Start Up No.2209: Gen Z’s politics v social media, why AI gives bad advice, weird AI images infest LinkedIn, and more

Posted on April 26, 2024 by charlesarthur

Researchers have worked out how to distinguish elephant ivory from the mammoth variety – useful for when smugglers are caught. CC-licensed photo by James St. John on Flickr.

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

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. Piano. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Gen Z is losing its political voice on social media • TechCrunch

Amanda Silberling:

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According to young political content creators, the ban could decimate Gen Z’s access to political news and information.

“An unfortunately large amount of 18- to 24-year-olds find out information about local elections from TikTok, so my heart is breaking,” Emma Mont, a political content creator, told TechCrunch. According to the Pew Research Center, about a third of American adults between ages 18 and 29 regularly get their news from TikTok.

“I think it’s going to have an impact not only on the people who provide information, but also the people who receive that information,” Mont said. “Part of the reason I make the content I do is that I know there’s someone who’s watching and this is the first time they’re ever gonna learn about Roe v. Wade, or whatever I’m talking about.”

For most content creators, the transition away from TikTok is difficult, but not insurmountable — many full-time creators already cultivate multi-platform followings, rather than depending on one platform, in preparation for this exact kind of worst-case scenario (remember Vine?).

Instagram Reels is a clear alternative to TikTok, but for political creators, it’s not a real option. As of March, Instagram is filtering out political content from users that you don’t already follow. That means that it’s basically impossible for political creators and activists to reach a wider audience.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” said Pratika Katiyar, a Northeastern University student and research assistant at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. “There’s no need for Instagram to limit political content. That’s just driving users away from their platforms.”

Even before Instagram’s recent policy update, users alleged that their posts about the war in Gaza were being suppressed. Meta communications director Andy Stone chalked up these complaints to a “bug” that had “nothing to do with the subject matter” of the posts.

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Given how much TikTok skews the information that it allows (some fascinating threads on Twitter about the defaults it shows, and the censorship that goes on), the TikTok ban doesn’t sound like the worst thing. Also, have these 18-24 people heard of these things called news organisations?
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Why AI is failing at giving good advice • Maxim Zubarev

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TLDR: ChatGPT generates responses based on the highest mathematical probabilities derived from existing texts on the internet. Popular advice (for various reasons) is seldomly good, nor (by definition) uniquely applicable, nor (mostly) founded on actual experience. You are probably better off taking advice from a real person who can empathize and knows what they are talking about.

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But if you want to read the longer version, there’s the whole rest of the blogpost. Which does expand on it usefully.
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US fertility rate falls to record low • WSJ

Jennifer Calfas and Anthony DeBarros:

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American women are giving birth at record-low rates.

The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 births per woman in 2023, a 2% decline from a year earlier, federal data released Thursday showed. It is the lowest rate recorded since the government began tracking it in the 1930s.

The decline reflects a continuing trend as American women navigate economic and social challenges that have prompted some to forgo or delay having children. A confluence of factors are at play. American women are having fewer children, later in life. Women are establishing fulfilling careers and have more access to contraception.

At the same time, young people are also more uncertain about their futures and spending more of their income on homeownership, student debt and child care. Some women who wait to have children might have fewer than they would have otherwise for reasons including declining fertility.

“People are making rather reasoned decisions about whether or not to have a child at all,” said Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “More often than not, I think what they’re deciding is ‘Yes, I’d like to have children, but not yet.’”

Total fertility estimates the number of children a woman would give birth to in her lifetime. The estimates don’t account for what women actually decide in later years, said Brady Hamilton, a co-author of the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.

The number of births last year was the lowest since 1979, according to provisional data. About 3.59 million children were born in the US in 2023, a 2% drop compared with 3.66 million in 2022.

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Facebook’s bizarre AI images now on LinkedIn, too • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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The same types of bizarre AI images that have repeatedly gone viral on Facebook have begun to make their way to LinkedIn. In some cases, these images are performing very well, as is the case on Facebook. In others, they are identified as AI by a majority of the commenters.

We’ve covered the success of AI-generated content farming on Facebook, where bizarre AI images of “shrimp Jesus,” hot flight attendants, elaborate wood carvings and sand sculptures, and children building extremely elaborate things out of trash have repeatedly gone megaviral and are getting fed to people via the platform’s recommendation algorithms. The same type of images are going viral on LinkedIn, which is nominally for work but has many bizarre corners and its own, often deranged types of engagement hacking.

“This is an amazing work of craftsmanship, and Mark should see this,” a post featuring an AI-generated child standing next to a gigantic AI-generated gourd (or wood?) carving of Mark Zuckerberg reads. “Please, re share so this can get to Mark Zuckerberg.” The post has 1,139 reactions and had 133 comments before the creator turned them off.

Some of these images have been discovered by the r/linkedinlunatics subreddit, but I was able to find many other examples by searching for the same types of repetitive captions that these images are posted with on Facebook.

“I think the kid is so talented and has a great future,” one account wrote beside an image of an AI-generated child standing next to an elaborate AI-generated sculpture of the soccer player Ronaldo. “Don’t you agree he did his best bringing out Ronaldo sculpture from a tree.”

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Maybe it should be an interview requirement to identify this junk. Though the pictures are truly hilarious, particularly the “Zuckerberg emerging from an orange” one.
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Dazhon Darien: ex-athletic director accused of framing principal with AI arrested at airport with gun • The Baltimore Banner

Kristen Griffith and Justin Fenton:

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Baltimore County Police arrested Pikesville High School’s former athletic director Thursday morning and charged him with using artificial intelligence to impersonate Principal Eric Eiswert, leading the public to believe Eiswert made racist and antisemitic comments behind closed doors.

Dazhon Darien, 31, was apprehended as he attempted to board a flight to Houston at BWI Airport, Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough said at a news conference Thursday afternoon. Darien was stopped for having a gun on him and airport officials saw there was a warrant for his arrest. Police said they did not know whether Darien was trying to flee.

Darien was charged with disrupting school activities, after investigators determined Darien faked Eiswert’s voice and circulated the audio on social media in January, according to the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office. Darien’s nickname, DJ, was among the names mentioned in the audio clips he allegedly faked.

“The audio clip … had profound repercussions,” police wrote in charging documents. “It not only led to Eiswert’s temporary removal from the school but also triggered a wave of hate-filled messages on social media and numerous calls to the school. The recording also caused significant disruptions for the PHS staff and students.”

Police say Darien made the recording in retaliation after Eiswert initiated an investigation into improper payments he made to a school athletics coach who was also his roommate, and Darien is also charged with theft and retaliating against a witness.

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Not the first time that deepfake audio has been used in this way – remember the mother back in March 2021 who “created deepfake videos to force rivals off her daughter’s cheerleading squad”.
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An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary • MIT Technology Review

Melissa Heikkilä:

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I am standing in front of a green screen, and Oshinyemi guides me through the initial calibration process, where I have to move my head and then eyes in a circular motion. Apparently, this will allow the system to understand my natural colors and facial features. I am then asked to say the sentence “All the boys ate a fish,” which will capture all the mouth movements needed to form vowels and consonants. We also film footage of me “idling” in silence.

He then asks me to read a script for a fictitious YouTuber in different tones, directing me on the spectrum of emotions I should convey. First I’m supposed to read it in a neutral, informative way, then in an encouraging way, an annoyed and complain-y way, and finally an excited, convincing way.

“Hey, everyone—welcome back to Elevate Her with your host, Jess Mars. It’s great to have you here. We’re about to take on a topic that’s pretty delicate and honestly hits close to home—dealing with criticism in our spiritual journey,” I read off the teleprompter, simultaneously trying to visualize ranting about something to my partner during the complain-y version. “No matter where you look, it feels like there’s always a critical voice ready to chime in, doesn’t it?”

“That was really good. I was watching it and I was like, ‘Well, this is true. She’s definitely complaining,’” Oshinyemi says, encouragingly. Next time, maybe add some judgment, he suggests.

…The day after my final visit, Voica emails me the videos with my avatar. When the first one starts playing, I am taken aback. It’s as painful as seeing yourself on camera or hearing a recording of your voice. Then I catch myself. At first I thought the avatar was me.

