It’s not tech­ni­cally a tax. Taxes pro­duce valu­able pub­lic ben­e­fits, like med­ical re­search and parks. This is sim­ply le­gal theft.

Amazon makes nearly a bil­lion dol­lars in profit from search ads. Every week. Each week, they sell mer­chants and pub­lish­ers enough search-dis­tort­ing ads to cap­ture a bil­lion dol­lars in rev­enue. Amazon makes enough in search ad rev­enue to give every sin­gle one of their em­ploy­ees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over.

My pub­lisher is ter­rific, and they’re work­ing hard to in­tro­duce peo­ple to my new book. Last week, they be­gan buy­ing search ads on Amazon.

At first glance, this is com­pelling. Someone who is­n’t sure what they’re look­ing for, who is look­ing for a book or a kitchen ap­pli­ance, might find one if the right ad showed up at the right time.

But of course, that’s not what yields, or what most of the ads you see on Amazon do.

If you’re search­ing for an air fryer, Amazon al­ready knows quite a bit. They know the best-re­viewed, least-re­turned, best-priced model. The only pur­pose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that is­n’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse. [Cory wrote about this three years ago, and the scale has al­ready dou­bled.]

When there are plenty of ads, the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to pro­tect the sales they were en­ti­tled to in the first place. Businesses con­tinue to buy the ads—not be­cause they’re dumb, but be­cause the sys­tem has cre­ated a sit­u­a­tion with few op­tions. Folklore im­plies that buy­ing the ads some­how shifts how search re­sponds in the long run, even af­ter the ads stop run­ning, but there’s lit­tle data to con­firm this.

Traditional ads in­crease de­mand. We see some­thing that’s clearly an ad, it might spark de­sire, and sales go up. But zero-sum search ads aren’t like that–the to­tal sales in the cat­e­gory stay the same, and mer­chants are merely com­pet­ing for a share of a sta­tic pie. This study ar­gues that an ecom­merce site with search ads ac­tu­ally sells fewer items than the same site with­out ads.

The high­est-yield­ing ad my pub­lisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“. It costs about a dol­lar per click. My pub­lisher is pay­ing Amazon a dol­lar to show you an ad for the book you went to buy in the first place.

Who ends up pay­ing the more than $50 bil­lion a year spent on these ads? It’s not the sell­ers. Sellers can’t make heart­felt do­na­tions for long. It’s you. By mak­ing the mar­ket­ing of prod­ucts sig­nif­i­cantly less ef­fi­cient, Amazon’s theft makes prod­ucts more ex­pen­sive or sucks the en­ergy out of the de­vel­op­ment of new prod­ucts.

It leads to two per­verse side ef­fects. First, pro­duc­ers re­al­ize that if brand rep­u­ta­tion mat­ters less than a bud­get for clicks, they will shift to shoddy and cheap ver­sions of their prod­ucts so they have a big­ger bud­get for clicks. And sec­ond, Amazon (and Google be­fore it) have an in­cen­tive to make their or­ganic search re­sults worse–giv­ing pro­duc­ers more in­cen­tive to buy more ads.

For decades, Amazon cre­ated value for con­sumers by low­er­ing the price of just about every­thing. And they opened the doors to mer­chants who did­n’t have suf­fi­cient dis­tri­b­u­tion. They claimed to be cus­tomer-cen­tric, and they were.

I don’t think they can claim this any longer. The ad sys­tem they built is­n’t il­le­gal, but it’s pretty clear who it’s for.

Amazon is steal­ing from the cus­tomers they said they were here to serve.

HID++BoltUnifyingBluetoothUSB

Your Logitech mouse,fi­nally lo­cal.

A lo­cal-first al­ter­na­tive to Logitech Options+, writ­ten in Rust.Remap but­tons, drive DPI and SmartShift over HID++.No ac­count, no teleme­try.

$brew in­stall –cask open­logi

.dmg.deb / .rpm / .pkg.tar.zst.msiMIT / Apache-2.0Not af­fil­i­ated with Logitech

Click a but­ton, bind an ac­tion.

The cen­ter of the app, work­ing right here: a mouse di­a­gram with click­able hotspots and a per-but­ton ac­tion picker. Choose a hotspot, then bind any of the built-in ac­tions.

con­fig.toml · schema_ver­sion = 2

schema_ver­sion = 2selected_device = “2b042”[devices.2b042.bindings]MiddleClick = “MissionControl”DpiToggle = “CycleDpiPresets”Thumbwheel = “VolumeUp”Forward = “BrowserForward”Back = “BrowserBack”GestureButton = “AppExpose”

schema_ver­sion = 2

se­lect­ed_de­vice = “2b042”

[devices.2b042.bindings]

MiddleClick = “MissionControl”

DpiToggle = “CycleDpiPresets”

Thumbwheel = “VolumeUp”

Forward = “BrowserForward”

Back = “BrowserBack”

GestureButton = “AppExpose”

MX Master 4Writes straight to con­fig.toml, the file you own.

Everything Options+ does, with­out the ac­count.

OpenLogi dri­ves your mouse over HID++ di­rectly: but­tons, DPI and SmartShift, from a na­tive app that never phones home.

HID++ 2.0 · 44 ac­tions

Remap any but­ton

Bind any of 44 built-in ac­tions to each phys­i­cal but­ton, per de­vice. Custom short­cuts, app launch­ers and scripted ac­tions too.

DPI con­trol & pre­sets

Set pointer res­o­lu­tion and cy­cle your own pre­sets, writ­ten straight to the sen­sor over HID++.

HID++ 0x2201

SmartShift

Flip the wheel be­tween ratchet and free-spin, or let it switch au­to­mat­i­cally by scroll speed.

HID++ 0x2111

Per-app pro­file­sCom­ing soon

Per-application over­lays that switch the mo­ment your fo­cused app does. Ships in a later re­lease.

