Author name: Kris Guyer

intel,-microsoft-discuss-plans-to-run-copilot-locally-on-pcs-instead-of-in-the-cloud

Intel, Microsoft discuss plans to run Copilot locally on PCs instead of in the cloud

the ai pc —

Companies are trying to make the “AI PC” happen with new silicon and software.

The basic requirements for an AI PC, at least when it's running Windows.

Enlarge / The basic requirements for an AI PC, at least when it’s running Windows.

Intel

Microsoft said in January that 2024 would be the year of the “AI PC,” and we know that AI PCs will include a few hardware components that most Windows systems currently do not include—namely, a built-in neural processing unit (NPU) and Microsoft’s new Copilot key for keyboards. But so far we haven’t heard a whole lot about what a so-called AI PC will actually do for users.

Microsoft and Intel are starting to talk about a few details as part of an announcement from Intel about a new AI PC developer program that will encourage software developers to leverage local hardware to build AI features into their apps.

The main news comes from Tom’s Hardware, confirming that AI PCs would be able to run “more elements of Copilot,” Microsoft’s AI chatbot assistant, “locally on the client.” Currently, Copilot relies on server-side processing even for small requests, introducing lag that is tolerable if you’re making a broad request for information but less so if all you want to do is change a setting or get basic answers. Running generative AI models locally could also improve user privacy, making it possible to take advantage of AI-infused software without automatically sending information to a company that will use it for further model training.

Right now, Windows doesn’t use local NPUs for much, since most current PCs don’t have them. The Surface Studio webcam features can use NPUs for power-efficient video effects and background replacement, but as of this writing that’s pretty much it. Apple’s and Google’s operating systems both use NPUs for a wider swatch of image and audio processing features, including facial recognition and object recognition, OCR, live transcription and translation, and more.

Intel also said that Microsoft would require NPUs in “next-gen AI PCs” to hit speeds of 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) to meet its requirements. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and others sometimes use TOPS as a high-level performance metric when comparing their NPUs; Intel’s Meteor Lake laptop chips can run 10 TOPS, while AMD’s Ryzen 7040 and 8040 laptop chips hit 10 TOPS and 16 TOPS, respectively.

Unfortunately for Intel, the first company to put out an NPU suitable for powering Copilot locally may come from Qualcomm. The company’s upcoming Snapdragon X processors, long seen as the Windows ecosystem’s answer to Apple’s M-series Mac chips, promise up to 45 TOPS. Rumors suggest that Microsoft will shift the consumer version of its Surface tablet to Qualcomm’s chips after a few years of offering both Intel and Qualcomm options; Microsoft announced a Surface Pro update with Intel’s Meteor Lake chips last week but is only selling it to businesses.

Asus and Intel are offering a NUC with a Meteor Lake CPU and its built-in NPU as an AI development platform.

Enlarge / Asus and Intel are offering a NUC with a Meteor Lake CPU and its built-in NPU as an AI development platform.

Intel

All of that said, TOPS are just one simplified performance metric. As when using FLOPS to compare graphics performance, it’s imprecise and won’t capture variations in how each NPU handles different tasks. And the Arm version of Windows still has software and hardware compatibility issues that could continue to hold it back.

As part of its developer program, Intel is also offering an “AI PC development kit” centered on an Asus NUC Pro 14, a mini PC built around Intel’s Meteor Lake silicon. Intel formally stopped making its NUC mini PCs last year, passing the brand and all of its designs off to Asus. Asus is also handling all remaining warranty service and software support for older NUCs designed and sold by Intel. The NUC Pro 14 is one of the first new NUCs announced since the transition, along with the ROG NUC mini gaming PC.

Intel, Microsoft discuss plans to run Copilot locally on PCs instead of in the cloud Read More »

economics-roundup-#1

Economics Roundup #1

I call the section ‘Money Stuff’ but as a column name that is rather taken. There has been lots to write about on this front that didn’t fall neatly into other categories. It clearly benefited a lot from being better organized into subsections, and the monthly roundups could benefit from being shorter, so this will probably become a regular thing.

Quite the opposite, actually. Jobs situation remains excellent.

Whatever else you think of the economy, layoffs are still at very low levels, the last three years are the lowest levels on record, do note that the bottom of this chart is 15,000 rather than zero even without adjusting for population size.

Ford says it is reexamining where to make cars after the UAW strikes. The union responded by saying, essentially, ‘fyou, pay me’:

“Maybe Ford doesn’t need to move factories to find the cheapest labor on Earth,” he said. “Maybe it needs to recommit to American workers and find a CEO who’s interested in the future of this country’s auto industry,” Fain said.

Which is, of course, what both of them would always say no matter what. I do presume that now that the UAW has raised the price and expected future price of dealing with them, Ford is now placing a higher priority in getting new factories and jobs outside the reach of the UAW.

Something rather remarkable happened here in 2020.

High-propensity applications means businesses likely to hire employees with payroll. The number was holding steady for a decade at 100k such applications per month, then it jumped and is now stable at closer to 150k, with other applications a similar percentage above previous trend. This really is a big game.

So, this happened:

Tom Gara: NY Mag’s personal finance columnist was convinced by a cold caller claiming to be a CIA agent in Langley that she needed to empty her bank account, put the money in a shoebox and give it to a guy coming to meet her on the street.

Falling for this scam was unbelievably stupid. I do not understand how they pulled this off and she fell for it. However writing the details of this up is a public service, as is admitting that this happened to you, so we thank her for that.

Critical Bureaucracy Theory: A lot of people dunking on this, but she’s doing society a service by describing it in detail, at her own expense.

Knowing about index funds and being able to compound performance doesn’t necessarily make you immune to pressure tactics.

Andrew Rettek: I would not hand $50,000 to a stranger.

I mean yes, that is true, it is possible to be good at figuring out index funds while still falling for scams. Indeed, a key reason to invest in index funds is that you do not have good judgment, the whole idea is that index funds do not use judgment. I still do think that there is a common factor that I want present wherever I seek advice.

Arnold Kling links to Moses Strenstein, with the claim that GDP growth is ‘driven primarily by old folks buying healthcare stuff (variously, on the taxpayer’s dime.)

As always, one can check the data. Even if you think GDP is not a good measure, the healthcare share of GDP should check out.

Health care spending continues to rise as a share of GDP, but it is clearly not growing so fast that we lack other RGDP gains.

It does seem valid to say that marginal healthcare spending is Hansonian, as in spending more does not lead to better health or less death, so any such increases in spending should be considered wasted, and not count as people being better off.

(As usual, standard caveat that of course much of healthcare is highly valuable, as was driven home to me this past two weeks. I am fine now.)

Similarly, Moses claims service inflation is still too high, but we should expect service inflation to exceed general inflation, and indeed want that to drive up real wages. And he complains that consumer spending is down:

Is higher consumer spending the goal, a cause, or both? I get confused about that. If people think the economy is bad so they cut their spending, that can make things bad, but if they do that and the economy remains good then that seems great and should lead to more savings and investment? Whereas the savings rate is quite low? So what is going on, if both savings and consumer spending are down, but GDP is up? That part does seem suspicious on first glance. It can be explained, and some of the explanations pass muster, but it is not going to feel like a good economy even then.

Yet another round of ‘life can’t be bad look at all your Nice Things.

Overeducated Gibbon: All these doomposts about how people are worse off materially than they used to be, but then I look at the size of houses people buy, the niceness of cars they drive, the massive increase in air travel, the boom in restaurant spending etc.