The more I watch videos of “myself,” the more I spiral. Do I really squint that much? Blink that much? And move my jaw like that? Jesus. It’s good. It’s really good. But it’s not perfect. “Weirdly good animation,” my partner texts me. “But the voice sometimes sounds exactly like you, and at other times like a generic American and with a weird tone,” he adds. “Weird AF.”

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Presently it’s a lot of work, but that’s going to get less and less.
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Our laser technique can tell apart elephant and mammoth ivory: here’s how it may disrupt the ivory trade • The Conversation

Rebecca Shepherd is a senior lecturer in anatomy at the University of Bristol:

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our new study, published in PLOS ONE, presents a major breakthrough – using a well known laser technique to tell mammoth and elephant ivory apart.

Our results couldn’t come soon enough. The number of African elephants has dramatically declined from approximately 12 million a century ago to about 400,000 today.

Annually, over 20,000 elephants are poached for ivory, primarily in Africa. This decline not only disrupts ecological balance, but also diminishes biodiversity. Ultimately, it highlights the urgent need for conservation efforts to protect these species.

The hunt for mammoth ivory is also a problem. The new regulations are leading to a rise in the modern-day “mammoth hunter”. These are people who deliberately set out to excavate mammoth remains from the Siberian permafrost in the summer months.

Driven by the lucrative market for mammoth ivory, these hunters undertake expeditions in remote Arctic regions, where permafrost melting is accelerated by climate change. This has made previously inaccessible mammoth tusks more reachable.

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Non-invasive, done with laser light, though I wonder quite how many Customs halls would invest in it. And how many have ivory passing through. Perhaps in the African nations (or Russia?).
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Bill Gates, Man United and 20 other sites that ban linking to them • Malcolm Coles

Malcolm Coles:

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10+ years ago I created an annual list of websites that FORBADE you from linking to them, DEMANDED you write to ask for permission or LIMITED links to only their home page. Royal Mail even promised to post me a paper licence.

Now a decade has passed, let’s see who’s still doing it … And yes I’ve linked to your websites to prove this. Uh oh.

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Thames Water, British Gas, Real Madrid, even YouGov; and a peculiar one you’ll have to look up for yourself at Which?. (Thanks Malcolm for the link!)
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February 2024: Kuo: Apple Vision Pro on track to launch in more countries before WWDC in June • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol, back in February:

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Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo today reiterated his belief that the Apple Vision Pro will launch in additional countries before Apple’s annual developers conference WWDC in June. The headset first launched in the U.S. earlier this month.

Apple will likely expand the Vision Pro to more English-speaking countries, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.K., but it has also been localizing visionOS in preparation to launch the headset in countries like France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

Kuo said demand for the Vision Pro in the U.S. has “slowed down significantly” since the headset launched there on February 2. He estimated that US shipments of the headset will total 200,000 to 250,000 units this year, which he said is better than Apple’s original estimate of 150,000 to 200,000 units, but it is still a “niche market.”

In recent weeks, there was a lot of discussion about Vision Pro returns on social media. However, based on his inspection of the “repair/refurbishment production line” for the headset, Kuo estimated that the current return rate is “less than 1%.”

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I link to this because Neil Cybart pointed to it in his Above Avalon newsletter. This is in light of the suggestion – also by Kuo – earlier this week that “Apple has cut its Vision Pro shipments to 400-450k units”. Kuo says this is a cut made before launching elsewhere, and that US sales forecasts have been cut, but it does feel a little like offering one set of figures one time, and a different one another.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad?
• Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see?
• How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online?
• What can we do about it?
• Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?

Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Start Up No.2208: how Google Search died, US bans China’s TikTok, eating with Andreessen, testing the Rabbit R1, and more

Posted on April 25, 2024 by charlesarthur

The new moneymaker at games company Hasbro is cards, rather than toys. CC-licensed photo by Jesper Währner 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. Snap! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The man who killed Google Search • Where’s Your Ed At

Ed Zitron:

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The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.

For those unfamiliar with Google’s internal scientology-esque jargon, let me explain. A “code yellow” isn’t, as you might think, a crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy’s tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I’m not making this up — the colour of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It’s essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1 and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation where workers are pulled from their desks and into a conference room where they tackle the problem as a top priority. Any other projects or concerns are sidelined.

In emails released as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, Dischler laid out several contributing factors — search query growth was “significantly behind forecast,” the “timing” of revenue launches was significantly behind, and a vague worry that “several advertiser-specific and sector weaknesses” existed in search.

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This is a fantastic read. Zitron is never short of an opinion, but this is based on careful mining of Google emails released in the US DoJ lawsuit against Google, showing how a former Yahoo executive came along and poisoned a system that had worked wonderfully for more than 20 years.
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US bans TikTok owner ByteDance, and will prohibit app in US unless it is sold • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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The Senate on Monday night approved a bill that orders TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the company within 270 days or lose access to the US market. The House had already passed the bill, and President Biden signed it into law today.

The “Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” was approved as part of a larger appropriations bill that provides aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. It passed in a 79-18 vote. Biden last night issued a statement saying he will sign the appropriations bill into law “as soon as it reaches my desk.” He signed the bill into law today, the White House announced.

The bill classifies TikTok as a “foreign adversary controlled application” and gives the Chinese company ByteDance 270 days to sell it to another entity. Biden can extend the deadline by up to 90 days if a sale is in progress.

TikTok would maintain access to the US market if the president determines that the divestiture “would result in the relevant foreign adversary controlled application no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary.” The same divestiture-or-sale requirement would apply to other applications subsequently designated as being controlled by foreign adversaries.

If ByteDance doesn’t sell TikTok, app stores in the US would have to drop the app, and Internet hosting services would be prohibited from providing services that enable distribution of TikTok in the US. Companies that violate the prohibition would have to pay civil penalties.

…ByteDance has said it will file a lawsuit in an attempt to block the law. “This legislation is a clear violation of the First Amendment rights of TikTok’s 170 million American users,” Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s public policy head in the US, reportedly told staff in a memo after the House vote on Saturday. “We’ll continue to fight… This is the beginning, not the end of this long process.”

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My dinner with Andreessen • The American Prospect

Rick Perlstein went to one of Marc Andreessen’s houses for a party:

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One participant was a British former journalist become computer tycoon who had been awarded a lordship. He proclaimed that the Chinese middle class doesn’t care about democracy or civil liberties. I was treated as a sentimental naïf for questioning his blanket confidence.

Another attendee seemed to see politics as a collection of engineering problems. He kept setting up strange thought experiments, which I did not understand. I recall thinking it was like talking to a creature visiting from another solar system that did not have humans in it. I later conveyed my recollection of this guy to an acquaintance who once taught history at Stanford. He noted a similarity to a student of his who insisted that all the age-old problems historians worried over would soon obviously be solved by better computers, and thus considered the entire humanistic enterprise faintly ridiculous.

I also remember I raised an objection to Silicon Valley’s fetish for “disruption” as the highest human value, noting that healthy societies also recognize the value of preserving core values and institutions, and feeling gaslit in return when the group came back heatedly that, no, Silicon Valley didn’t fetishize disruption at all.

The subject of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) came up. They rose up in thunderous hatred at her for blocking potential “innovation in the banking sector.” (She’ll make a similar cameo in Part Two of this series.) I suffered an epic case of l’esprit d’escalier at that.

I thought it was pretty much universally understood by then that the fetish for “innovation in the banking sector” was what collapsed the world economy in 2008. Had I not been stunned into silence, I could have quoted Paul Volcker that the last useful innovation in banking was the automatic teller machine, and pointed out that it was only by strangling “innovation in the banking sector” that (as Elizabeth Warren always points out) the New Deal ushered in the longest period of financial stability in American history, and the golden age of global capitalism to boot.

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There’s a lot of puzzling about who the “British former journalist become computer tycoon” could be. Sir Clive Sinclair fits the bill (he was a journalist, very early on). Anyone else?
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Rabbit R1 hands-on: early tests with the $199 AI gadget • The Verge

David Pierce:

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After spending a few hours playing with the device, I have to say: it’s pretty nice. Not luxurious, or even particularly high-end, just silly and fun. Where Humane’s AI Pin feels like a carefully sculpted metal gem, the R1 feels like an old-school MP3 player crossed with a fidget spinner. The wheel spins a little stiffly for my taste but smoothly enough, the screen is a little fuzzy but fine, and the main action button feels satisfying to thump on.