Bolt, Unifying, Lightspeed, Bluetooth or wired

Reach de­vices over a Logi Bolt, Unifying or Lightspeed re­ceiver, a di­rect Bluetooth pair­ing, or a USB ca­ble. No re­ceiver re­quired.

Live de­vice view

A carousel of paired de­vices with bat­tery per­cent­age and charge state for every­thing on­line.

HID++ 0x1004

Nothing be­tween your mouse and your ma­chine.

No ac­count, no teleme­try, no cloud. Bindings live in a plain TOML file you own, and every change goes straight to the de­vice over HID++.

Network · Device ren­ders only

Up and run­ning in a minute.

Signed builds for ma­cOS, Linux and Windows. Pick your plat­form be­low. Step-by-step setup lives in the docs.

.dmg · .deb · .rpm · .msi

ma­cOS

$brew in­stall –cask open­logi

Homebrew is rec­om­mended, or grab the signed .dmg for Apple sil­i­con or Intel.

Linux

Packages for amd64 and ar­m64, with .rpm and Arch .pkg.tar.zst builds also avail­able.

Windows

New

The newest port: signed x86_64 and ar­m64 in­stallers, val­i­dated on Windows 11.

Quit Logi Options+ be­fore launch­ing: the two fight over HID++ ac­cess, and only one app can own a re­ceiver at a time. On Linux, the same ap­plies to Solaar.

It’s on the roadmap, at the far end: a cross-com­puter pointer and clip­board bridge is a very large fea­ture. The half that lives in the pro­to­col al­ready ships. OpenLogi dri­ves Easy-Switch host switch­ing over HID++ (0x1814/0x1815), and paired mice fol­low the key­board when it switches hosts. If the rest lands, it will be opt-in and lo­cal-net­work only.

Bolt pair­ing ships in the GUI, and Unifying and Lightspeed pair­ing is in progress. Until it lands, pair once with Logitech’s tool or Solaar; OpenLogi dri­ves the de­vice from then on.

Not yet, though an im­porter is in progress. In the mean­time, bind­ings are a short TOML file you can re­build in min­utes, and un­like Options+ they stay in one portable, hand-ed­itable file.

OpenLogi remaps the side but­tons (Back, Forward, mid­dle click) through a CGEventTap, and ma­cOS puts event taps be­hind the Accessibility per­mis­sion. The HID++ paths (gesture but­ton, thumb wheel, DPI, SmartShift) don’t need it.

Only when you ask. The in-app up­date check is opt-in and off by de­fault; new builds come from Homebrew (brew up­grade –cask open­logi) or the signed in­stallers on the re­leases page.

Copy the TOML file. Devices are keyed by phys­i­cal iden­tity (receiver se­r­ial and slot, or the de­vice’s own se­r­ial), so the same mouse keeps its bind­ings wher­ever the file goes. Built-in sync may come one day, but it’s hard to square with the no-ac­count prin­ci­ple.

Being am­bi­tious and be­ing a dad

When I was go­ing through YC, I did­n’t men­tion my seven month old daugh­ter to any­one. Now a few years later I have two kids, a dog and a very packed sched­ule. My kids are the best thing in my life. For years, my work was my life. Now my life com­petes with my work.

I don’t think I’m alone. Here’s Paul Graham in Having Kids:

Some of my wor­ries about hav­ing kids were right, though. They def­i­nitely make you less pro­duc­tive. I know hav­ing kids makes some peo­ple get their act to­gether, but if your act was al­ready to­gether, you’re go­ing to have less time to do it in.

Some of my wor­ries about hav­ing kids were right, though. They def­i­nitely make you less pro­duc­tive. I know hav­ing kids makes some peo­ple get their act to­gether, but if your act was al­ready to­gether, you’re go­ing to have less time to do it in.

I love build­ing, learn­ing, and com­pet­ing. Life be­fore kids was straight­for­ward: I worked hard and cen­tered my life around things I love: com­put­ers, tech­nol­ogy, friends. I moved to SF, worked at some awe­some com­pa­nies, met a won­der­ful girl and built a strong re­la­tion­ship. A huge amount of my time was spent on work, and yet there was still some left for that and more. Turns out, you have a lot of time when you don’t have de­pen­dents.

All the peo­ple I ad­mire most are builders. I have de­voured bi­ogra­phies and stud­ied many great founders. Unfortunately this led me to an un­com­fort­able con­clu­sion: most of them are hor­ri­ble par­ents.

Steve Jobs lit­er­ally aban­doned his daugh­ter Lisa be­cause “the time was­n’t right” (he was fo­cused on Apple). Einstein aban­doned one kid1 and was con­stantly ab­sent, day­dream­ing about work around his other two, to the point where his wife di­vorced him and took them. Elon Musk has so many chil­dren and com­pa­nies that he me­chan­i­cally can­not spend any sig­nif­i­cant amount of time with any of them. Edison, Ford, Ferrari,… the list goes on and on. Most bi­ogra­phies of great founders I’ve read have had an­other story etched in be­tween the lines: a pretty bleak one of a bad par­ent.

I know many am­bi­tious par­ents; it’s not an un­com­mon com­bi­na­tion. Most of them are will­ing to make a choice that I will not: del­e­gate the par­ent­ing away. I do not be­lieve the qual­ity time the­ory. I firmly be­lieve in max­i­miz­ing the quan­tity of time spent with them; there are no di­min­ish­ing re­turns for them on that front. This is some­what prob­lem­atic, and un­for­tu­nately it gets worse. The time spent is even more im­por­tant when they’re young, which of course hap­pens to co­in­cide with the prime of my ca­reer.