Marc Andreessen: 💯

I continue to think that we can simultaneously live in what in many ways is great material abundance, and also be materially worse off. Yes, the basket of goods we currently buy was impossible to access in the past and would have been immensely costly. Yes, we have much better material possessions in many, even most, ways.

None of that matters if mandatory largely signaling and positional goods, especially education, health care and housing, are eating everyone’s budgets alive, to the point where many people feel they cannot afford children, and few feel they can afford four or more children. No cell phone or fast car is going to make up for that.

Our houses and apartments are bigger, but a lot of that is that they are required to be bigger, from a mix of regulations and cultural expectations. Being forced to buy more housing than you need, that you cannot afford, is not doing you any favors.

Vibecession Even if Inaccurate

As Scott Sumner points out, we are also clearly outperforming all our rivals. He ascribes this misconception to bad luck. I agree it is bad luck, but in terms of the initial conditions handed to Biden.

Scott Sumner also makes the case that yes, the economy is actually good, the numbers are real, it is that the public is being dumb at evaluating conditions, it is bad at that, you can tell because all they actually know are local conditions and they agree local conditions are fine.

I do think people are making the mistake of not comparing conditions to the right counterfactuals, not considering the initial conditions of the pandemic and previous administration’s choices, and not having reasonable expectations going forward. Compared to what could have been reasonably expected, compared to how others are doing, we are doing well.

Given those conditions, Biden needed to manage expectations, to explain the consequences of our Covid economic policies. Instead, he did not explain any of that, and then spent more.

Also people do not remember what the past was like, and imagine people used to be much richer than they were, with better consumption of goods then they had, and less stupid annoyances and time sinks than there were.

Most basically they forget how much more money people now make.

As some commenters point out, to the extent people are moving up in the general, that does not move up people overall in relative terms. So if your sense of ‘middle class’ membership, and what it means for middle class people to do well, is mostly relative, then this chart is a problem for those not in that new upper third.

Scott Sumner asks a related question more generally. Should a price index measure constant utility or constant quantity, or what?

Imagine an economy where the aggregate quantity of the only good increases at 5% per year, while the price of that good rises by 10%/year. You can think of that economy as having a 15% nominal growth rate. (I’ll ignore compounding for simplicity; technically it’s 15.5%). How much extra income would a person need each year in order to maintain a constant utility? I’m not sure, but I’m pretty confident the answer is not 10%, and it’s also not 15%.

1. A person that got a 15% raise would be able to buy 5% more real goods. So presumably their utility would be higher than before.

2. A person that got a 10% raise would be able to buy the same amount of goods, while that person’s acquaintances would be 5% ahead in real terms. So presumably that person would feel worse off in terms of utility.

This suggests that a measure of inflation that holds utility constant would be somewhere between 10% and 15%.

One index has to create one number. Then that number is equated to multiple different things.

It gets even more complicated if the quality of those goods also rises 10%/year, for varying versions of quality.

Let’s assume that instead of holding utility constant, we hold quantity constant. Then it becomes easy to calculate inflation—which would be exactly 10% in this case. Unfortunately, our textbooks seem to conflate “constant quantity” and “constant utility” in a way that ignores the social aspect of consumption.

My thought experiment involves an economy where quantity grows over time. But the same problem occurs with quality improvements. Here again, a “hedonic” adjustment that attempts to account for quality changes will typically come up with a lower estimate of inflation than an index that holds utility constant. Thus the BLS says that the price of TVs has fallen by more than 99% since 1959 (due to quality improvements), but average people don’t think that way.

They want to know how much more it costs to buy the sort of TV their neighbors have, not how much more it costs to buy the sort of TV their grandparents had.

You want to know all of these things.

You definitely want to know what it costs to get the things people typically get, so you can feel like you are keeping up, maintaining social status and dignity, buying what you are entitled to. The Iron Law of Wages covers what families expect to need, not the theoretical bare minimums.

It is also valuable to have the option to buy a really terrible today but fine 40 years ago television for $5 (remember, down 99%!) instead of a good one for $500 or great one for $2000, or to spend $0 and use your phone or tablet you have anyway as a TV potentially better than what you used to have growing up.

A lot of the problem today is that the metaphorical cheap TV, or the option to go without one, is not available.

Consider what it would cost to get the 40-years-ago quality car, or school, or healthcare, or housing, or childcare, or even food. It is easy to forget how universally worse was the quality of most goods and services back then, of course with notably rare exceptions.

In many ways it would suck to have to, today, consume that 1984 basket, even if you got to also pick some cheap stuff from the 2024 basket like a discount cell phone and all the free internet services. But the option to go with that basket to save money, to be confident you could keep your head above water? That would be great. And also there are some places where you would happily take the discount, whereas society is forcing you to buy cars with various features, childcare from college students on ground floors and hyper expensive health insurance that has not been shown to improve health, and so on.

This is related to my thoughts on the Cost of Thriving Index, and the fact that what matters is not the CPI per se but the expected purchases you have to make and costs imposed on you, and that your practical lived experience is not going to reflect the ‘value’ of the goods purchased all that tightly.

Also related is the increasing complexity of life, and the fact that the ‘intelligence waterline’ required to navigate things reasonably keeps rising. We largely self-segregate by intelligence and it is very easy to be completely out of touch with the lived experience of the majority, and especially of a substantial minority. See this Damon Sasi thread, and the original thread from Nathan Culley.

The vibecession is extreme?

Kimberly Strassel: Among the elite, 74% say their finances are getting better, compared with 20% of the rest of voters. (The share is 88% among elites who are Ivy League graduates.) The elite give President Biden an 84% approval rating, compared with 40% from non-elites.

I have a hard time believing that only 20% of ‘non-elite’ voters are seeing their finances improve. Here elite is defined as more than 150k in income, living in a high-density area and with a postgraduate degree, which should be a single-digit percentage of the population. Most people’s finances should be improving most of the time, since you get older and likely avoid extreme bad outcomes.

Also, the post claims these ‘elites’ have 77% support for “strict rationing of gas, meat, and electricity.” To contain climate change, you see. Support for rationing of electricity is certifiably nuts, as nuts as the ‘only four flights in a lifetime’ proposal.

When people say they believe the economy sucks for people like them, I continue to believe them. If your response is a bunch of economic statistics saying otherwise, you are asking the wrong questions.

John Arnold: 3.7% unemployment rate

3.2% annualized GDP growth

1.8% real wage growth 2023

3.1% annualized CPI

27% S&P 500 return past year

Larry Summers echoes that a lot of why people feel the economy is bad is that they hate high interest rates, because the cost of money is one of people’s main expenses. Housing is a huge cost in particular, and mortgage costs have shot through the roof mostly without coming down.

And of course people do not think about or care about the forward rate of change of the price level, they care a lot about current prices versus past prices and versus their pocketbooks, and they notice some prices more than others. So when grocery prices are up 25% in four years, that is a big deal. Everything still feels outrageously expensive, and ‘the last year has been fine’ is not yet bringing much comfort.

Nor does ‘food and clothing are actually outrageously cheap, historically speaking, you should be focused on the newly expensive things like health care and housing and education’ although that is very true.

Bloomberg: By volume, steak sales over the last 12 months were down 20% from the same period four years earlier, according to consumer research firm NIQ.

That is a very clear sign of feeling poorer, whether or not one is actually poorer. This is not about overall meat consumption or veganism, since Americans consumed 57.6 pounds of beef in 2023, down only 1% from 58.1 in 2019.