When I first got the device and connected it to Wi-Fi, it then immediately asked me to sign up for an account at Rabbithole, the R1’s web portal. I did that, scanned a QR code with the R1 to get it synced up, and immediately did a software update. I spent that time logging in to the only four external services the R1 currently connects to: Spotify, Uber, DoorDash, and Midjourney.

Once I was eventually up and running, I started chatting with the R1. So far, it does a solid job with basic AI questions: it gave me lots of good information about this week’s NFL draft, found a few restaurants near me, and knew when Herbert Hoover was president. This is all fairly basic ChatGPT stuff, and there’s some definite lag as it fetches answers, but I much prefer the interface to the Humane AI Pin — because there’s a screen, and you can see the thing working so the AI delays don’t feel quite so interminable.

Almost immediately, though, I started running into stuff the R1 just can’t do. It can’t send emails or make spreadsheets, though Lyu has been demoing both for months. Rabbithole is woefully unfinished, too, to the point I was trying to tap around on my phone and it was instead moving a cursor around a half-second after every tap. That’s a good reminder that the whole thing is running on a virtual machine storing all your apps and credentials, which still gives me security-related pause.

Oh, and here’s my favorite thing that has happened on the R1 so far: I got it connected to my Spotify account, which is a feature I’m particularly excited about. I asked for “Beyoncé’s new album,” and the device excitedly went and found me “Crazy in Love” — a lullaby version, from an artist called “Rockabye Baby!” So close and yet so far.

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Better than the Humane thing, but still some way to go.
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NASA’s Voyager 1 resumes sending engineering updates to Earth • Voyager

Naomi Hartono:

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The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the flight data subsystem (FDS) memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.

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This is so mindblowing. I can’t even think of an analogy that gets close to it.
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Almost every Chinese keyboard app has a security flaw that reveals what users type • MIT Technology Review

Zeyi Yang:

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Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the world share a security loophole that makes it possible to spy on what users are typing.

The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and state surveillance groups, according to researchers at the Citizen Lab, a technology and security research lab affiliated with the University of Toronto.

These apps help users type Chinese characters more efficiently and are ubiquitous on devices used by Chinese people. The four most popular apps—built by major internet companies like Baidu, Tencent, and iFlytek—basically account for all the typing methods that Chinese people use. Researchers also looked into the keyboard apps that come preinstalled on Android phones sold in China.

What they discovered was shocking. Almost every third-party app and every Android phone with preinstalled keyboards failed to protect users by properly encrypting the content they typed. A smartphone made by Huawei was the only device where no such security vulnerability was found.

In August 2023, the same researchers found that Sogou, one of the most popular keyboard apps, did not use Transport Layer Security (TLS) when transmitting keystroke data to its cloud server for better typing predictions. Without TLS, a widely adopted international cryptographic protocol that protects users from a known encryption loophole, keystrokes can be collected and then decrypted by third parties.

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This seems more like mistake than malice – Sogu fixed the issue on being told about it. But it preexists and won’t be fixed in many devices.
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S&P says regulation could increase stablecoin adoption as number of holders* nears 100 million • Coindesk

Omkar Godbole:

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Stablecoins are hotter than ever. The number of addresses holding dollar and crypto-pegged stablecoins has increased 15% this year to above 93.6 million, the highest on record, according to data source rwa.xyz.

Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies with values pegged to an external reference, like the U.S. dollar. They can be broadly categorized as fiat-backed, crypto-backed, or algorithmic stablecoins. As of the time of writing, there are 35 stablecoins in existence, boasting a combined market capitalization of $157bn.

Tether (USDT) holders, with an industry-leading market cap of $114.07bn, accounted for just over 80% of the total stablecoin addresses, followed by USDC and BUSD.

The tally of the so-called holding addresses increased even during the 2022 crypto bear market. The Fed raised interest rates rapidly in 2022, boosting investor demand for the US dollar and greenback-equivalents like the dollar-pegged cryptocurrencies.

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One hates to point out that “number of addresses holding” is emphatically not the same as “number of people”, and it’s amazing that Coindesk should make such an obvious mistake. Also amazing that Tether is nearly three-quarters of the “value”, and yet more than 80% of the addresses. “Capitalisation” is also doing a lot of work there; it’s notional, of course, and could never be recovered.
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Meta’s Threads now has more daily US users than Musk’s X • Business Insider

Kali Hays:

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Meta’s newest app, launched last summer on the back of Instagram’s tech, has seen daily active users grow consistently since November, according to usage estimates from Apptopia. Threads is a direct rival of X, formerly Twitter, which has struggled to maintain its user base since Elon Musk acquired the platform about 18 months ago.

Now, Threads has more daily active users (DAU) in the US than X, a trend that’s been ongoing since December, when Threads became Apple’s most downloaded app.

“Threads DAUs in the US passed X in December 2023 and it has not looked back,” Thomas Grant, Apptopia’s VP of research, said. It’s currently the third most downloaded free app on the Apple App Store, while X is in 41st place. In the Google Play Store, Threads is in 12th place among free apps, while X is in 44th place.

So far in April, Threads has averaged an estimated 28 million daily active users, so people who have opened the app at least once in a 24-hour period. That’s a roughly 55% increase in DAUs from December when Threads averaged an estimated 18 million users each day.

DAUs in the US have been choppier on X, and fewer than Threads overall during the same time period. In April so far, X has averaged 22 million DAUs, a usage rate that’s 21% lower than Threads. DAUs on X have been relatively flat for the last three months but are up since December when the platform saw 17 million DAUs. That was the first month Threads beat X on DAUs in the US.

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This is interesting, because it suggests that eX-Twitter has some real problems ahead. Musk hasn’t made any financial pronouncements for a while, and silence isn’t golden. One point: I don’t set much store by “more downloaded than”, though, when one app is more than 15 years old and the other less than a year. Those who want eX-Twitter already have it. Apparently Threads still has fewer monthly active users.

And one has to wonder how Apptopia gets its numbers. That isn’t answered. Which leads us on to…
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Best way to measure internet audience? It still doesn’t exist • Bloomberg

Reyhan Harmanci:

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It’s not just big media companies that want bespoke analytics. A nonprofit news site, the 19th, has announced that it’s created its own engagement metric called “total journalism reach,” which includes site views as well as podcast listens and event attendees.

“There is no perfect data. All data has its inaccuracies, biases and imperfections. All data is opaque,” says Brandon Silverman, creator and former chief executive officer of CrowdTangle, an analytics tool that Meta Platforms Inc. acquired in 2016. Even so, advertisers and content creators have been particularly ill-served by the gatekeeping platforms.

Witness, for instance, the recent “correction” from Apple Inc. about its podcast numbers. A bug (or was it a feature?) had inflated the numbers of people downloading podcasts; many hit shows took a 20% haircut overnight. It brought to mind the situation in 2018, when a class-action lawsuit forced Facebook to admit that it had misreported its video metrics for more than a year, inflating views by 60% to 80%.

According to Ben Smith, author of Traffic and co-founder of the news site Semafor, the problem isn’t so much that audience numbers are simply made up. “The scale is exaggerated, but the numbers are directionally true,” he says. “Instagram is, in fact, really popular. TikTok is really popular.” But there are powerful incentives to believe in the biggest possible numbers; venture capital (and other jackpot-based industries, with a small number of big winners and many losers, like book publishing) demands the hockey stick curve. “They are fake in some spiritual sense, as the tech industry is addicted to growth,” he says.

It’s hard not to be addicted to growth. Foster, who left Substack for another service at the start of the year, doesn’t track his readers manually anymore. (Substack has had its own problems with its writers complaining that the company was trading growth in audience metrics at the expense of paying subscribers.) But he also doesn’t avail himself of more complicated metrics than in the past. “I still don’t care about analytics that much. If you are like, say, MrBeast, you live to maximize analytics—my brain doesn’t do that,” he says.