I’ll find my­self plan­ning my work or re­flect­ing on how much I ac­com­plished to­day or in the last week and the re­sult is clear. I’m a pro­duc­tive and well or­ga­nized per­son, but com­par­ing the out­put of par­ent-me to the kid­less-me in a given week re­veals a vis­i­ble gap. Everyone knows life is short. Now that I have kids, it feels 10x shorter.

This sucks. I am am­bi­tious: I wake up every morn­ing with a burn­ing fire in my stom­ach to build awe­some things. In this, I dif­fer from Paul Graham:

I hate to say this, be­cause be­ing am­bi­tious has al­ways been a part of my iden­tity, but hav­ing kids may make one less am­bi­tious.

I hate to say this, be­cause be­ing am­bi­tious has al­ways been a part of my iden­tity, but hav­ing kids may make one less am­bi­tious.

I am not less am­bi­tious. But I am also am­bi­tious about be­ing a great dad.

My anec­do­tal ob­ser­va­tions show a pretty strict di­chotomy: great fa­thers and great achiev­ers rarely over­lap. Rarely is not never though. Some fig­ures in tech­nol­ogy (Paul Graham, DHH, Jeff Dean, even Mark Zuckerberg) seem to be push­ing on both fronts with rare suc­cess. Often the pat­tern is early suc­cess, but not al­ways. Frankly even if I could­n’t find the pat­tern, I would still not ac­cept de­feat.

I don’t have a per­fect mag­i­cal so­lu­tion. I’m voic­ing a frus­tra­tion, but I am also re­ject­ing the choice. I’ve come to re­de­fine am­bi­tion for my­self: am­bi­tion is be­ing a great dad as well as build­ing great things. I ac­knowl­edge and ac­cept that it is much more dif­fi­cult than just aim­ing for one or the other, and both are hard enough in their own right. But hard is the point of am­bi­tion, right?

My strat­egy is pretty sim­ple: stay fo­cused, don’t waste time on bull­shit, keep im­prov­ing ex­e­cu­tion. I do this by care­fully clar­i­fy­ing what I want my work to be, fo­cus­ing on health to max­i­mize en­ergy, set­ting clear rules on time with kids (weekday din­ners, week­ends pri­or­i­tize fam­ily) and com­pletely re­mov­ing time-wast­ing ac­tiv­i­ties. With clear goals and dis­ci­pline, my plan is to achieve com­pound­ing gains.

I am writ­ing this be­cause I never hear any­one say it.

Be am­bi­tious enough to be an am­bi­tious dad.

Footnotes

It’s ac­tu­ally not clear whether it was aban­don­ment or early death — see the Einstein fam­ily. ↩

It’s ac­tu­ally not clear whether it was aban­don­ment or early death — see the Einstein fam­ily. ↩

Discuss on Hacker News

Both teams worked re­ally hard to get in the best shape. On the day of the first race, both teams were ready to win.

The green team won by one mile!

The Red team was crushed in their de­feat, but they were de­ter­mined to win the race next year. So they es­tab­lished a panel of au­di­tors to ob­serve the sit­u­a­tion and as­cer­tain if there were any dif­fer­ences be­tween the teams.

After sev­eral weeks of de­tailed in­tel­li­gence gath­er­ing, the au­di­tors could find only one dif­fer­ence; the Green team had 7 row­ers and 1 cap­tain…

… and the Red team had 7 cap­tains and 1 rower!

Un-perplexed by the raw data, up­per man­age­ment showed un­ex­pected wis­dom: they hired a con­sult­ing com­pany to an­a­lyze the data and sug­gest a so­lu­tion that would en­able the Red team to win next year.

After sev­eral months the con­sul­tants came to the con­clu­sion that the ra­tio of cap­tains to row­ers was the prob­lem in the Red team. Based on this analy­sis a so­lu­tion was pro­posed: the struc­ture of the Red team has to be changed!

Like sharks get­ting the scent of re­or­ga­ni­za­tion blood, up­per man­age­ment wasted no time in re­struc­tur­ing the Red team into 4 Captains, led by 2 Managers, re­port­ing to 1 Senior Director with a dot­ted line to the rower. Besides that, in a blaze of un­re­stricted in­spi­ra­tion, they sug­gested they might be in­clined to im­prove the row­er’s work­ing en­vi­ron­ment by a non-mon­e­tary re­ward and recog­ni­tion scheme if there was im­proved per­for­mance by the rower.

The next year, the Green team won by 2 miles…

The Red team up­per man­age­ment im­me­di­ately fired the rower based on his un­sat­is­fac­tory per­for­mance.

A bonus was paid to the Captains, Directors, and Managers for the strong lead­er­ship and mo­ti­va­tion they showed dur­ing the prepa­ra­tion phase and as an in­cen­tive for them to find a bet­ter rower for the next race.

The con­sult­ing com­pany pre­pared a new analy­sis of the re­struc­tur­ing ac­tiv­ity, which showed that the strat­egy was good, the mo­ti­va­tion was great, the re­struc­tur­ing was ex­e­cuted cor­rectly, but the tool used (which was not in­cluded in the orig­i­nal data) was sub-stan­dard and had to be im­proved.

Currently the Red team man­age­ment is hav­ing a new boat de­signed; and to demostrate fis­cal and HR dex­ter­ity for stock­hold­ers they also out­sourced the row­ing to India.

Why have I been blocked?

This web­site is us­ing a se­cu­rity ser­vice to pro­tect it­self from on­line at­tacks. The ac­tion you just per­formed trig­gered the se­cu­rity so­lu­tion. There are sev­eral ac­tions that could trig­ger this block in­clud­ing sub­mit­ting a cer­tain word or phrase, a SQL com­mand or mal­formed data.

What can I do to re­solve this?

You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Please in­clude what you were do­ing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bot­tom of this page.

In early February 2011 Egypt was in the mid­dle of a po­lit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion. One morn­ing, every­one’s phones sud­denly pinged with an alert.