Robin Hanson points out that the best participants in prediction markets reliably outperform others, and that a market with only them would be far more accurate if they were still willing to participate and others could be kept out. Given arbitrage opportunities, this seems extremely difficult. If you could do it, though, it would totally work. The EMH is false, centrally because the market is a compromise between inertia and dumb money on one side, and smart money with its cognitive and capital and opportunity costs on the other.

So what can you do? The answer is simple. You let everyone participate, but you track who does what, and you figure out what the fair price is given everyone’s trades and track records. I have some experience with this. If you knew what everyone in market was doing, you would often say that the market price and the ‘fair’ price were distinct. There is no reason you could not also do this with prediction markets, or with the stock market.

If you know who is on both sides of every trade, and you pay attention, you can be a profitable trader indeed.

Markets are weak-form efficient if and only if P=NP, claims paper. Which we already knew, given that we knew that the efficient market hypothesis is false and also that P almost certainly does not equal NP. Now we have a claim that those two are logically linked.

Mira extends the market concept.

Mira: You should be able to buy anything with a limit order.

“I don’t feel like paying $250 for an anime figurine, but I left an order up for $50”

If they saw 10,000 orders at a lower price rung sitting there eventually they would take it. Otherwise, the demand gradient at $250 is ~0

“ebay but we virtualized all transactions so you can speculate on everything without worrying about shipping(unless you want to).

You can buy call options on your waifu’s figurine to hedge against the risk the manufacturer goes out of business and the price increases.”

The b2b version of this is “financializing the supply chain so that car companies don’t need to keep their own stockpile of parts and estimate demand to hedge against disruptions. they can buy options on necessary parts and some hedge fund will take the risk of war or sanctions”.

Kickstarter is arguably a variant of this.

As usual the answer is transaction costs, and general inability to make this sufficiently smooth and easy. Still, I do think there are many things to be done in such a space. I even have ideas about how one can use AI to do this better – you can privately indicate what you want in plain English, and then there is a background universal matching system of sorts.

The Argentinian province of La Rioja is attempting to print its own currency.

Quintela said that Bocades would be exchangeable for pesos at the provincially-owned bank. However, given the province’s scarce supply of pesos, the plan relies on “people starting to trust in the bonds’ value” so that they don’t exchange them immediately.

They want it to be one way. I am pretty sure it is the other way.

I say three cheers for most forms of surge pricing. Alas, most others disagree.

Tyler Durden (as in Zero Hedge): Wendy’s To Test ‘Surge Pricing’ Using ‘High-Tech Menu Boards’ That Change In Real Time.

“Guess people better change their lunch hours from 2pm to 4pm. With all of the concern of rising prices, the last thing you want to have to consider is how much will it cost you for a burger and fries depending on the time of day,” Ted Jenkin, CEO of Atlanta-based wealth management firm oXYGen Financial, told The Post.

Joel Grus:

Yep. There are three kinds of restaurants, those who are much cheaper at lunch, those that are closed for lunch, and those that are neither. If there was a place that gave a discount at 2pm or 3pm? I can (often) happily wait. But the places that are packed for lunch usually are, if not always as cheap as Wendy’s, also not so expensive.

In this case, the question is whether the cognitive cost and stress associated with changing prices is worth the efficiency of moving consumption to less utilized hours. My presumption is that fully dynamic pricing is several bridges too far on this, even without the public reaction, so it is good that Wendy’s backed down. There simply is not enough benefit here.

A constant discount for quiet hours (with raised menu prices otherwise), however, does seem like a good idea?

Biden Administration issues rule capping credit card late fees at $8, and according to CBS is forming a new ‘strike force’ to crack down on ‘illegal and unfair’ pricing on things like groceries, prescription drugs, health care, housing and financial services. It will never not be weird to me that people pay these fees so often, as in 45 million holders saving an average of $220 annually? Autopay exists, including to give minimum payments of similar size to the fee, life does not need to be this hard. Presumably cutting these particular fees will mean increased interest rates and less access to credit. And yes, it should scare you that the government has a ‘strike force’ aiming to target ‘unfair’ grocery prices.

Many (perhaps most) of the modern world’s trends that impact all those prices are out of government control, and that masks the quality of decisions about the parts where we can choose better or worse outcomes.

Burgess Everett: 70-25, Senate votes to disapprove rule allowing imports of fresh beef from Paraguay into the United States. That’s a veto-proof majority

Biden admin “strongly opposes” the move, which was led by Tester and Rounds

Matthew Yglesias: Everyone is mad about food prices and also hates things that would make food cheaper.

Also, yes. Everyone hates all the things that would actually make food cheaper.

Once again we confirm the finding that when you mandate transparent pay policies, as 71% of the OECD countries do, here’s what happens:

Robin Hanson: “71% of OECD countries have … [policies] revealing pay between coworkers doing similar work within a firm. … narrowed coworker wage gaps [but]… led to counterproductive peer comparisons & caused employers to bargain more aggressively, lowering average wages.”

The abstract attempts to somewhat bury the lede, that average wages are down, emphasizing all the other good effects that still combine to lower average pay to ask the title question, ‘Is Pay Transparency Good?’

Abstract: While these policies have narrowed coworker wage gaps, they have also led to counterproductive peer comparisons and caused employers to bargain more aggressively, lowering average wages. Other pay transparency policies, without directly targeting discrimination, have benefited workers by addressing broader information frictions in the labor market. Vertical pay transparency policies reveal to workers pay differences across different levels of seniority. Empirical evidence suggests these policies can lead to more accurate and more optimistic beliefs about earnings potential, increasing employee motivation and productivity. Cross-firm pay transparency policies reveal wage differences across employers. These policies have encouraged workers to seek jobs at higher paying firms, negotiate higher pay, and sharpened wage competition between employers. We discuss the evidence on effects of pay transparency, and open questions.

It is not good.

Pay transparency is even worse than that. It means that your pay must be socially determined as a function of your status and title. The equality of pay means that firms cannot pay extra to superior employees without also giving them the required social status or lifting everyone else’s pay. This not only makes them bargain harder and lowers wages, it means inefficient allocations of labor, such as when pay transparency made me unable to retain a highly valuable software engineer because the other software engineers in the company saw his pay, a small fraction of the value he produced, and threatened to revolt.

It also means that everyone around you knows exactly how much you make, which is kind of an obnoxious privacy issue, one might say. Never ask a man his salary.

Megan McArdle uses economics to argue that air travel pricing is a zero sum game. The airlines do not make real money, they will never make real money. People demand cheap airfare. The way you give it to them is to unbundle the seat with everything else, and engage in price discrimination, so if you dare say ‘families get to sit together for free’ then that generosity must be paid for elsewhere.

In which case, okay, fine, pay for it elsewhere, because that is clearly an efficient allocation and families need subsidies that won’t induce bad behavior, and not doing this increases stress on families.

Should we overall be happy that we use this price discrimination scheme, where you can fly remarkably cheaply if you accept a worse experience?

Yes, I think the optionality and ability to price discriminate outweigh the deadweight losses. I say this as someone who, although I obviously don’t have to, readily accepts the cheapest options, and accepts a slightly smaller seat in the back boarding last without a carry-on bag and so on, because I learned while being a Magic: The Gathering professional how to make that work.

The flip side is that Choices are Bad. I do not want to spend an hour stressing about exactly which features to buy for a flight, where each is priced to frequently make that decision close. I do not want to play an Out to Get You game of ‘upgrades’ against the airline, or feel like I am being threatened with potential disasters if I don’t pay up.