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It is a bit astonishing that we’re 30 years into the commercial internet and still don’t have rigorous ways to measure this stuff. OK, we never did with newspapers, radio, or TV, but they didn’t require the same level of presence or attention.
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Hasbro pretty much entirely depends on Magic: The Gathering to make a profit • Sherwood News

Matt Phillips:

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genuine transformation is taking place at struggling toymaker Hasbro, which on Wednesday morning crushed expectations in its Q1 report.

The massive profitability of the company’s Wizards of the Coast division — which makes Magic the Gathering cards, and the game’s digital spinoffs — drove the results. The division’s sales rose roughly 7% year over year, helping to offset a 21% year over year sales slump in the toy division.

But the real story is the near-40% margins of the the Wizards division, where operating profit jumped 60% to $123m and accounted for outsized performance of the company on the bottom line.

Meanwhile, the toy division lost $47m. Thanks to Wizards, the company posted an overall operating profit of $116m, helping Hasbro more than double Wall Street’s earnings-per-share expectations.

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The other day I was passing a video games store, and noticed the window displays for a new Pokémon game – involving cards. Nintendo started out as a card game company in the 19th century, and it’s still going at it. Hasbro’s just catching up.
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Start Up No.2207: TSMC’s Arizona culture clash, Apple preps new iPads, Vision Pro forecasts cut, AI poisons Reddit, and more

Posted on April 24, 2024 by charlesarthur

Book sales generally follower a power law – a small number of authors are very successful, but most aren’t. CC-licensed photo by Shou-Hui Wang 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.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Cont’d p94. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Inside TSMC’s Phoenix, Arizona expansion struggles • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

»

The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company; Taiwanese TSMC veterans described their American counterparts as lacking the kind of dedication and obedience they believe to be the foundation of their company’s world-leading success.

Some 2,200 employees now work at TSMC’s Arizona plant, with about half of them deployed from Taiwan. While tension at the plant simmers, TSMC has been ramping up its investments, recently securing billions of dollars in grants and loans from the US government. Whether or not the plant succeeds in making cutting-edge chips with the same speed, efficiency, and profitability as facilities in Asia remains to be seen, with many skeptical about a US workforce under TSMC’s army-like command system. “[The company] tried to make Arizona Taiwanese,” G. Dan Hutcheson, a semiconductor industry analyst at the research firm TechInsights, told Rest of World. “And it’s just not going to work.”

TSMC did not respond to a detailed list of questions from Rest of World.

…But both American and Taiwanese engineers said that the training for new hires was largely insufficient. Managers excluded Americans from higher-level meetings conducted in Mandarin, according to one ex-TSMC engineer. Some of the Americans said that they rarely had a chance to handle problems themselves, and were mostly tasked with observing. “It’s like math in school,” Bruce said. “You can watch your teacher do 500 practice problems on the chalkboard, but if you don’t do some problems on your own, you are going to fail the test.”

As training went on, tensions mounted. US engineers told Rest of World that some Taiwanese male engineers had calendars with bikini models on their desks and occasionally shared sexual memes in group chats. A female American colleague, according to an American trainee who witnessed the conversation, asked a Taiwanese engineer to remove his computer wallpaper depicting a bikini model. One former American engineer said some local co-workers referred to him as a “white breeding pig,” implying he was only in Taiwan to sleep with local women. At a meeting, a manager said Americans were less desirable than Taiwanese and Indian workers, according to people who saw leaked notes, which circulated among trainees.

«

The most amazing culture clash, which also points to some of why the US relies on Taiwan and China to do everything.
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AI is poisoning Reddit to promote products and game Google with ‘parasite SEO’ • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

For years, people who have found Google search frustrating have been adding “Reddit” to the end of their search queries. This practice is so common that Google even acknowledged the phenomenon in a post announcing that it will be scraping Reddit posts to train its AI. And so, naturally, there are now services that will poison Reddit threads with AI-generated posts designed to promote products.

A service called ReplyGuy advertises itself as “the AI that plugs your product on Reddit” and which automatically “mentions your product in conversations naturally.” Examples on the site show two different Redditors being controlled by AI posting plugs for a text-to-voice product called “AnySpeech” and a bot writing a long comment about a debt consolidation program called Debt Freedom Now.

A video demo shows a dashboard where a user adds the name of their company and URL they want to direct users to. It then auto-suggests keywords that “help the bot know what types of subreddits and tweets to look for and when to respond.” Moments later, the dashboard shows how Reply Guy is “already in the responses” of the comments section of different Reddit posts. “Many of our responses will get lots of upvotes and will be well-liked.”

The creator of the company, Alexander Belogubov, has also posted screenshots of other bot-controlled accounts responding all over Reddit. Begolubov has another startup called “Stealth Marketing” that also seeks to manipulate the platform by promising to “turn Reddit into a steady stream of customers for your startup.” Belogubov did not respond to requests for comment.

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SEO, the perfect poison.
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California just went 9.25 hours using only renewable energy • Fast Company

Adele Peters:

»

California first hit the milestone of running on 100% clean power in 2022, but it was only temporary. “In past years, it was only for one or two days, and not consecutively,” says Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor who has been posting updates about the state’s grid each day on X. “And all of a sudden we’re having now 37 of the last 45 days, and the last nine days straight.”

There’s a caveat: California also has natural gas plants that keep running at low levels in case backup power is needed. Even when the state is producing more than enough renewable energy to cover all of its needs, it’s still exporting some gas power to other states. But it also exports solar power, helping make other grids cleaner. And it keeps getting closer to its overall goals for renewable energy. By 2030, the state plans to run on 60% renewable energy. It’s likely to hit that goal early. By 2045, the state plans to run on 100% zero-carbon energy, and Jacobson argues it’s technically possible to also accomplish that goal faster.

The state now has nearly 47 gigawatts of solar installed, both on rooftops and in sprawling, utility-scale solar farms. Rooftop solar helps reduce demand from the grid, since homeowners can use that power directly. And on sunny April days, when it usually isn’t hot enough to need air conditioning, renewables on the grid can produce more electricity than Californians need.

…The state has added a significant amount of battery storage in the last few years. California is now home to the world’s largest lithium-ion battery storage system for the grid, with more storage projects opening soon. Last Sunday, the state stored a record amount of power [6GW].

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Apple announces ‘Let Loose’ event on May 7 amid rumours of new iPads • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

Apple is expected to announce new iPad Pro and iPad Air models, along with updated Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard accessories.

Here is everything that has been rumoured:

• Two new iPad Pro models with the M3 chip, OLED displays, a thinner enclosure, thinner bezels, a matte screen option, a landscape-oriented front camera, other design changes, and possibly MagSafe wireless charging
• Two new iPad Air models with the M2 chip and a landscape-oriented front camera, including a first-ever 12.9-inch iPad Air with a mini-LED display
• A new Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro with an aluminum enclosure, larger trackpad, and other design tweaks
• A new Apple Pencil, which may have a new “squeeze” gesture for certain actions and support visionOS eventually

Apple has not released any new iPads since late 2022, so this event has been a long time coming.

«

Correction: a VERY long time coming. Samsung (which makes OLED panels) introduced its first OLED tablet in 2014. Yes, ten years ago.
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Apple cuts 2024 & 2025 Vision Pro shipment forecasts, unfavorable to MR headset, Pancake, and Micro OLED trends • Medium

Ming-Chi Kuo:

»

My latest survey is as follows:

• Apple has cut its 2024 Vision Pro shipments to 400–450k units (vs. market consensus of 700–800k units or more).

• Apple cut orders before launching Vision Pro in non-US markets, which means that demand in the US market has fallen sharply beyond expectations, making Apple take a conservative view of demand in non-US markets.

• Apple is reviewing and adjusting its head-mounted display (HMD) product roadmap, so there may be no new Vision Pro model in 2025 (the previous expectation was that there would be a new model in 2H25/4Q25). Apple now expects Vision Pro shipments to decline YoY in 2025.

The weak-than-expected Vision Pro demand means that the following new trends are likely to be below market expectations.

• MR [mixed reality] headset devices. The challenge for Vision Pro is to address the lack of key applications, price, and headset comfort without sacrificing the see-through user experience. In contrast, VR is also a niche market, but at least there are proven successful applications (games), and trend visibility is better than MR.