The Armed Forces asks Egypt’s hon­est and loyal men to con­front the trai­tors and crim­i­nals and pro­tect our peo­ple and ho­n­our and our pre­cious Egypt.

The Armed Forces asks Egypt’s hon­est and loyal men to con­front the trai­tors and crim­i­nals and pro­tect our peo­ple and ho­n­our and our pre­cious Egypt.

A se­ries of mes­sages ar­rived all os­ten­si­bly from the net­work provider Vodafone. All pro-regime and all with the un­der­cur­rent of vi­o­lence.

Why did Vodafone send these mes­sages? Earlier in the week, all Internet ac­cess was cut off now phones were blast­ing pro­pa­ganda to the masses.

After the net­work went down, Vodafone is­sued a state­ment say­ing:

It has been clear to us that there were no le­gal or prac­ti­cal op­tions open to Vodafone, or any of the mo­bile op­er­a­tors in Egypt, but to com­ply with the de­mands of the au­thor­i­ties.

It has been clear to us that there were no le­gal or prac­ti­cal op­tions open to Vodafone, or any of the mo­bile op­er­a­tors in Egypt, but to com­ply with the de­mands of the au­thor­i­ties.

Do you have to fol­low or­ders? Do you have to obey the law even when it is un­just? Should multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions in­struct lo­cal ex­ec­u­tives to be loyal to their par­ent com­pany or the rulers of the coun­try they live in?

After the mes­sages came in - in­clud­ing promises that “The Armed Forces cares for your safety and well be­ing and will not re­sort to us­ing force against this great na­tion” - Vodafone Global, safely en­sconced in the UK, put out an­other state­ment:

Under the emer­gency pow­ers pro­vi­sions of the Telecoms Act, the Egyptian au­thor­i­ties can in­struct the mo­bile net­works of Mobinil, Etisalat and Vodafone to send mes­sages to the peo­ple of Egypt. They have used this since the start of the protests. These mes­sages are not scripted by any of the mo­bile net­work op­er­a­tors and we do not have the abil­ity to re­spond to the au­thor­i­ties on their con­tent. Vodafone Group has protested to the au­thor­i­ties that the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion re­gard­ing these mes­sages is un­ac­cept­able. We have made clear that all mes­sages should be trans­par­ent and clearly at­trib­ut­able to the orig­i­na­tor. Statements - Vodafone Egypt

Under the emer­gency pow­ers pro­vi­sions of the Telecoms Act, the Egyptian au­thor­i­ties can in­struct the mo­bile net­works of Mobinil, Etisalat and Vodafone to send mes­sages to the peo­ple of Egypt. They have used this since the start of the protests. These mes­sages are not scripted by any of the mo­bile net­work op­er­a­tors and we do not have the abil­ity to re­spond to the au­thor­i­ties on their con­tent.

Vodafone Group has protested to the au­thor­i­ties that the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion re­gard­ing these mes­sages is un­ac­cept­able. We have made clear that all mes­sages should be trans­par­ent and clearly at­trib­ut­able to the orig­i­na­tor.

Statements - Vodafone Egypt

A few years later I was at a net­work­ing event chat­ting to a guy. We’d both pre­vi­ously worked for Vodafone. Me in the UK, he in Egypt. I asked him about the in­ci­dent - he talked about how they built the SMS in­fra­struc­ture, what they did to se­cure it, how they pre­vented spam, and how one day armed men ar­rived.

I sus­pect most of us have seen a movie where some flunky in an of­fice re­fuses the bad­dies de­mands to open the safe, and then gets shot in the head. Perhaps you think that’s a no­ble death? He lived with ho­n­our and re­fused to yield! But, in every movie I’ve seen, the guy’s sub­or­di­nate opens the safe any­way and gets to live.

But we’re tech­nol­o­gists, right? We can build fail safes and cryp­to­graphic proofs and sim­ply build in­fra­struc­ture that can’t be abused.

And then the men with guns come and tell you what to do.

I’ve writ­ten be­fore about Civic Hygiene - it’s the idea that we should be mind­ful of the ways that our tech­nolo­gies could be mis­used. The term was coined back in 2010 by the tech­nol­o­gist Bruice Schneier

It’s bad civic hy­giene to build tech­nolo­gies that could some­day be used to fa­cil­i­tate a po­lice state.

It’s bad civic hy­giene to build tech­nolo­gies that could some­day be used to fa­cil­i­tate a po­lice state.

But what do we mean by that?

We don’t want back­doors in se­cu­rity prod­ucts - lest hack­ers break in or evil gov­ern­ments get elected. But we want a way to ac­cess our beloved ones’ data af­ter they die. It’s im­por­tant that we know that pho­tos haven’t been ma­nip­u­lated by pro­pa­gan­dists and sabo­teurs. But we want to send funny memes about that politi­cian we don’t like. We don’t want po­lice stalk­ing ex girl­friends’ cars - but we want dan­ger­ous dri­vers pros­e­cuted.

We want to be alerted about im­mi­nent threats, but don’t want Governments to use that power for ill.

Way back in the early 2020s, I had a mi­nor role in the UK Government’s adop­tion of Common Alerting Protocol the tech­nol­ogy which pow­ers cell-broad­cast emer­gency alerts.

Even back then, one of the dis­cus­sions was around whether the util­ity of be­ing able to send an un­avoid­able push no­ti­fi­ca­tion was worth the risk that some­one would send an in­ap­pro­pri­ate mes­sage. Fresh in every­one’s minds was the false alarm say­ing mis­siles were head­ing to Hawaii.

Too many safe­guards means that a gen­uine alert does­n’t get sent in time. Too few safe­guards and you can blame “Human Error” for any mis­takes.