The ultimate version of this: Overbooked flights were always awesome, if not as awesome as having no one next to you. How great is it to suddenly be offered hundreds of dollars to postpone your flight by a few hours? When I was a Magic player I would very often take the deal, especially flying back.

The hourly rate on it was amazing even when you sold out cheap, and you could spend the time reading a book or listening to music. I love this as an example of something that some will say ‘exploits’ poor people when it does nothing of the kind, and call to be banned driving up ticket prices.

Oh, and also it seems this refers to something that happened with Uber and Lyft.

Jordan Valinsky (CNN): Lyft and Uber will stop offering services in Minneapolis on May 1 after the city council overrode the mayor’s veto of a minimum wage for rideshare drivers.

The city council on Thursday voted 10-3 in favor of the override, allowing rideshare drivers to be paid the local minimum wage of $15.57 an hour.

Lyft said in a statement the bill was “deeply flawed” and that the ordinance makes its “operations unsustainable.”

“We support a minimum earning standard for drivers, but it should be done in an honest way that keeps the service affordable for riders,” said a Lyft spokesperson.

Uber said in a statement obtained by CNN that it’sdisappointed the council chose to ignore the data and kick Uber out of the Twin Cities, putting 10,000 people out of work and leaving many stranded.”

Presumably there is then a doom loop, where demand drops so wait times increase, and because of minimum wage for down time you can’t get enough drivers standing by, so there is no viable service. Which is a shame. I am not saying I would be happy if rideshare prices doubled, but if there are no easy hailable cabs, the chances I would pay double for a given ride is substantial, especially for shorter ones.

Presumably, of course, Uber and Lyft also want to make a point and send a message to any other cities that might try this. They will survive without Minneapolis. They also would have looked terrible if they had actually doubled prices in the city, whereas they look a lot better withdrawing, the same way everyone hates surge pricing.

Paying minimum wage of $15/hour does not seem so prohibitive as to cause the doom loop. This, however, is something different.

Austen Allred: Important to note Minneapolis didn’t enforce a $15/hr minimum wage. It enforced a minimum of $1.40 per mile and $0.51 per minute (WAY higher than $15/hr), forced the companies to pay 80% of the cost of any canceled ride, and a lot more.

Robot Spider: Wait, so a 30 mile ride taking 30 minutes in medium traffic would require the driver being paid $57.30? For a half hour of work? That’s more than a software engineer.

Hktsre: wait that’s like ~$60/hour.

Joshua Hartley: The scams that 80% rule would have led to… Uber had tons of NYC scammers whenever they first were paying drivers for cancelled rides.

Then you would need to somehow pay Lyft or Uber more on top of that.

Not a reliable source, but I saw a claim that in August 2023 driver pay was $1 base fare, plus $0.20 per minute, plus $0.90 per mile.

So yes. If that is close to accurate, this jump could plausibly cause a doom loop.

It is not completely unheard of, if this discounts time between rides. For comparison: New York City yellow taxis charge $4-$6 up front, $3.50 cents per mile above 12 miles per hour, or 70 cents per minute in slow traffic (so effectively minimum 12 miles per hour in terms of payment). That is solidly more than Minneapolis is requiring.

Adam Platt breaks down what happened as he sees it in its broader context. Uber arrived in 2012, to a city without hailable cabs. Uber rapidly displaced existing very poor heavily regulated taxi service via pricing below cost and ignoring the regulations. Now the drivers are using their pull to get a 40%-50% raise by government mandate, at a level not guaranteed to anyone else, because they have political pull. Sounds right.

If the city does not back down, I do not expect Uber and Lyft to do so. We would then be about to do a natural experiment in so many ways. How much would this cause rents to drop, and how much would good locations rise in relative value?

Detroit is implementing a tax on the unimproved value of land. Tyler Cowen asks how optimistic we should be for this experiment, and brainstorms potential downsides.

One is that Detroit might use this to net raise property taxes by undoing the cut on buildings while keeping the tax on land. This is always possible but I don’t think it is likely, the two taxes are too clearly similar and correlated.

A second is that landowners might try to lower their tax burden by developing low-quality housing, whereas land speculators might otherwise be able to hold out on such low-value uses until they can do something more valuable. If the landowner is profit maximizing, we have made it more profitable to build now but even more additionally profitable to build whatever is net most valuable. Whatever a landowner who is not liquidity constrained chooses to do should be efficient? With the concern that people with negative cash flow often don’t long term maximize. But why would someone like that not simply sell the land to someone else? And in general, I find it hard to think that if this does the job of inducing more construction and more cleanup and such, that this could be net bad.

Beyond that, the big danger is indeed that this might simply not do much.

Tyler Cowen warns that new research shows that California state taxes have reached a tipping point where they are driving many high earners out of the state, erasing half or more of revenue gains, and the state is in crisis. None of that seems like news. I certainly have considered whether to leave New York for the same reason, and almost did so at one point. I ultimately decided to stay put, but I am paying a hell of a lot of money to be here.

Scott Sumner disagrees with me in the nicest possible way.

Scott Sumner: I agree with 95% of the views in this Zvi Mowshowitz post, but not this one:

Andrew Biggs makes the case for eliminating the tax preference for retirement accounts. This mostly benefits the rich, does not obviously increase net savings values, causes lots of hoops to be jumped through, and we can use the money to shore up social security instead, or I would add to cut income tax rates. This would be obviously great on the pure economics, assuming it did not retroactively confiscate existing savings and only applied going forward. But as Matthew Yglesias says, political nonstarter, so much so that not even I support doing it.

For the umpteenth time, retirement accounts (401k, Roth, etc.) do not provide any tax preference for saving. They remove a tax penalty for saving, and make the system neutral between current and future consumption.

Scott and Sumner I are thinking on different margins.

Scott’s point is that currently the tax system penalizes savings and rewards consuming now over consuming later, because it taxes income where it should tax consumption. I agree with him, and would support such a move.

However, once we have made that decision to mostly tax income rather than consumption, making an exception in particular for retirement accounts seems like a clear mistake to me given everything we now know, if we assume the revenue deficit is made up for by higher income taxes elsewhere.

Patrick McKenzie offers an additional explanation for occupational licensing, which is that it requires you to put a $X00k piece of paper, that also cost a bunch of time and energy, at risk as the price of admission to the chance of doing various crimes.

It is hard to throw someone in jail, it is hard to fine people serious money. It is much easier to take away their piece of paper. So you can keep such people on a much tighter leash.

Patrick McKenzie: One thing the IRS did was starting to assign tax preparers numbers. The biggest single consequence of this is it allows you to cluster tax fraud, which the IRS institutionally perceived as being acts of individual taxpayers, by their preparer.

Seen in this light, licensing regimes hear the critics of licensing regimes that suggest they are exclusionary, cost a lot of money, and teach nothing of value, and say “… And?”

They usually don’t say this out loud.

Robin Hanson: We have other much more cost-effective ways to punish offenders than this.

There are obviously much better ways to punish offenders, but in practice are we capable of doing them? Otherwise they do not help.

We have a wise legal principle that punishment legal requires high barriers in terms in terms of both burden of proof and the nature of wrongdoing.

However, in order to make many systems incentive-compatible, it needs to be possible to punish people for much lesser offenses, with a much lighter process that has a much lower burden of proof. If your homeowners association had to go to criminal court every time you failed to mow your lawn, you are not going to be forced to mow your lawn.