«

There’s more, but those are the principal ones. Half as much as forecast (by the market). At a guess, Apple thought there would be more enthusiasm too, but got the developer story completely wrong, and has also got the content story terribly wrong too.
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Taser company Axon is selling AI that turns body cam audio into police reports • Forbes

Thomas Brewster:

»

American cops are increasingly leaning on artificial intelligence to assist with policing, from AI models that analyze criminal patterns to drones that can fly themselves. Now, a GPT-4 powered AI can do one of their less appealing jobs: filing paperwork.

On Tuesday, Axon, the $22bn police contractor best known for manufacturing the Taser electric weapon, launched a new tool called Draft One that it says can transcribe audio from body cameras and automatically turn it into a police report. Cops can then review the document to ensure accuracy, Axon CEO Rick Smith told Forbes. Axon claims one early tester of the tool, Fort Collins Colorado Police Department, has seen an 82% decrease in time spent writing reports. “If an officer spends half their day reporting, and we can cut that in half, we have an opportunity to potentially free up 25% of an officer’s time to be back out policing,” Smith said.

These reports, though, are often used as evidence in criminal trials, and critics are concerned that relying on AI could put people at risk by depending on language models that are known to “hallucinate,” or make things up, as well as display racial bias, either blatantly or unconsciously.

“It’s kind of a nightmare,” said Dave Maass, surveillance technologies investigations director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Police, who aren’t specialists in AI, and aren’t going to be specialists in recognizing the problems with AI, are going to use these systems to generate language that could affect millions of people in their involvement with the criminal justice system. What could go wrong?”

«

You know that the answer is “everything”, which is going to mean that the bodycam videos will have to be evidence, and that’s going to be a whole new mess.
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The world’s electric car fleet continues to grow strongly, with 2024 sales set to reach 17 million • International Energy Authority

»

Despite near-term challenges in some markets, based on today’s policy settings, almost 1 in 3 cars on the roads in China by 2030 is set to be electric, and almost 1 in 5 in both United States and European Union.

More than one in five cars sold worldwide this year is expected to be electric, with surging demand projected over the next decade set to remake the global auto industry and significantly reduce oil consumption for road transport, according to the new edition of the IEA’s annual Global EV Outlook.

The latest Outlook, published today, finds that global electric car sales are set to remain robust in 2024, reaching around 17m by the end of the year. In the first quarter, sales grew by about 25% compared with the same period in 2023 – similar to the growth rate seen in the same period a year earlier, but from a larger base. The number of electric cars sold globally in the first three months of this year is roughly equivalent to the number sold in all of 2020.

In 2024, electric cars sales in China are projected to leap to about 10m, accounting for about 45% of all car sales in the country. In the United States, roughly one in nine cars sold are projected to be electric – while in Europe, despite a generally weak outlook for passenger car sales and the phase-out of subsidies in some countries, electric cars are still set to represent about one in four cars sold.

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No one buys books • The Elysian

Elle Griffin:

»

In 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon & Schuster. The two publishing houses made up 37% and 11% of the market share, according to the filing, and combined they would have condensed the Big Five publishing houses into the Big Four. But the government intervened and brought an antitrust case against Penguin to determine whether that would create a monopoly.

The judge ultimately ruled that the merger would create a monopoly and blocked the $2.2bn purchase. But during the trial, the head of every major publishing house and literary agency got up on the stand to speak about the publishing industry and give numbers, giving us an eye-opening account of the industry from the inside. All of the transcripts from the trial were compiled into a book called The Trial. It took me a year to read, but I’ve finally summarized my findings and pulled out all the compelling highlights.

I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).

But let’s dig into everything they said in detail.

«

Fascinating read. Book sales by author really follow a power law. Advances, though, don’t.
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When Facebook bans the news • Matt Pearce

Matt Pearce:

»

Meta banned journalism from its services in Canada in 2023 when the government passed a law in 2023 saying the Meta and Google had to pay for journalism. Google decided to settle up and fork over about $100m; Meta didn’t. The pre-print studied the impact on Canadian users and news outlets, and some of the findings were interesting:

Our key findings:

– Even six months after the ban, a large number of Canadians (approximately 33%) still say they use Meta’s flagship social media platforms Facebook or Instagram for access to Canadian political and current affairs information.

– The Facebook Pages of national news outlets lost approximately 64% of their Facebook engagement following the end of news availability for Canadian users. Local news outlets lost approximately 85%. Almost half of all local news outlets stopped posting on Facebook entirely in the four months following the ban.

– Engagement with politically relevant pages and groups has remained unchanged since the ban, suggesting politically-oriented users have not reduced their Facebook usage.

– Members of politically-oriented Facebook Groups have circumvented the ban by posting screenshots of Canadian news articles. Although there are fewer screenshots of news post-ban than there were links to news articles pre-ban, the total engagement with news content in these Groups has remained consistent…

…But in the big picture, for a journalist, this is just a different variation of the post-hyperlink, AI-driven business model that Meta and Google are already building toward, one in which the world’s internet users park in one spot, look at ads, and are passively served free content served via algorithm. Canada just got there a little earlier than the rest of us.

If you’re a journalist, in the business of finding facts and putting them in front of as many people as possible, your labour will probably still end up in front of people. If you’re a journalist, it’s the cost of the labour of journalism, not the copyrighted output, that’s the core public policy problem for you here, and it’s the component that often gets the least legal, scholarly and political attention when everybody’s throwing down stakes on these types of bills.

«

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Start Up No.2206: China tells Apple to zap messaging apps, smart TV halts PC, Amazon stops California droning, and more

Posted on April 23, 2024 by charlesarthur

You already know that wireless charging is less efficient than wired – but now iFixit has evaluated precisely how much. CC-licensed photo by HS You on Flickr.

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

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. Watts up? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

China orders Apple to remove popular messaging apps • WSJ

Aaron Tilley, Liza Lin and Jeff Horwitz:

»

China ordered Apple to remove some of the world’s most popular chat messaging apps from its app store in the country, the latest example of censorship demands on the iPhone seller in the company’s second-biggest market.

Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp and Threads as well as messaging platforms Signal and Telegram were taken off the Chinese app store Friday. Apple said it was told to remove certain apps because of national security concerns, without specifying which.

“We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree,” an Apple spokesperson said.

These messaging apps, which allow users to exchange messages and share files individually and in large groups, combined have around three billion users globally. They can only be accessed in China through virtual private networks that take users outside China’s Great Firewall, but are still commonly used.

Beijing has often viewed such platforms with caution, concerned that these apps could be used by its citizens to spread negative content and cause social unrest. Much of the news China censors at home often makes it beyond the Great Firewall through such channels.

The Cyberspace Administration of China asked Apple to remove WhatsApp and Threads from the App Store because both contain political content that includes problematic mentions of the Chinese president, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Apple spokesperson said that wasn’t part of the reasoning.

The move shrinks the number of foreign chat apps Chinese internet users can use to communicate with those outside of the country, a further tightening of internet controls by Beijing, which is sensitive to uncensored information circulating.

«

Feelings, it could be said, run strong over this. There’s the Apple view: got to follow the laws. Then there’s the people outside Apple who say that it does anything it can to protect its revenue streams ahead of principles. China is its Kobayashi Maru: the conflict from which it cannot escape successfully.
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Is your PC having trouble? Your smart TV might be to blame • The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto:

»

It turns out your TV can actually mess up your computer — at least if you’re using a Hisense TV and Windows.

Kevin Snow, a video game narrative designer, wrote on Cohost that they’d been having trouble with their PC. The “Display Settings” menu didn’t open. The “Task Manager” started hanging. Then things necessary to making the computer work started to fail. Spelunking in hidden comments on Microsoft forums revealed the problem: Snow’s TV.

Basically, the TV had been generating Universal Plug and Play IDs and had, over the course of several years, convinced Snow’s computer that there were essentially an infinite number of devices on their network. Snow’s smart TV, a Hisense 50Q8G, had inadvertently created a denial-of-service attack on their PC.

Snow fixed the issue with their computer by deleting the keys the TV had generated for five minutes. Then they restarted the computer. “Everything worked again,” Snow wrote. “I laughed so hard I cried. I felt like I’d solved a murder.”