I don’t know which safe­guards are in place for the UK’s sys­tem - and most de­tails are ex­empt from Freedom of Information re­quests. But it is both easy and fun to spec­u­late on how such a sys­tem might be de­signed.

The Government gen­er­ates an alert. It spec­i­fies where and when the alert should be sent. It sends that mes­sage to the net­work op­er­a­tors via a se­cure and pri­vate chan­nel. Perhaps they also do some out-of-band ver­i­fi­ca­tion like hav­ing the net­work op­er­a­tor call a pre-de­ter­mined phone num­ber to check the mes­sage’s va­lid­ity.

At which point, the op­er­a­tor can choose to send the mes­sage or not.

Or can they?

In August 2026, the UK gov­ern­ment in­structed net­work op­er­a­tors to send this mes­sage:

Did the net­works have to send that mes­sage? If they thought it was­n’t se­ri­ous enough, could they have re­fused? As far as I can tell, the law only talks about the fact that op­er­a­tors can dis­re­gard “spam” laws in or­der to send a mass mes­sage:

A rel­e­vant pub­lic com­mu­ni­ca­tions provider (P) may, for the pur­pose of pro­vid­ing an emer­gency alert ser­vice, dis­re­gard the re­stric­tions on the pro­cess­ing of data re­lat­ing to users or sub­scribers set out in para­graph (2) if the con­di­tions set out in para­graph (3) are met. […] (3) The con­di­tions are— (a)P is no­ti­fied by a rel­e­vant pub­lic au­thor­ity that— (i)an emer­gency within the mean­ing of sec­tion 1(1) of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 has oc­curred, is oc­cur­ring or is about to oc­cur; Statutory Instrument 2015 No. 355

A rel­e­vant pub­lic com­mu­ni­ca­tions provider (P) may, for the pur­pose of pro­vid­ing an emer­gency alert ser­vice, dis­re­gard the re­stric­tions on the pro­cess­ing of data re­lat­ing to users or sub­scribers set out in para­graph (2) if the con­di­tions set out in para­graph (3) are met.

[…]

(3) The con­di­tions are—

(a)P is no­ti­fied by a rel­e­vant pub­lic au­thor­ity that—

(i)an emer­gency within the mean­ing of sec­tion 1(1) of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 has oc­curred, is oc­cur­ring or is about to oc­cur;

Statutory Instrument 2015 No. 355

I’m no ex­pert, but I can’t see any­thing in the spec­trum li­cence nor in the Wireless Telegraphy Act which com­pels op­er­a­tors to process these mes­sages.

The usual British way is to ask peo­ple to play nicely and threaten them with reg­u­la­tion if they don’t.

Could the net­works have re­fused to send the mes­sage about wild­fires - or in­deed any other mes­sage? If your least favourite politi­cian gets their hands on the emer­gency alert sys­tem and tries to abuse it, would you want the net­works to stand up to them?

What if the net­work re­fuses to send the mes­sage be­cause they’re wor­ried alert­ing peo­ple about a hur­ri­cane will lower the com­pa­ny’s prof­its?

What if armed thugs are sent in and the choice is send the mes­sage or die?

I don’t know what the an­swer is here. I think most peo­ple agree that it is broadly sen­si­ble to have a way to alert the pop­u­la­tion of emer­gen­cies. There’s no mass me­dia any more, we’re not all lis­ten­ing to a sin­gle ra­dio chan­nel, or read­ing news­pa­pers, or even on the same so­cial me­dia plat­forms. Sometimes there are emer­gen­cies and the Government has a duty to alert peo­ple to them.

How would you de­sign a sys­tem that si­mul­ta­ne­ously achieved all these goals:

Rapid send­ing of mes­sages

Careful check­ing of the con­tent of mes­sages

Ability to quickly tar­get a spe­cific ge­o­graphic area

Inability to mis­tak­enly send a test mes­sage

Requiring strong proof that the mes­sage is au­then­tic be­fore send­ing

Resilient enough to work af­ter sig­nif­i­cant dam­age to in­fra­struc­ture

That net­works have the abil­ity to vet and ig­nore

That net­works are com­pelled to send

Which can only be used for good

And can­not be used for evil.

In truth, hav­ing ex­pe­ri­enced fire-starters, I’m not both­ered about the con­tents of this lat­est mes­sage from the UK Government. Given the over­stretched fire ser­vice and the im­mi­nent threat across most of the coun­try, my per­sonal opin­ion is that it is pro­por­tion­ate.

But it is easy to see why some peo­ple feel this might open the gate­way to mes­sages which, at best, are ir­rel­e­vant and, at worst, are sim­i­lar to the in­sid­i­ous pro­pa­ganda which ap­peared on the phones of Egyptians:

To every mother-fa­ther-sis­ter-brother, to every hon­est cit­i­zen. Preserve this coun­try as the na­tion is for­ever.

To every mother-fa­ther-sis­ter-brother, to every hon­est cit­i­zen. Preserve this coun­try as the na­tion is for­ever.

Perhaps you can think of a way to de­sign an alert­ing sys­tem which can­not be abused - but I can’t.

The Fastest AIJust Got Faster.