This suggests a simple compromise.

Let those who would enter the profession have a choice. They can choose to go through the training and licensing process as it exists today.

Or they can choose to post an actual bond for $X00k, perhaps via insurance. If something goes wrong, you have now agreed to forfeit some or all of that bond via a much lighter process with a much lower punishment threshold than the courts.

To be clear, regardless of the alternatives, this is all a deeply stupid reason to throw up huge barriers to people doing useful things. There are indeed many obvious superior solutions. But you do have to deal with the problem that this is helping to solve. This might beat doing nothing, given the brokenness of our default systems.

Claim that workers are much more productive outside the office, to the tune of £15,000 per worker per year for every extra day (I assume of the week). That is an absurd amount of extra productivity. This seems difficult to reconcile with the additional finding that return-to-office orders had almost no effect on profitability or market value.

The current best theory seems to be that on a given day productivity is often better at home, but that you learn skills, build a team and coordinate better at the office, so the costs of remote largely only show up over time.

Patrick McKenzie promotes Mercury as much better than other banks for wire transfers, with routine payments landing in under a minute.

Patrick McKenzie’s Bits about Money, Financial Systems Take a Holiday, all sorts of annoying persnickety and fascinating (to me anyway) details. Incidentally, such issues will keep the AIs away until suddenly they don’t.

Also his periodic reminder that the things said by customer service representatives at banks correlate remarkably little to what would happen if you wrote the bank a letter from a Dangerous Professional (or got Claude to write it for you), especially when what the CSR says is not in your favor.

The rules for checks are illegible and complex, because illegible and complex rules refined over decades perform better, and as a legal system checks get to keep those rules.

Claims about FTX and Alameda and Tether, that they were engaged in highly systematic money laundering and it is only now starting to come to light and we have only seen the tip of the iceberg. It certainly is hard to reconcile the facts presented with these companies not being a blatant criminal conspiracy in distinct ways from the stealing of customer funds.

Nate Silver: Average monthly price of top 10 paid Substack newsletters, selected categories:

Culture: $6.50

US Politics: $6.60

Sports: $8.10

Business: $22.90

Tech: $28.50

Finance: $45.00

Yes, we’re spending our Saturday afternoon doing a little Market Research™. Silver Bulletin is weirdly like 20% sports-ish, 60% politics-ish and 20% biz/tech-adjacent so it’s kind of a weird one. Big year ahead so I hope you’ll consider reading.

This would suggest I am underpricing at $10, since my comparables are all over $20, usually for a lot less content. But of course those Substacks mostly paywall their content, whereas I paywall absolutely nothing. So the value proposition is in that sense not so great. The $0 deal is, from one’s own perspective, even better. Still, what a deal.

Vitalik Buterin offers thought on ‘the end of my childhood,’ which is more of a wide-ranging survey of what he has learned and how he has changed, with childhood’s end being the taking of responsibility for being ‘one of the others’ who works to make things better.

Offered without comment, except that of the places I’ve worked with others (as opposed to communities, although it is still close) I find the same:

Jim Savage: A friend who worked for startups, nonprofits and the top rungs of government now works for a hedge fund. Calls it the most truth-seeking place she’s ever worked. Interesting how humans thrive when performance is a scalar.

In defense of the Ferengi and the need for markets in Star Trek’s Federation. Akiva Malamet points out that the Federation has turned so far away from markets that it is horribly inefficient at resource allocation and unable to do business where there is not abundance. Earth may be a paradise in Star Trek in many senses, but labor and what is effectively capital are allocated horribly, and the incentives do not work at all. I would add that Starfleet is horribly inefficient as well. Humanity fights existential wars on a regular basis, and no one thought to have a dedicated warship until the Defiant, instead we thought with the same ships we use for trade and exploration? We send gigantic ships to explore strange new worlds when we could send a scout ship, or an unmanned probe (even if you buy random just-so limits on AI)?

Meanwhile yes, things mostly don’t seem great for Ferengi or on Ferenginar, and the author admits there is far too much greed for greed’s sake (and of course the writers give Ferengi many negative attributes not related to being capitalists), but they can get things done. Most of the things shown as wrong with Ferengi society are not actually economically efficient. That they have not long since been eliminated tells you a lot about how that society actually works.

Scott Sumner on China’s weak economy. It does make sense that if youth unemployment is 20% and there are plenty of workers in the countryside, then the impending demographic collapse is not yet an issue, except perhaps for real estate prices. It will bind eventually, but not yet.

Economics Roundup #1 Read More »

workers-with-job-flexibility-and-security-have-better-mental-health

Workers with job flexibility and security have better mental health

Healthier work —

Job flexibility and security were linked to significantly less psychological distress and anxiety.

Workers with job flexibility and security have better mental health

Office Space

American workers who have more flexibility and security in their jobs also have better mental health, according to a study of 2021 survey data from over 18,000 nationally representative working Americans.

The study, published Monday in JAMA Network Open, may not be surprising to those who have faced return-to-office mandates and rounds of layoffs amid the pandemic. But, it offers clear data on just how important job flexibility and security are to the health and well-being of workers.

For the study, job flexibility was assessed in terms of ease of adjusting work schedules, advance notice of scheduling changes, and whether schedules were changed by employers often. People who reported greater flexibility in their job had 26 percent lower odds of serious psychological distress, which was measured on a validated, widely used questionnaire that assesses depression, nervousness, hopelessness, and worthlessness, among other forms of distress. Greater job flexibility was also linked to 13 percent lower odds of experiencing daily anxiety, 11 percent lower odds of experiencing weekly anxiety, and 9 percent lower odds of experiencing anxiety a few times a year.

Job security also appeared to be a boon for mental health. Workers were asked how likely they thought that they may lose their job or get laid off in the next 12 months. Those who reported feeling more secure in their positions had 25 percent lower odds of serious psychological distress. Job security was also associated with 27 percent lower odds of experiencing daily anxiety and 21 percent lower odds of experiencing weekly anxiety.

The study, led by Monica Wang of Boston University’s School of Public Health, also looked at how job flexibility and security affected job absenteeism, finding mixed results. Both job flexibility and security were linked to fewer days where workers reported working while they were sick—suggesting that flexibility and security enabled workers to make use of sick leave when they needed it. In line with that finding, more job flexibility led to more days where workers reported being absent due to illness in the three months prior to the survey. Greater job security, on the other hand, led to fewer absences over the previous three and 12 months.

It’s unclear why that would be the case, but the researchers speculated that “Job security may lead to lower work absenteeism due to higher work satisfaction, decreased job-related stress, and financial security,” they wrote.

Overall, the study’s findings indicate “the substantive impact that flexible and secure jobs can have on mental health in the short-term and long-term,” the researchers conclude.

They do note limitations of the study, the main one being that the study identifies associations and can’t determine that job flexibility and security directly caused mental health outcomes and the work absence findings. Still, they suggest that workplace policies could improve the mental health of employees. This includes flexible scheduling, leave policies, and working arrangements, including remote and hybrid options, which can all allow workers to accommodate personal and family needs. For improving job security, the researchers recommend longer-term contracts and long-term strategies to invest in employees, such as “uptraining,” skill development, and advancement opportunities.

Workers with job flexibility and security have better mental health Read More »

flying-coach?-at-least-you’ll-be-able-to-watch-movies-on-an-in-seat-oled-tv-soon

Flying coach? At least you’ll be able to watch movies on an in-seat OLED TV soon

In-Flight Entertainment —

Who needs legroom when you have 8.3 million individually emissive pixels?