Look, I’m very glad Snow fixed the problem — sounds annoying — but I am sort of stuck on why the problem exists in the first place. I’ve emailed HiSense requesting comment, but the company hasn’t replied. (I’ve also reached out to Snow.) I assume the problem is due simply to bad code, but I don’t know for sure.

What I do know is that this isn’t a problem dumb TVs ever had. Full disclosure: I am strongly in favor of a dumb home. My thermostat should not connect to the internet, and neither should my fridge. If a company goes bankrupt, I should not have to worry about whether my coffee maker’s software is suddenly broken or whether my lights will turn on. The only things using my Wi-Fi should be my phone and my computer. Everything else should remain offline, where it belongs.

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Apple acquires French AI company specializing in on-device processing • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

»

Apple has acquired the Paris-based artificial intelligence startup Datakalab amid its push to deliver on-device AI tools.

Datakalab specializes in algorithm compression and embedded AI systems. The acquisition, finalized on December 17 last year, was quietly conducted but noted in a European Commission filing spotted by French publication Challenges (via iPhoneSoft). While the financial details of the transaction remain undisclosed, the move is almost certainly part of Apple’s broader strategy to bring more sophisticated AI technology to its devices, such as those expected to be introduced in iOS 18.

The company was established in 2016 by Xavier and Lucas Fischer and made significant strides in AI technology focusing on low-power, high-efficiency deep learning algorithms that function without relying on cloud-based systems. This approach aligns with Apple’s oft-touted commitment to user privacy, data security, and reliable performance, as processing data locally minimizes the risk of data breaches and ensures faster processing times.

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Unsurprising, but also indicative of the direction it’s all heading. Which is a direction it’s been headed in for a long time.
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Wireless charging: trading efficiency for convenience • iFixit News

Shahram Mokhtari, Chayton Ritter and Arthur Shi tested wired versus wireless charging:

»

Apple’s MagSafe charger did relatively well in the 0-100% charge scenario but as the graph shows, there were some key differences when compared to our baseline wired test. First off, we can see the power draw ramps up faster and earlier in the charge process but also ramps down a little quicker later on. This results in a total energy use of 23.33Wh. That’s a 24.4% increase in energy consumption when compared to our wired test and represents a 59% loss of energy to charge a 12.7Wh battery.

In addition to the extra 5.08Wh required to get to a full charge, taking our 7 hour sleep cycle scenario means the wireless charger continues to draw 1.5W from mains for another 4 hours and 55 minutes which uses another 7.4Wh. We’re now at 30.73Wh, and we’re not done yet.

Once you remove your phone from the wireless charging station, the station continues to draw power to “probe” for the presence of a device on the pad that may need to be charged. These probe signals are sent out often enough that we see energy fluctuations from the mains that average to around 0.2W, even though we’re not charging anything. So over the 17 hours that our phone isn’t being charged, the device itself draws 3.4Wh. This gives us a total draw of 34.13Wh per day, or 12.36kWh per year. That’s 36.48% more energy used when compared to a wired charge.

Since we’re using 15.88Wh of energy above our baseline of 18.25Wh, this means that a potential 5.8kWh a year is being wasted.

«

They also tested a cheap Amazon wireless charger (used 100% more energy than wired) and a Tesla one of unknown configuration which chews up a ton of energy even when just plugged in and not charging anything; it used 113% more than the wired one.
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Amazon ends California drone deliveries • TechCrunch

Brian Heater:

»

Amazon confirmed it is ending Prime Air drone delivery operations in Lockeford, California. The Central California town of 3,500 was the company’s second US drone delivery site, after College Station, Texas. Operations were announced in June 2022.

The retail giant is not offering details around the setback, only noting, “We’ll offer all current employees opportunities at other sites, and will continue to serve customers in Lockeford with other delivery methods. We want to thank the community for all their support and feedback over the past few years.”

College Station deliveries will continue, along with a forthcoming site in Tolleson, Arizona set to kick off deliveries later this year. Tolleson, a city of just over 7,000, is located in Maricopa County, in the western portion of the Phoenix metropolitan area.

Prime Air’s arrival brings same-day deliveries to Amazon customers in the region, courtesy of a hybrid fulfillment center/delivery station. The company says it will be contacting impacted customers when the service is up and running. There’s no specific information on timing beyond “this year,” owing, in part, to ongoing negotiations with both local officials and the FAA required to deploy in the airspace.

«

The details around this are confusing: Amazon seems to be both going ahead and retreating from drone delivery. Whichever it is, the trials are on a very small scale. And it’s moved really slowly. Here’s a story I wrote about Amazon seeking permission from the US Federal Aviation Authority to fly drones.. in 2014.
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Google all at sea over rising tide of robo-spam • The Register

Rupert Goodwins:

»

AI spam is proliferating out of control. Content spam was two% of search hits before ChatGPT: it’s 10% now; Google is manually delisting sites like never before.

It takes a lot for Google to remove sites from its search results. That means losing ad revenue – the main reason spam sites exist – and revenue is the crack cocaine of publicly traded tech companies. See Microsoft’s continued attempts to monetize the Windows desktop. Or Meta’s alleged use of harmfully addictive algorithms.

You know this already, you use big tech services and you know the difference between what the companies say in public and what they actually deliver. You don’t matter, the revenue you represent does.

The primary reason Google is spending its own money to reduce its revenue is that AI spam content is so cheap and easy to produce that it has a much better chance of overwhelming everything else. It is so toxic, moreover, that it risks driving mass migration of users away from Google, people already fed up with sponsor-heavy search results heavily spiced with pre-AI clickbait garbage. This is certainly an exponential threat to Google, and potentially to all other on-ramps to web content. Which is to say, the web as we know it as a place to create and discover outside big known brands.

Stopping this is hard. One answer is to out-AI the AI spammers, automating the business of finding and isolating the cheats. Two problems: AI is very resource-intensive and this risks joining cybercurrency in the business of boiling the oceans in an exponential megawatt orgy. The other is that there is no way to win, as AI spam develops the equivalent of antibiotic immunity.

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The secret water footprint of AI technology • The Markup

Nabiha Syed in conversation with Shaolei Ren, associate professor of computer science at University of California:

»

Syed: With very good reason, we’re starting to see more scrutiny of the carbon footprint of various technologies, including AI models like GPT‑3 and GPT‑4 as well as bitcoin mining. But your research focuses on something receiving less attention: the secret water footprint of AI technology. Tell us about your findings.

Ren: Water footprint has been staying under the radar for various reasons, including the big misperception that freshwater is an “infinite” resource and the relatively lower price tag of water. Many AI model developers are not even aware of their water footprint. But this doesn’t mean water footprint is not important, especially in drought regions like California.

Together with my students and my collaborator at UT Arlington, I did some research on AI’s water footprint using state-of-the-art estimation methodology. We find that large-scale AI models are indeed big water consumers. For example, training GPT‑3 in Microsoft’s state-of-the-art US data centers can directly consume 700,000 litres of clean freshwater (enough to produce 370 BMW cars or 320 Tesla electric vehicles), and the water consumption would have been tripled if training were done in Microsoft’s data centers in Asia. These numbers do not include the off-site water footprint associated with electricity generation.

For inference (i.e., conversation with ChatGPT), our estimate shows that ChatGPT needs a 500-ml bottle of water for a short conversation of roughly 20 to 50 questions and answers, depending on when and where the model is deployed. Given ChatGPT’s huge user base, the total water footprint for inference can be enormous.

Then, we further studied the unique spatial-temporal diversities of AI models’ runtime water efficiency—the water efficiency changes over time and over locations. This implies that there’s potential to reduce AI’s water footprint by dynamically scheduling AI workloads and tasks at certain times and in certain locations, the way we reduce our electricity bills by utilizing the low electricity prices during the night to charge our electric vehicles.

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What if your AI girlfriend hated you? • WIRED

Kate Knibbs:

»

It seems as though we’ve arrived at the moment in the AI hype cycle where no idea is too bonkers to launch. This week’s eyebrow-raising AI project is a new twist on the romantic chatbot—a mobile app called AngryGF, which offers its users the uniquely unpleasant experience of getting yelled at via messages from a fake person. Or, as cofounder Emilia Aviles explained in her original pitch: “It simulates scenarios where female partners are angry, prompting users to comfort their angry AI partners” through a “gamified approach.” The idea is to teach communication skills by simulating arguments that the user can either win or lose depending on whether they can appease their fuming girlfriend.