Introducing the all new Cere­bras CS-4, a rev­o­lu­tion­ary rack-scale so­lu­tion that de­liv­ers up to 30x faster in­fer­ence com­pared to GPUs, en­hanced eco­nom­ics, and a sim­ple path to de­ploy hy­per­scale ca­pac­ity. It is the ar­chi­tec­ture for fron­tier AI.​

Three WSE-3 Turbo per System​

Each wafer de­liv­ers up to 2x the speed of the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion​

More Performance per Wafer​

All new power, cool­ing, and I/O un­leashes even more per­for­mance per wafer​

Nexus Rack-Scale Platform

Enables rapid de­ploy­ment in hy­per­scale dat­a­cen­ters​

Up to 30x faster than GPUs​

Powered by WSE-Turbo, CS-4 de­liv­ers up to 30x faster in­fer­ence com­pared to GPU sys­tems, set­ting a new record for the fastest in­fer­ence avail­able in pro­duc­tion.​

Higher ul­tra­fast through­put

The CS-4 so­lu­tion shifts the in­fer­ence Pareto fron­tier, de­liv­er­ing up to 10x more through­put per watt than CS-3 while gen­er­at­ing to­kens up to 30x faster than pro­duc­tion GPU sys­tems. The re­sult is a sys­tem de­signed to de­liver both through­put and in­ter­ac­tiv­ity.​

Frontier-ready ar­chi­tec­ture

By re­duc­ing wafer-to-wafer in­ter­con­nect la­tency to 2 mi­crosec­onds, CS-4 de­liv­ers more than 1,000 to­kens per sec­ond on mod­els ex­ceed­ing 10 tril­lion pa­ra­me­ters, pre­serv­ing in­ter­ac­tive de­code per­for­mance at un­prece­dented scale.​

BUILT FOR HYPERSCALE​

CS-4 is the first it­er­a­tion of the new Cerebras Nexus Platform Architecture. It is built around a mod­u­lar con­cept with three foun­da­tional el­e­ments: Compute, Power, and I/O — each with sig­nif­i­cant in­no­va­tion to sim­plify man­u­fac­tur­ing, de­ploy­ment, main­te­nance, and up­grades.​

Modular com­pute back­pack de­sign

Cerebras has fun­da­men­tally re-imag­ined the server. Each Wafer-Scale Backpack is a self-con­tained as­sem­bly that­folds the wafer, power con­ver­sion, di­rect liq­uid cool­ing, high-speed I/O, and con­trol elec­tron­ics into a com­pact 3D pack­age with 50% fewer com­po­nents. This de­sign sim­pli­fies man­u­fac­tur­ing and re­duces de­ploy­ment time from days to hours.​

High-density power de­liv­ery

With power de­liv­ery just 0.5 mil­lime­ters away from the proces­sor - roughly 100x closer than the roughly 50mm of con­ven­tional GPU boards - CS-4 nearly elim­i­nates board-level power loss. This en­ables the de­liv­ery of twice as much power to the WSE-3T, en­abling higher op­er­at­ing fre­quen­cies and faster to­ken gen­er­a­tion.​

Next-gen wafer I/O in­ter­face

CS-4 in­tro­duces a new pro­gram­ma­ble I/O subsystem that dou­bles I/O band­width and re­duces la­tency, ben­e­fit­ting both ag­gre­gated and dis­ag­gre­gated so­lu­tions. The Wafer I/O Module also en­ables wafers to be linked within and across racks with­out a switch, for wafer-to-wafer la­tency as low as two mi­crosec­onds that is key to in­ter­ac­tiv­ity for mod­els with tens of tril­lions of pa­ra­me­ters.​

Deploy in­fra­struc­ture then com­pute

CS-4 sep­a­rates the sta­ble power, cool­ing, and net­work layer from its mod­u­lar wafer-scale com­pute. The Cerebras PowerRack can be in­stalled and fa­cil­ity-qual­i­fied be­fore com­pute ar­rives. Compute back­packs then slide into place and con­nect to power, cool­ing, and data—re­duc­ing de­ploy­ment from days to hours while sim­pli­fy­ing ser­vice and fu­ture up­grades at hy­per­scale.​

CS-4 by the num­bers

First CS-4 ship­ments be­gin this quar­ter.​Bring the fastest AI to your data cen­ter.​​

FAQ

Scientists ‘stunned’ by chil­dren’s lung re­cov­ery in ul­tra low emis­sion zone

14 hours ago

Smitha MundasadHealth re­porter

BBC

Scientists say they have been “stunned” by how quickly young chil­dren’s lungs be­gan to re­cover and grow af­ter pol­lu­tion re­stric­tions were brought in where they lived.

Researchers found that chil­dren in London whose lung growth had been stunted by pol­lu­tion showed im­pres­sive im­prove­ments af­ter the in­tro­duc­tion of an Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) in 2019 re­duced emis­sions.

The study fol­lowed more than 3,400 pri­mary school chil­dren in London and Luton and pro­vides what sci­en­tists be­lieve is the strongest ev­i­dence yet that lo­cal clean air zones could help re­duce some of the harm caused by pol­lu­tion dur­ing child­hood.

But in­de­pen­dent re­searchers cau­tion that other fac­tors must also be con­sid­ered.

Air pol­lu­tion can stunt the growth of young chil­dren’s lungs leav­ing them at an in­creased risk of asthma, heart dis­ease, di­a­betes and even pre­ma­ture death.

Children are also more vul­ner­a­ble to pol­lu­tion be­cause their lungs and im­mune sys­tems are still de­vel­op­ing. And when out­side, they tend to be closer to the ground and nearer sources of ex­haust fumes, for ex­am­ple.

In the study, re­searchers re­cruited six to nine-year-olds at­tend­ing pri­mary schools in London’s ul­tra low emis­sion zone and fol­lowed the same chil­dren for five years, com­par­ing them to sim­i­lar chil­dren (in terms of so­cio-eco­nomic back­ground, phys­i­cal ac­tiv­ity and eth­nic­ity) in Luton.

Children in the study had an­nual lung func­tion and ca­pac­ity tests in the year be­fore Ulez came in and for four years af­ter.

Initial re­sults showed chil­dren’s lungs in London were smaller in ca­pac­ity than those in Luton, which is less pol­luted than London but has a sim­i­lar mix of pol­lu­tants.

At the end of the study the chil­dren’s lung ca­pac­ity reached near iden­ti­cal lev­els in both groups.