  • This is one of the Panasonic Avionics Astrova in-flight entertainment systems, set to debut in Icelandair, Qantus, and United Airlines flights in the next couple of years.

    Panasonic

  • The goal doesn’t seem to be to keep them in first class; economy seats will get them too, albeit in smaller sizes.

    Panasonic

Flying on commercial airlines today might be a lot more of a pain than it used to be, but new tech is going to bring some improvement to one part of the experience—in-flight entertainment. Panasonic Avionics’ brand Astrova in-flight entertainment systems are starting to roll out on commercial flights on certain airlines, promising 4K HDR TVs and other features to the backs of seats that should be a huge upgrade over the abysmal screens we normally watch in-flight movies on.

Look at most commercial airlines today, and you’ll find a tiny, terrible LCD TV embedded in the seat in front of you. These HD, standard dynamic range screens have terrible contrast and poor viewing angles, and they aren’t bright enough to achieve a good viewing experience when the overhead lights are on.

They’re bad enough that I always bring my own hardware for flights—most recently, I took three flights with Apple’s Vision Pro headset, which I plan to write about later this week. But most people just bring a tablet.

Astrova is Panasonic’s name for an in-flight entertainment system that aims to improve things dramatically. The OLED screens have 4K resolution and support HDR+. They also have two USB-C charging ports built in that can charge at up to 100 W, and they support Bluetooth, so you can use AirPods or Sony’s popular WH-1000 over-ear headphones.

With current systems, you have to bring an adapter to make that happen, if it’s possible.

Panasonic has paired the screens with new colored LED lighting systems that aim to make it so the bright overhead cabin lights don’t have to come on, washing out the image.

The screens come in 13-, 16-, 19-, 22-, 27-, 32-, and 42-inch variants. “How would you fit a 42-inch screen in an airplane seat?” you might ask. Well, that size is likely for ultra-high-end international flights where people can pay thousands and thousands of dollars for private cabins. Those aren’t the only types of seats that will get some kind of Astrova OLED system, though.

The rollout begins this year with Icelandair and Qantas planning to install Astrova systems in 2025 and late 2024. Icelandair will be first; new Airbus A321neo LR craft will see 16-inch screens in business class and 13-inch ones in economy. Qantas will install Astrova as part of its retrofit of its A330-200 fleet of planes and in newly ordered A350-1000 craft. The emphasis for Qantas is on long-haul flights, specifically those between Australia and Europe or the United States.

Last summer, US-based United Airlines announced many of its longer international flights would see these systems installed in 2025, with some domestic flights to follow, so it won’t be limited to intercontinental flights.

It’s doubtful that these screens will hold a candle to the latest high-end OLED TVs from LG and Samsung, and it looks like it will be a few years before they’re widespread in domestic flights. But any improvement is welcome on the terrible in-flight entertainment systems we’re using now. Now, if only another company could invent some way to use new tech to make the seats 20 percent bigger—I can dream, anyway.

Listing image by Panasonic

Flying coach? At least you’ll be able to watch movies on an in-seat OLED TV soon Read More »

justice-department-indicts-7-accused-in-14-year-hack-campaign-by-chinese-gov

Justice Department indicts 7 accused in 14-year hack campaign by Chinese gov

INDICTED —

Hacks allegedly targeted US officials and politicians, their spouses and dozens of companies.

Justice Department indicts 7 accused in 14-year hack campaign by Chinese gov

peterschreiber.media | Getty Images

The US Justice Department on Monday unsealed an indictment charging seven men with hacking or attempting to hack dozens of US companies in a 14-year campaign furthering an economic espionage and foreign intelligence gathering by the Chinese government.

All seven defendants, federal prosecutors alleged, were associated with Wuhan Xiaoruizhi Science & Technology Co., Ltd. a front company created by the Hubei State Security Department, an outpost of the Ministry of State Security located in Wuhan province. The MSS, in turn, has funded an advanced persistent threat group tracked under names including APT31, Zirconium Violet Typhoon, Judgment Panda, and Altaire.

Relentless 14-year campaign

“Since at least 2010, the defendants … engaged in computer network intrusion activity on behalf of the HSSD targeting numerous US government officials, various US economic and defense industries and a variety of private industry officials, foreign democracy activists, academics and parliamentarians in response to geopolitical events affecting the PRC,” federal prosecutors alleged. “These computer network intrusion activities resulted in the confirmed and potential compromise of work and personal email accounts, cloud storage accounts and telephone call records belonging to millions of Americans, including at least some information that could be released in support of malign influence targeting democratic processes and institutions, and economic plans, intellectual property, and trade secrets belonging to American businesses, and contributed to the estimated billions of dollars lost every year as a result of the PRC’s state-sponsored apparatus to transfer US technology to the PRC.”

The relentless, 14-year campaign targeted thousands of individuals and dozens of companies through the use of zero-day attacks, website vulnerability exploitation, and the targeting of home routers and personal devices of high-ranking US government officials and politicians and election campaign staff from both major US political parties.

“The targeted US government officials included individuals working in the White House, at the Departments of Justice, Commerce, Treasury and State, and US Senators and Representatives of both political parties,” Justice Department officials said. “The defendants and others in the APT31 Group targeted these individuals at both professional and personal email addresses. Additionally in some cases, the defendants also targeted victims’ spouses, including the spouses of a high-ranking Department of Justice official, high-ranking White House officials and multiple United States Senators. Targets also included election campaign staff from both major US political parties in advance of the 2020 election.”

One technique the defendants allegedly used was the sending of emails to journalists, political officials, and companies. The messages, which were made to appear as originating from news outlets or journalists, contained hidden tracking links, which, when activated, gave APT31 members information about the locations, IP addresses, network schematics, and specific devices of the targets for use in follow-on attacks. Some of the targets of these emails included foreign government officials who were part of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a group formed after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre that’s critical of the Chinese government; every European Union member of that’s a member of that group; and 43 UK parliamentary accounts part of the group or critical of the People’s Republic of China.

APT31 used a variety of methods to infect networks of interest with custom malware such as RAWDOOR, Trochilus, EvilOSX, DropDoor/DropCa, and later the widely available Cobalt Strike Beacon security testing tool. In late 2016, the hacking group exploited what was then a zero-day vulnerability in unnamed software to gain access to an unidentified defense contractor. In their indictment, prosecutors wrote:

Using the zero-day privilege escalation exploit, the Conspirators first obtained administrator access to a subsidiary’s network before ultimately pivoting into the Defense Contractor’s core corporate network,” prosecutors wrote in the indictment. “The Conspirators used a SQL injection, in which they entered malicious code into a web form input box to gain access to information that was not intended to be displayed, to create an account on the subsidiary’s network with the username “testdew23.” The Conspirators used malicious software to grant administrator privileges to the “testdew23” user account. Next, the Conspirators uploaded a web shell, or a script that enables remote administration of the computer, named “Welcome to Chrome,” onto the subsidiary’s web server. Thereafter, the Conspirators used the web shell to upload and execute at least two malicious files on the web server, which were configured to open a connection between the victim’s network and computers outside that network that were controlled by the Conspirators. Through this method, the Conspirators successfully gained unauthorized access to the Defense Contractor’s network.