…Obviously, I downloaded AngryGF immediately. (It’s available, for those who dare, on both the Apple App Store and Google Play.) The app offers a variety of situations where a girlfriend might ostensibly be mad and need “comfort.” They include “You put your savings into the stock market and lose 50% of it. Your girlfriend finds out and gets angry” and “During a conversation with your girlfriend, you unconsciously praise a female friend by mentioning that she is beautiful and talented. Your girlfriend becomes jealous and angry.”

The app sets an initial “forgiveness level” anywhere between 0 and 100%. You have 10 tries to say soothing things that tilt the forgiveness meter back to 100. I chose the beguilingly vague scenario called “Angry for no reason,” in which the girlfriend is, uh, angry for no reason. The forgiveness meter was initially set to a measly 30%, indicating I had a hard road ahead of me.

Reader: I failed.

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“Hello, I’ve come to couples counselling today because my AI girlfriend is stuck at 25%.” More seriously, do people really, honestly need more anger in their lives?
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FBI chief says Chinese hackers have infiltrated critical US infrastructure • Reuters via The Guardian

»

Chinese government-linked hackers have burrowed into US critical infrastructure and are waiting “for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow”, the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, has warned.

An ongoing Chinese hacking campaign known as Volt Typhoon has successfully gained access to numerous American companies in telecommunications, energy, water and other critical sectors, with 23 pipeline operators targeted, Wray said in a speech at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday.

China is developing the “ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing”, Wray said at the 2024 Vanderbilt summit on modern conflict and emerging threats.

He added: “Its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic.”

Wray said it was difficult to determine the intent of this cyber pre-positioning, which was aligned with China’s broader intent to deter the US from defending Taiwan.

China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control. Taiwan strongly objects to China’s sovereignty claims and says only the island’s people can decide their future.

Earlier this week, a Chinese ministry of foreign affairs (MFA) spokesperson said Volt Typhoon was in fact unrelated to China’s government, but was part of a criminal ransomware group.

«

Couldn’t it be both? Just asking.
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Start Up No.2205: the gamification of our lives, surviving hacking, India’s TV heatwave, Apple kills FineWoven cases?, and more

Posted on April 22, 2024 by charlesarthur

Huge areas of land in London currently used for golf could be turned into housing, but who would have the political will?CC-licensed photo by It’s No Game on Flickr.

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

Why everything is becoming a game • Gurwinder

“Gurwinder”:

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Some people began to consider whether games could be used to make people do other things. In the Seventies, the American management consultant Charles Coonradt wondered why people work harder at games they pay to play than at work they’re paid to do. Like [BF] Skinner, Coonradt saw that a defining feature of compelling games was immediate rewards. Most of the feedback loops in employment — from salary payments to annual performance appraisals — were torturously long. So Coonradt proposed shortening them by introducing daily targets, points systems, and leaderboards. These conditioned reinforcers would transform work from a series of monthly slogs into daily status games, in which employees competed to fulfil the company’s goals.

In the 21st century, advances in technology made it easy to add game mechanics to almost any activity, and a new term — “gamification” — became a buzzword in Silicon Valley. By 2008, business consultants were giving presentations about leveraging fun to shape behavior, while futurists gave TED Talks speculating on the social implications of a gamified world. Underpinning every speech was a single, momentous question: if gamification could make people buy more stuff and work more hours, what else could it be used to make people do?

…back then gamification seemed to be mostly a force for good. In 2007, for instance, the online word quiz FreeRice gamified famine relief: for every correct answer, 10 grains of rice were given to the UN World Food Programme. Within six months it had already given away over 20 billion grains of rice.

Meanwhile, the SaaS company, Opower, had gamified going green. It turned eco-friendliness into a contest, showing each person how much energy they were using compared with their neighbors, and displaying a leaderboard of the top 10 least wasteful. The app has since saved over $3bn worth of energy. And then there was Foldit, a game developed by University of Washington biochemists who’d struggled for 15 years to discern the structure of an Aids virus protein. They reasoned that, if they turned the search into a game, someone might do what they couldn’t. It took gamers just 10 days.

…It all seemed so simple: if we could only create the right games, we could make humanity fitter, greener, kinder, smarter. We could repopulate forests and even cure cancers simply by making it fun.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Instead, gamification took a less wholesome route.

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Could olivine weathering work for carbon capture? • Works in Progress

Campbell Nilsen on the possibility of carbon sequestration using olivine, an inert material formed by a chemical reaction in the sea with carbon dioxide and silicate rocks:

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In 2007, however, the Dutch press began entertaining a rather more sensational idea: the carbon emissions of the Netherlands, and perhaps the world, could be effectively and cheaply offset by spreading huge amounts of ground olivine rock – a commonly found, mostly worthless silicate rock composed mainly of forsterite, Mg₂SiO₄ – onto the shores of the North Sea, producing mile after aesthetically intriguing mile of green sand beaches as a side effect. The author of the proposal, Olaf Schuiling, envisioned repurposing thousands of tankers and trucks to ship ground rock from mines in Norway, covering the coast of the North Sea with shimmering golden-green sand and saving the human race from the consequences of the Industrial Revolution.

It seemed too good to be true – so in 2009 the geoscientists Suzanne Hangx and Chris Spiers published a rebuttal. While it was true that ground forsterite has significant sequestration potential on paper (each tonne of forsterite ultimately sequestering 1.25 tonnes of CO₂), Hangx and Spiers concluded that the logistics of Schuiling’s proposal would make the project an unworkable boondoggle.

Start with transport requirements. For the past two decades, the Netherlands has emitted about 170 megatonnes of CO₂ a year on average; each year, around 136 megatonnes of olivine would be needed to sequester Dutch emissions in full. The nearest major olivine mine, Gusdal, is located in Norway, around a thousand kilometers away. Transporting the required olivine by sea with the most commonly-used cargo ship (the $150m Handysize vessel, with a capacity of about 25 kilotonnes) for example, would require over 100 trips a week – 5% of the world’s Handysize fleet – further clogging some of the world’s busiest waters for shipping. And that’s just for the Netherlands, which is only responsible for about 0.5% of the world’s carbon emissions.

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So it’s another unworkable idea: initially promising but can’t scale. Seems like we’ll have to rely on the atmosphere and the sea to deal with it.
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Oxford shuts down institute run by Elon Musk-backed philosopher • The Guardian

Nick Robins-Early:

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Oxford University this week shut down an academic institute run by one of Elon Musk’s favorite philosophers. The Future of Humanity Institute, dedicated to the long-termism movement and other Silicon Valley-endorsed ideas such as effective altruism, closed this week after 19 years of operation. Musk had donated £1m to the FHI in 2015 through a sister organization to research the threat of artificial intelligence. He had also boosted the ideas of its leader for nearly a decade on X, formerly Twitter.

The center was run by Nick Bostrom, a Swedish-born philosopher whose writings about the long-term threat of AI replacing humanity turned him into a celebrity figure among the tech elite and routinely landed him on lists of top global thinkers. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Musk all wrote blurbs for his 2014 bestselling book Superintelligence.

“Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes,” Musk tweeted in 2014.

Bostrom resigned from Oxford following the institute’s closure, he said.

The closure of Bostrom’s centre is a further blow to the effective altruism and long-termism movements that the philosopher had spent decades championing, and which in recent years have become mired in scandals related to racism, sexual harassment and financial fraud. Bostrom himself issued an apology last year after a decades-old email surfaced in which he claimed “Blacks are more stupid than whites” and used the N-word.

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Hack attack! • The World of Edrith

“Edrith”:

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It began one Tuesday afternoon. I briefly checked my personal email to see several emails from Facebook saying that an unfamiliar person had logged in and changedmy password – and to click on a particular link to notify them if it wasn’t me. I was at work at the time, so I only had time to quickly do that. Facebook locked the account and that – for the time being – was that.