“While we would ex­pect chil­dren’s lungs to grow year on year, our re­sults in­di­cate that the London chil­dren’s lung growth had ac­cel­er­ated dur­ing the four years to ‘catch up’ with the con­trol group in Luton to reach sim­i­lar lev­els of lung ca­pac­ity,” re­searchers say.

“I was ab­solutely stunned when I first saw the re­sults,” Prof Chris Griffiths, a se­nior au­thor on the study, at Queen Mary University of London, told the BBC.

“The speed of catch up in lung ca­pac­ity in the London group was sur­pris­ing and im­pres­sive.

“This shows an am­bi­tious clean air zone can drive pol­lu­tion lev­els down, rapidly restor­ing chil­dren’s stunted lung growth.”

The main test mea­sured how much air a child could forcibly breathe out in one sec­ond af­ter a big breath in.

In prac­ti­cal terms the im­prove­ments could mean chil­dren in the London group could run as fast as the Luton group with­out get­ting out of breath or blow out the same num­ber of can­dles for ex­am­ple, Griffiths ex­plained.

Another way of test­ing for lung ca­pac­ity used in the study showed sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ments too, though not to the same ex­tent - im­ply­ing there are still gains to be made.

Overall the pro­por­tion of chil­dren in London whose lung ca­pac­ity was deemed “clinically im­paired” (suggesting lung dam­age re­sult­ing in coughs or breath­less­ness) fell from 14% to 9%.

In Luton - where some smaller scale mea­sures were put in place to tackle air pol­lu­tion - the fig­ures were 9% to 7%.

The team’s mea­sure­ments also showed the level of ni­tro­gen diox­ide chil­dren were ex­posed to fell faster in London than in Luton over this time.

Researchers say this is key as it likely demon­strates that the im­proved lung growth they saw was re­lated to air qual­ity im­prove­ments fol­low­ing the im­ple­men­ta­tion of Ulez.

London’s Ulez was first in­tro­duced in 2019 by Mayor Sadiq Khan in a bid to “clean up London’s air”. London had high lev­els of the harm­ful gas ni­tro­gen diox­ide which comes from mo­tor ve­hi­cles.

Older, more pol­lut­ing ve­hi­cles had to pay a daily charge to drive in cen­tral London. The mea­sures were later ex­panded to cover the whole cap­i­tal. While many sup­ported the pol­icy it pro­voked po­lit­i­cal op­po­si­tion and protests.

Prof Anna Hansell, at the University of Leicester, who was not in­volved in the study said the im­proved lung func­tion in chil­dren was “likely to have life­long ben­e­fits for their health.”

She added the study was “carefully con­ducted by “well-respected re­searchers” and that the ge­o­graph­i­cal com­par­isons be­tween London and Luton were im­por­tant as there had been gen­eral re­duc­tions in air pol­lu­tion over time.

“This proved par­tic­u­larly use­ful, given that the study pe­riod in­cluded the Covid-19 pan­demic — and demon­strates the find­ings in London are not due to changes re­lated to the pan­demic,” she said.

Another as­pect to con­sider was that the London group may have been more likely to walk or cy­cle to school once Ulez came in.

Meanwhile, Kevin McConway, emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor at the Open University, said it was im­por­tant to take the full im­pact of Covid into ac­count and ar­gued that study­ing other cities could help tease out whether some im­prove­ments were due to un­mea­sured dif­fer­ences be­tween London and Luton.

Lead au­thor, Dr Helen Wood, at Queen Mary University of London said while the re­sults were very promis­ing there was no room for com­pla­cency as “air pol­lu­tion in both London and Luton — as well as other cities across the UK — re­mains above WHO guide­line lev­els, so there is still work to be done”.

“We know clean air zones are a com­plex area and the im­pact on busi­nesses and in­di­vid­u­als must be con­sid­ered. What we are do­ing is adding new ev­i­dence to in­form the de­bate,” Griffiths said.

“There are more than a bil­lion kids liv­ing in cities around the world, most of them in pol­luted en­vi­ron­ments, get­ting a re­ally bad start in life.

“That’s why these are im­por­tant find­ings with global rel­e­vance.”

The work in­volved re­searchers from the Universities of Bedfordshire, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Southern California and is pub­lished in the Lancet Public Health.

DesktopFly 🪰

A 3D fruit fly that lives on your ma­cOS desk­top — dri­ven by a live spik­ing sim­u­la­tion of the real FlyWire con­nec­tome. It walks across your win­dows, grooms, sleeps, and de­cides to flee your cur­sor with the same neu­rons a real fly uses.

The fly’s brain win­dow: 23,210 real neu­ron soma po­si­tions from FlyWire v783, with live spikes flash­ing at real neu­ron lo­ca­tions. The two glow­ing yel­low mark­ers are the Giant Fibers — the es­cape com­mand neu­rons. Click any re­gion to stim­u­late it.

What’s real

23,210 neu­ron soma po­si­tions (of 139,255 in FlyWire v783) ren­der the ro­tat­ing brain win­dow, col­ored by su­per-class (FlyWire’s coarse cell-type group­ing).

A 668-neuron cir­cuit with ~19,000 real synap­tic con­nec­tions (synapse counts, signed by neu­ro­trans­mit­ter pre­dic­tion) runs as a 1 kHz leaky-in­te­grate-and-fire (LIF) sim­u­la­tion:

LC4 (104) + LPLC2 (210) loom­ing-de­tec­tor vi­sual neu­rons DNp01 / Giant Fiber (GF) (2) — the es­cape com­mand neu­ron DNa01 + DNa02 (4) steer­ing neu­rons · DNp09 (2) for­ward walk­ing DNg11 (6) groom­ing · MDN (4) back­ward walk­ing (“moonwalker”) DNp02/DNp04/DNp11 (6) es­cape-ma­neu­ver (wing) neu­rons their 330 strongest part­ners, in­clud­ing as­cend­ing (proprioceptive) and sen­sory (wind) neu­rons

LC4 (104) + LPLC2 (210) loom­ing-de­tec­tor vi­sual neu­rons

DNp01 / Giant Fiber (GF) (2) — the es­cape com­mand neu­ron

DNa01 + DNa02 (4) steer­ing neu­rons · DNp09 (2) for­ward walk­ing

DNg11 (6) groom­ing · MDN (4) back­ward walk­ing (“moonwalker”)

DNp02/DNp04/DNp11 (6) es­cape-ma­neu­ver (wing) neu­rons

their 330 strongest part­ners, in­clud­ing as­cend­ing (proprioceptive) and sen­sory (wind) neu­rons

Escape is not scripted. Your cur­sor’s ap­proach be­comes loom­ing in­put to the real LC4/LPLC2 cells; the fly takes off only when the Giant Fiber ac­tu­ally spikes through its real synapses — ~1,200 synapses of feed­for­ward in­hi­bi­tion push back, which is why slow ap­proaches are tol­er­ated and fast lunges trig­ger es­cape in ~4 ms, just like the real an­i­mal.

The body it­self is pro­ce­dural (FlyWire is a brain con­nec­tome — no body geom­e­try ex­ists), with a tri­pod gait, vis­i­ble wing-beat, al­ti­tude-scaled flight, groom­ing, and sleep pos­tures.

Installation

Requirements: ma­cOS 13+, Xcode Command Line Tools (Swift 5.9+). No per­mis­sions or en­ti­tle­ments needed — every­thing it senses (cursor, win­dow frames, clicks-as-taps, ther­mal state) is per­mis­sion-free.

git clone https://​github.com/​Denis­Sergee­vitch/​desk­top-fly.git cd desk­top-fly ./build.sh ./DesktopFly

A 🪰 item ap­pears in the menu bar; quit from there. The fly wan­ders your desk­top on a trans­par­ent, click-through over­lay — it never in­ter­cepts your mouse or key­board.

Controls (menu bar 🪰)

The brain win­dow is in­ter­ac­tive: hov­er­ing pauses the ro­ta­tion; click­ing a re­gion “optogenetically” stim­u­lates the ~60 near­est cir­cuit neu­rons for 400 ms. The fly’s re­ac­tion is what­ever the real net­work does down­stream — click the Giant Fiber and it es­capes; click DNg11 and it grooms; click one side’s DNa01/02 and it turns.

How real neu­rons drive the body

The loop also closes body→brain: the gait rhythm feeds the cir­cuit’s real as­cend­ing (proprioceptive) neu­rons in phase with the legs, and fast cur­sor mo­tion stim­u­lates its sen­sory (wind) part­ners.

Desktop ecol­ogy (all per­mis­sion-free ma­cOS senses)

Window ter­rain: win­dow top edges are ledges — the fly lands on them, walks along them, rides a win­dow you drag, and star­tles when one closes un­der its feet.

Window looms: a win­dow ap­pear­ing near the fly feeds the loom­ing path­way; the cir­cuit de­cides whether to flee your di­alogs.

Clicks are sub­strate taps; click­ing next to the fly star­tles it through the wind→GF path­way. Typing is vi­bra­tion (idle-time API — knows when keys were pressed, never which).

Circadian rhythm: dawn/​dusk ac­tiv­ity peaks, mid­day siesta, night qui­es­cence. Sleep: idle at night → it sleeps, breath­ing slowly, with raised arousal thresh­old; it grooms af­ter wak­ing.

Temperature: flies are ec­totherms — a hot Mac is a faster fly.

Regenerating the data

data/ ships with com­pact de­rived files. To re­build them from the raw FlyWire Codex dumps (~60 MB down­load):

mkdir -p /tmp/flywire && cd /tmp/flywire B=https://​stor­age.googleapis.com/​fly­wire-data/​codex/​data/​fafb/​783 curl -O “$B/classification.csv.gz” -O “$B/coordinates.csv.gz” \ -O “$B/connections.csv.gz” -O “$B/consolidated_cell_types.csv.gz” cd - && python3 etl.py /tmp/flywire

Diagnostics

./DesktopFly –simtest # cir­cuit in­vari­ants: GF silent at rest, 4 ms loom la­tency, … ./DesktopFly –behaviortest # 17 end-to-end checks: stim­u­late neu­rons -> body re­acts ./DesktopFly –snapshot f.png # off­screen fly ren­der ./DesktopFly –brainshot b.png # off­screen brain ren­der

What’s mod­eled vs. mea­sured

Honesty sec­tion: the con­nec­tome gives wiring, not phys­i­ol­ogy. The LIF dy­nam­ics, neu­ro­trans­mit­ter signs (ACh+, GABA−, Glu−), the gap-junc­tion boost on LC→GF and wind→GF (documented elec­tri­cal cou­pling), synap­tic de­lays, and the sen­sory trans­duc­tion (cursor → loom­ing value) are stan­dard mod­el­ing choices lay­ered on the real graph. Everything down­stream of the sen­sory neu­rons — who con­nects to whom, and how strongly — is FlyWire data.

License & ci­ta­tion

Code is MIT. The files in data/ are de­rived from FlyWire (FAFB v783) and are CC BY-NC 4.0 — see data/​DA­TA_LI­CENSE.md. If you use this, cite:

Dorkenwald, S. et al. Neuronal wiring di­a­gram of an adult brain. Nature 634, 124 – 138 (2024). https://​doi.org/​10.1038/​s41586 – 024-07558-y

Schlegel, P. et al. Whole-brain an­no­ta­tion and multi-con­nec­tome cell typ­ing of Drosophila. Nature 634, 139 – 152 (2024). https://​doi.org/​10.1038/​s41586 – 024-07686 – 5