Other APT31 targets include military contractors and companies in the aerospace, IT services, software, telecommunications, manufacturing, and financial services industries. APT31 has long been known to target not only individuals and entities with information of primary interest but also companies or services that the primary targets rely on. Primary targets were dissidents and critics of the PRC and Western companies in possession of technical information of value to the PRC.

Prosecutors said targets successfully hacked by APT31 include:

  • a cleared defense contractor based in Oklahoma that designed and manufactured military flight simulators for the US military
  • a cleared aerospace and defense contractor based in Tennessee
  • an Alabama-based research corporation in the aerospace and defense industries
  • a Maryland-based professional support services company that serviced the Department of Defense and other government agencies
  • a leading American manufacturer of software and computer services based in California
  • a leading global provider of wireless technology based in Illinois; a technology company based in New York
  • a software company servicing the industrial controls industry based in California
  • an IT consulting company based in California; an IT services and spatial processing company based in Colorado
  • a multifactor authentication company; an American trade association
  • multiple information technology training and support companies
  • a leading provider of 5G network equipment in the United States
  • an IT solutions and 5G integration service company based in Idaho
  • a telecommunications company based in Illinois
  • a voice technology company headquartered in California;
  • a prominent trade organization with offices in New York and elsewhere
  • a manufacturing association based in Washington, DC
  • a steel company
  • an apparel company based in New York
  • an engineering company based in California
  • an energy company based in Texas
  • a finance company headquartered in New York
  • A US multi-national management consulting company with offices in Washington, DC, and elsewhere
  • a financial ratings company based in New York
  • an advertising agency based in New York
  • a consulting company based in Virginia;
  • multiple global law firms based in New York and throughout the United States
  • a law firm software provider
  • a machine learning laboratory based in Virginia
  • a university based in California
  • multiple research hospitals and institutes located in New York and Massachusetts
  • an international non-profit organization headquartered in Washington, DC.

The defendants are:

  • Ni Gaobin (倪高彬), age 38
  • Weng Ming (翁明), 37
  • Cheng Feng (程锋), 34
  • Peng Yaowen (彭耀文), 38
  • Sun Xiaohui (孙小辉), 38
  • Xiong Wang (熊旺), 35
  • Zhao Guangzong (赵光宗), 38

The men were charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. While none of the men are in US custody or likely to face prosecution, the US Department of Treasury on Monday sanctioned Wuhan Xiaoruizhi Science and Technology Company, Limited. The department also designated Zhao Guangzong and Ni Gaobin for their roles in hacks targeting US critical infrastructure.

“As a result of today’s action, all property and interests in property of the designated persons and entity described above that are in the United States or in the possession or control of US persons are blocked and must be reported to OFAC,” Treasury officials wrote. “In addition, any entities that are owned, directly or indirectly, individually or in the aggregate, 50 percent or more by one or more blocked persons are also blocked. Unless authorized by a general or specific license issued by OFAC, or exempt, OFAC’s regulations generally prohibit all transactions by US persons or within (or transiting) the United States that involve any property or interests in property of designated or otherwise blocked persons.”

The US State Department is offering $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of any of the defendants or others associated with the campaign.

Justice Department indicts 7 accused in 14-year hack campaign by Chinese gov Read More »

mozilla’s-privacy-service-drops-a-provider-with-ties-to-people-search-sites

Mozilla’s privacy service drops a provider with ties to people-search sites

People search —

Owner of Onerep removal service launched “dozens of people-search services.”

Mozilla Monitor Plus dashboard

Mozilla

Mozilla’s Monitor Plus, a service launched by the privacy-minded tech firm in February, notes on its pitch page that there is “a $240 billion industry of data brokers selling your private information for profit” and that its offering can “take back your privacy.”

Mozilla’s most recent move to protect privacy has been to cut out one of the key providers of Monitor Plus’ people-search protections, Onerep. That comes after reporting from security reporter Brian Krebs, who uncovered Onerep CEO and founder Dimitri Shelest as the founder of “dozens of people-search services since 2010,” including one, Nuwber, that still sells the very kind of “background reports” that Monitor Plus seeks to curb.

Shelest told Krebs in a statement (PDF) that he did have an ownership stake in Nuwber, but that Nuwber has “zero cross-over or information-sharing with Onerep” and that he no longer operates any other people-search sites. Shelest admitted the bad look but said that his experience with people search gave Onerep “the best tech and team in the space.”

Brandon Borrman, vice president of communications at Mozilla, said in a statement that while “customer data was never at risk, the outside financial interests and activities of Onerep’s CEO do not align with our values.” Mozilla is “working now to solidify a transition plan,” Borrman said. A Mozilla spokesperson confirmed to Ars today that Mozilla is continuing to offer Monitor Plus, suggesting no pause in subscriptions, at least for the moment.

Monitor Plus also kept track of a user’s potential data breach exposures in partnership with HaveIBeenPwned. Troy Hunt, founder of HaveIBeenPwned, told Krebs that aside from Onerep’s potential conflict of interest, broker removal services tend to be inherently fraught. “[R]emoving your data from legally operating services has minimal impact, and you can’t remove it from the outright illegal ones who are doing the genuine damage.”

Still, every bit—including removing yourself from the first page of search results—likely counts. Beyond sites that scrape public records and court documents for your information, there are the other data brokers selling barely anonymized data from web browsing, app sign-ups, and other activity. A recent FTC settlement with antivirus and security firm Avast highlighted the depth of identifying information that often is available for sale to both commercial and government entities.

Mozilla’s privacy service drops a provider with ties to people-search sites Read More »

macos-sonoma-1441-released-to-fix-the-stuff-that-the-14.4-update-broke

macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 released to fix the stuff that the 14.4 update broke

doing better, thanks —

The 14.4 release introduced a number of problems the new update claims to fix.

An M3 MacBook Air running macOS Sonoma.

Enlarge / An M3 MacBook Air running macOS Sonoma.

Andrew Cunningham

Apple has just released version 14.4.1 for macOS Sonoma, a small-but-significant patch that claims to fix several issues with third-party software and accessories that cropped up in the 14.4 update. The 14.4.1 release also includes a pair of security fixes.

Apple’s release notes highlight fixes for three major problems:

  • USB hubs connected to external displays may not be recognized
  • Copy protected Audio Unit plug-ins designed for professional music apps may not open or pass validation
  • Apps that include Java may quit unexpectedly

Users and companies began noticing problems shortly after the macOS 14.4 update was released earlier this month. Reports of broken USB hubs cropped up on Reddit, the Apple Support Communities forums, and elsewhere within the first couple of days, and issues with Java and iLok audio software DRM devices were reported later on. Some users also reported broken printer drivers and deleted file revisions in iCloud Drive, though Apple’s release notes don’t mention those problems.

At least some of these bugs reportedly weren’t present in preview builds of the 14.4 update, which could explain why they weren’t discovered during the public beta period.

Both of the security patches are for so-called “clickless” exploits that can allow remote code execution after a system displays a compromised image. Apple has also released macOS Ventura 13.6.6 to patch the security vulnerabilities for Macs that haven’t upgraded to Sonoma (or can’t upgrade to Sonoma).

Apple released other minor updates to iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS last week to patch the same security vulnerabilities. None of those updates listed any specific non-security bug fixes in their release notes beyond the broad “important bug fixes and security updates” boilerplate that accompanies most minor OS updates from Apple.

macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 released to fix the stuff that the 14.4 update broke Read More »

where’d-my-results-go?-google-search’s-chatbot-is-no-longer-opt-in

Where’d my results go? Google Search’s chatbot is no longer opt-in

Google's generative search results turn the normally stark-white results page into a range of pastels.

Enlarge / Google’s generative search results turn the normally stark-white results page into a range of pastels.

Google

Last year Google brought its new obsession with AI-powered chatbots to Google Search with the launch of the “Search Generative Experience,” or “SGE.” If you opted in, SGE intercepted your Google search queries and put a giant, screen-filling generative AI chatbot response at the top of your search results. The usual 10 blue links were still there, but you had to scroll past Google’s ChatGPT clone to see them. That design choice makes outgoing web links seem like a legacy escape hatch for when the chatbot doesn’t work, and Google wants to know why more people haven’t opted in to this.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land reports that Google is going to start pushing SGE out to some users, even if they haven’t opted in to the “Labs experiment.” A Google spokesperson told the site SGE will be turned on for a “subset of queries, on a small percentage of search traffic in the US.” The report says “Google told us they want to get feedback from searchers who have not opted into SGE specifically. This way they can get feedback and learn how a more general population will find this technology helpful.”

Citing his conversation with Google, Schwartz says some users automatically see Chatbot results for queries where Google thinks a chatbot “can be especially helpful.” Google will turn on the feature for “queries that are often more complex or involve questions where it may be helpful to get information from a range of web pages—like ‘how do I get marks off painted walls.'”

I don’t think anyone has spotted one of these non-opt-in SGE pages in the wild yet, so it’s unclear what the presentation will be. As an opt-in, SGE has a huge explanation page of how your search results will change. The chatbot is easily Google Search’s biggest format change ever, and having that happen automatically would be awfully confusing!

It’s also unclear if you can opt out of this. Today SGE is not compatible with Firefox, so that might be one way to skip Google’s AI obsession for now. Google Search has recently undergone a big leadership shuffle, with Liz Reid taking over as the new head of Search. Reid previously led—wait for it—the SGE team, so the prevailing theory is that we’re going to get way more AI stuff in search going forward.

Where’d my results go? Google Search’s chatbot is no longer opt-in Read More »

lawsuit-from-elon-musk’s-x-against-anti-hate-speech-group-dismissed-by-us-judge

Lawsuit from Elon Musk’s X against anti-hate speech group dismissed by US judge

free speech —

Ruling says case appeared to be directed at “punishing” speech from nonprofit.

A smartphone displays Elon Musk's profile on X, the app formerly known as Twitter.

Getty Images | Dan Kitwood

A US judge has struck down a lawsuit brought by X against a nonprofit group that researched toxic content on the social media platform, finding the Elon Musk-owned company’s case appeared to be an attempt at “punishing” the group for exercising free speech.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate had sought to dismiss the case from X, which alleged the nonprofit unlawfully accessed and scraped X data for its studies. The CCDH found a rise in hate speech and misinformation on the platform. X had also alleged the group “cherry-picked” from posts on the platform to conduct a “scare campaign” to drive away advertisers, costing it tens of millions of dollars.

In a stinging ruling, US judge Charles Breyer in California granted the motion. “Sometimes it is unclear what is driving a litigation, and only by reading between the lines of a complaint can one attempt to surmise a plaintiff’s true purpose. Other times, a complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose. This case represents the latter circumstance. This case is about punishing the defendants for their speech,” he wrote in the decision.

The judge found that on top of punishing the CCDH for a report criticizing the company, X appeared to have filed the suit “perhaps in order to dissuade others who might wish to engage in such criticism.”

The lawsuit is just one of several bitter disputes between Musk, a self-declared “free speech absolutist,” and civil rights groups and academics whose research argues the platform has not been adequately policed following the billionaire’s takeover in late 2022.

It comes as X’s revenue has fallen after brands pulled away over Musk’s decision to relax moderation on the platform. He, in turn, has lashed out at advertisers, saying last year that those who have left should “go fuck themselves” despite the company struggling financially.

CCDH chief executive Imran Ahmed said following the ruling: “The courts today have affirmed our fundamental right to research, to speak, to advocate, and to hold accountable social media companies for decisions they make behind closed doors that affect our kids, our democracy, and our fundamental human rights and civil liberties.”

He described the suit as “Elon Musk’s loud, hypocritical campaign of harassment, abuse, and lawfare designed to avoid taking responsibility for his own decisions.”

In a statement on X, the company said it disagreed with the court’s decisions and “plans to appeal.” Musk did not immediately comment on the case but last week wrote on the platform that the CCDH was a “truly evil organization that just wants to destroy the first amendment under the guise of doing good!”

© 2024 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Please do not copy and paste FT articles and redistribute by email or post to the web.

Lawsuit from Elon Musk’s X against anti-hate speech group dismissed by US judge Read More »

“temporary”-disk-formatting-ui-from-1994-still-lives-on-in-windows-11

“Temporary” disk formatting UI from 1994 still lives on in Windows 11

some things never change —

“It wasn’t elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived.” It never did.

If you've formatted a disk in Windows in the last 30 years, you may have come across this dialog box.

Enlarge / If you’ve formatted a disk in Windows in the last 30 years, you may have come across this dialog box.

Andrew Cunningham

Windows 11 has done a lot to update and modernize long-neglected parts of Windows’ user interface, including many Settings menus and venerable apps like Notepad and Paint. But if you dig deep enough, you’ll still find parts of the user interface that look and work like they did in the mid-’90s, either for compatibility reasons or because no one ever thought to go back and update them.

Former Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer shared some history about one of those finely aged bits: the Format dialogue box, which is still used in fully updated Windows 11 installs to this day when you format a disk using Windows Explorer.

Plummer says he wrote the Format dialog in late 1994, when the team was busy porting the user interface from the consumer-focused Windows 95 (released in mid-1995) to the more-stable but more resource-intensive Windows NT (NT 4.0, released in mid-1996, was the first to use the 95-style UI).

Formatting disks “was just one of those areas where Windows NT was different enough from Windows 95 that we had to come up with some custom UI,” wrote Plummer on X, formerly Twitter. Plummer didn’t specify what those differences were, but even the early versions of Windows NT could already handle multiple filesystems like FAT and NTFS, whereas Windows 95 mostly used FAT16 for everything.

“I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on,” Plummer continued. “Then I busted out [Visual] C++ 2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn’t elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived. That was some 30 years ago, and the dialog is still my temporary one from that Thursday morning, so be careful about checking in ‘temporary’ solutions!”

The Windows NT version of the Format dialog is the one that survives today because the consumer and professional versions of Windows began using the NT codebase in the late ’90s and early 2000s with the Windows 2000 and Windows XP releases. Plenty has changed since then, but system files like the kernel still have “Windows NT” labels in Windows 11.

Plummer also said the Format tool’s 32GB limit for FAT volumes was an arbitrary decision he made that we’re still living with among modern Windows versions—FAT32 drives formatted at the command line or using other tools max out between 2TB and 16TB, depending on sector size. It seems quaint, but PC ads from late 1994 advertise hard drives that are, at most, a few hundred megabytes in size, and 3.5-inch 1.44MB floppies and CD-ROM drives were about the best you could do for removable storage. From that vantage point, it would be hard to conceive of fingernail-sized disks that could give you 256GB of storage for $20.

Plummer was involved with many bits and pieces of ’90s- and early 2000s-era MS-DOS and Windows apps, including the Task Manager, the Space Cadet Pinball game, and the first version of the product activation system that shipped with Windows XP. Plummer left Microsoft in 2003.

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