On my way home, I saw the same thing happening to LinkedIn. This time I was on it more quickly and was able to notify them, get in myself and change the password. I got a few more emails for sites I don’t use – Tictoc, Tinder, a couple of others – that suggested the hacker was trying out a number of popular sites to see if I was on them. That evening I spent about two hours going through all the accounts that had the same – or similar – password to the one that had been compromised, changing it and, where possible, turning on two-factor authentication. I submitted a request to Facebook to get my account back and thought I’d come off lightly.

Unfortunately, I’d forgotten something fairly crucial. My email account had the same password as Facebook.

…Shortly after this, the most disturbing bit happened. I received an email, from the hacker – but sent as if it was from myself to myself – which claimed he had implanted a Trojan into my computer and had control over. Unless I paid him $200 in bitcoin, he was threatening to delete files, reveal my personal information and online. The email was cleverly worded to get under skin and make you worry – clearly hoping people would pay up quickly to make them go away.

The one silver lining in all of this was that my phone seemed to be uncompromised. I was able to look up what was happening and found that this was a common scam: the most likely circumstance was that the hacker wasn’t actually in my computer, but just pretending to be.

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One big change in the past decade is that your computer might have a virus, but your phone won’t. But in the name of everything, don’t use the same passwords for important sites. And turn on 2FA.
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Doordarshan anchor faints during live news reading of heatwave updates: “teleprompter faded away” • NDTV

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Parts of India are being seared under a heatwave with maximum temperatures ranging from 40 degrees celsius to 46 degrees celsius in many areas. Amid the intense heat, a TV anchor recently fainted while reading heatwave updates live on air as her blood pressure suddenly fell. Lopamudra Sinha, an anchor with the Kolkata branch of Doordarshan, could be heard slurring while reading out the information before she blacked out. “The teleprompter faded away and I blacked out… I collapsed on my chair,” she said in a video shared on her Facebook page.

Ms Sinha said she fainted “due to intense heat and because her blood pressure plummeted suddenly”. The anchor also said that due to some snag in the cooling system, there was extreme heat inside the studio.

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Obviously, it’s very hot in a TV studio. But India is experiencing a heatwave which is even interfering with the election. We overlook extremes of climate when they’re far enough away.
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Apple reportedly stops production of FineWoven accessories • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

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In a post on X (formerly Twitter), [news leaker] Kosutami explained that Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories due to its poor durability. The company may move to another non-leather material for its premium accessories in the future.

Kosutami has revealed accurate information about FineWoven accessories in the past. The leaker unveiled Apple’s plans to introduce new Apple Watch bands made of a “woven fabric material” over a month before they debuted, as well as matching iPhone cases. Kosutami also revealed the very first images of FineWoven accessories shortly before the event in which they were officially announced. MacRumors understands the source of this latest information regarding the cessation of production to be the same as these previous FineWoven rumors that were ultimately accurate, so it should be taken seriously until we know more.

Apple stopped selling leather accessories in September last year, replacing them with a more environmentally friendly “FineWoven” material that the company describes as “luxurious and durable microtwill” made from 68% post-consumer recycled polyester. FineWoven iPhone cases are priced at $59, MagSafe Wallets at $59, AirTag holders at $35, and Apple Watch bands at $99.

Accessories made of the material have been very poorly received by customers, citing poor durability and disappointing quality. FineWoven accessories in new color options were noticeably absent from Apple’s spring refresh. If Apple has indeed stopped production of FineWoven accessories, it may be some time before the company’s existing stock inventory begins to noticeably deplete.

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Cardboard next?
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Newsweek is making generative AI a fixture in its newsroom • Nieman Journalism Lab

Andrew Deck:

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If you scroll down to the end of almost any article on Newsweek.com right now — past the headline, the article copy, several programmatic ads, and the author bio — you’ll find a short note. “To read how Newsweek uses AI, click here,” reads the text box. The link leads to Newsweek’s editorial standards page, where several paragraphs now outline how generative AI tools are being folded into the publication’s editorial process.

The disclosure is just one signal of a larger experiment with AI-assisted editorial work happening right now at the 90-year-old brand.

Newsweek first announced changes to its AI policy in September 2023, just as heated debates over early AI adoption in journalism began to boil over. Sports Illustrated and Gizmodo were among several publications criticized late last year for their shoddy use of generative AI tools to write articles. Publications, like Wired, responded by largely denouncing tools like ChatGPT in editorial work, promising to never publish text written or edited by AI.

Newsweek, meanwhile, has joined competitors like Business Insider in taking a relatively bullish view on the technology. “Newsweek believes that AI tools can help journalists work faster, smarter and more creatively,” reads the updated standards page. “We firmly believe that soon all journalists will be working with AI in some form and we want our newsroom to embrace these technologies as quickly as is possible in an ethical way.”

Six months into this new policy, staff writers and editors have not been required to use AI, but they are being encouraged to experiment with it to boost speed and efficiency. Newsweek has also rolled out a custom-built AI video production tool and is currently on a hiring spree for a new AI-focused Live News desk to cover breaking stories.

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Question is whether AI in this context is like a word processor, or like a cheaper replacement.
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The Golf Belt: how sustainable development on London’s golf courses can help address the housing crisis

Russell Curtis:

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Britain has a lot of golf courses: over a quarter of Europe’s courses are located within the United Kingdom. That’s two-and-a-half times that of the next most numerous country: 1,800 compared to Germany’s 731 – or one course for every 37,000 people, with each German course serving 113,500.

Imagine a typical golf course and your mind might conjure up images of rolling, emerald fairways of the home counties or rugged, windswept heathlands of the Scottish coast. Yet it might be surprising to learn that, despite London taking up around 0.65% of the UK’s total area, over 1 in 20 of the country’s golf courses lie within it. There are no fewer than 94 active golf courses (excluding driving ranges and courses with fewer than 9 holes) located within the Greater London area, together covering an area of 4,331 hectares. 21 of London’s boroughs have at least one course; some, such as Enfield, have seven.

For regular players, golf represents an opportunity to spend time outside with friends and colleagues, taking in the fresh air and exercise. Yet given the capital’s myriad constraints on development, it’s surely a stretch to claim that a leisure activity enjoyed by around 1% of the national population (a figure which is likely far less when only the population of London is taken into account) requires such huge tracts of land within a city which is in such dire need of homes?

Below I have set out how I believe that limited, sensitive, development of a small proportion of London’s golf courses could make a significant impact on meeting the city’s housing need as well enhancing biodiversity and opening up vital green space for the benefit of all Londoners.

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Putting this one right up there in the “bold ideas” category. Though for ownership, quite a few are owned by councils.
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Post News: the end

Noam Bardin, “Chief Poster”:

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It is with a heavy heart that I share this sad news with you. Despite how much we’ve accomplished together, we will be shutting down Post News within the next few weeks.

We have done many great things together. We built a toxicity-free community, a platform where Publishers engage, and an app that validated many theories around Micropayments and consumers’ willingness to purchase individual articles. We even managed to cultivate a phenomenal tipping ecosystem for creators and commenters.

But, at the end of the day, our service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform.

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Exit yet another would-be Twitter rival. Wonder if some of the Mastodon servers will shut down due to lack of funding and growth of traffic.
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Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Start Up No.2204: Tesla co-founder gets battery recycling, Google fires 28 over Israel protest, the Airchat obsession, and more

Posted on April 19, 2024 by charlesarthur

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:

»

…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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Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Start Up No.2203: how scammers generate AI books, Humane’s laser projector revisited, the mistaken dropdown divorce, and more

Posted on April 18, 2024 by charlesarthur

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:

»

…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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Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Start Up No.2202: the internet’s submarine repair crews, the unpaid digital butlers, reviewing for..profit, Facebook’s AI aircrew, and more

Posted on April 17, 2024 by charlesarthur

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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:

»

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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Start Up No.2201: Israel’s AI targeting machine, Twitter to charge new users to post, be an energy patriot!, Intercept struggles, and more

Posted on April 16, 2024 by charlesarthur

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

“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…

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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.

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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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Start Up No.2200: AI film cleanup earns fans’ ire, the hidden trouble with diabetes apps, the geothermal revolution, and more

Posted on April 15, 2024 by charlesarthur

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:

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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:

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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.”

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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.

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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

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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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Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified