A nerdy father of two, a husband of a beautiful and understanding wife, an engineer who loves anime and tinkering with PCs and games, but most of all, loves God.
In February 2021, a scientific paper came out that caused a sensation in the world of obesity research. It detailed the first results from studying weekly injections of the drug semaglutide—the generic name for Ozempic or Wegovy—to treat obesity. The paper showed that people taking the drug lost on average 15 percent of their body weight—a level of weight loss practically unheard-of for an anti-obesity medicine.
The paper, and the subsequent approval of Wegovy for weight management, kicked off an unprecedented clamor for this new generation of drugs. Demand for the injectables is so high that in May 2023, Wegovy manufacturer Novo Nordisk paused television advertising in order to buy itself time to produce more of the drug. Semaglutide is also used to treat type 2 diabetes, and in the UK patients have found it difficult to access the drug as Novo Nordisk struggled to keep up supply.
As demand for the drugs has risen, some have pointed out that for people to keep the weight off, they will likely have to stay on these drugs forever. That’s not surprising—the same is true for other weight loss interventions—but it raises a potentially vexing problem. The data we have suggests that a significant number of people stop taking these drugs after relatively short spans. We might have near-miraculous weight loss drugs, but what happens to the people who can’t stay on them?
These new drugs are part of a group called GLP-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs). They work by mimicking a hormone that regulates blood sugar levels and suppresses appetite by slowing down the rate at which food leaves the stomach. While using them to treat obesity is pretty novel, they’ve been approved for type 2 diabetes for a while. The first GLP-1 RA was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2005. That means we have some decent real-world data about how long people stay on GLP-1 RAs and the reasons they quit them.
One study looked at GLP-1 RAs prescribed in the UK between 2009 and 2017. Out of the 589 patients who started taking a GLP-RA, 45 percent stopped taking the drug within 12 months, and 65 percent within 24 months. The same group of scientists also looked at people taking GLP-1 RAs in the US across a similar period of time. That study included a much larger group of diabetes patients but found that people quit taking the drugs at a similar rate as in the UK. Within 12 months, 47 percent of patients stopped taking their GLP-1 AR; after 24 months that figure was 70 percent. On average, people in that study spent around 13 months using the drug before they stopped taking it.
Other real-world findings paint a similar picture. About half of Spanish patients taking a GLP-1 RA had stopped taking the drug after two years—a higher dropout rate than for other diabetes drugs. In Denmark, around 45 percent of diabetes patients stopped taking GLP-1 RAs within five years of starting the therapy, although a quarter of them started again within the following year. In lots of these studies, the scientists note that people quit these drugs at much higher rates than they do during clinical trials.
Staggering growth in Starlink collision-avoidance maneuvers in the past six months is sparking concerns over the long-term sustainability of satellite operations as thousands of new spacecraft are poised to launch into orbit in the coming years.
SpaceX‘s Starlink broadband satellites were forced to swerve more than 25,000 times between Dec. 1, 2022, and May 31, 2023 to avoid potentially dangerous approaches to other spacecraft and orbital debris, according to a report filed by SpaceX with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on June 30. That’s about double the number of avoidance maneuvers reported by SpaceX in the previous six-month period that ran from June to November 2022. Since the launch of the first Starlink spacecraft in 2019, the SpaceX satellites have been forced to move over 50,000 times to prevent collisions.
The steep increase in the number of maneuvers worries experts because it follows an exponential curve, leading to concerns that safety of operations in the orbital environment might soon get out of hand.
“Right now, the number of maneuvers is growing exponentially,” Hugh Lewis, a professor of astronautics at the University of Southampton in the U.K. and a leading expert on the impact of megaconstellations on orbital safety, told Space.com. “It’s been doubling every six months, and the problem with exponential trends is that they get to very large numbers very quickly.”
Data compiled by Lewis shows that, in the first half of 2021, Starlink satellites conducted 2,219 collision-avoidance maneuvers. The number grew to 3,333 in the following six-month period ending in December 2021 and then doubled to 6,873 between December 2021 and June 2022. In the second half of 2022, SpaceX had to alter the paths of its satellites 13,612 times to avoid potential collisions. In the latest report to the FCC, the company declared 25,299 collision-avoidance maneuvers over the past six months, with every satellite having been made to move an average of 12 times.
“Right now, every six months, the number of maneuvers that are being made doubles,” said Lewis. “It has gone up by a factor of 10 in just two years, and if you project that out, you’ll have 50,000 within the next six-month period, then 100,000 within the next, then 200,000, and so on.”
If the trend continues, by 2028, Starlink satellites will have to maneuver nearly a million times in a half-year to minimize the risk of orbital collisions. And Lewis doesn’t expect such growth to slow down any time soon. SpaceX has so far deployed about one-third of its planned first-generation constellation of 12,000 spacecraft and has been launching at a regular pace of over 800 satellites per year, a trend that is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.
The first-generation Starlink constellation is, however, just the beginning. The FCC has partially approved plans for the second-generation Starlink constellation, which could consist of up to 30,000 satellites. And other players all over the world, including Amazon with its Project Kuiper and China with Guowang, are scrambling to secure orbital slots with their respective regulators.
The projected growth in Starlink orbital collision avoidance maneuvers. (Image credit: Hugh Lewis)
Like swerving on a highway every 10 meters
According to Joanne Wheeler, a satellite regulations expert at Alden Legal and chair of the U.K.-based Satellite Finance Network, more than 1.7 million satellites have been registered with the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations’ agency overseeing the use of radio frequencies by satellites. Although not all of those plans are likely to come to fruition, the numbers in question are so high that experts such as Lewis question whether order in orbit can be maintained.
“If we’re expecting by the end of this decade to have 100,000 active satellites, then my suspicion is that the number of maneuvers collectively that all spacecraft operators will be making will be just enormous,” Lewis said. “You’re making maneuvers to mitigate the high-risk events, but it’s like driving down the highway and swerving every 10 meters to avoid a collision. It’s arguably not safe.”
Currently there are about 10,500 satellites orbiting our planet, 8,100 of which are operational, according to the European Space Agency. Things only started to get so congested fairly recently. For example in 2019, there were only about 2,300 active satellites circling the planet, according to Statista. The main driver of the growth is Starlink, by far the largest satellite constellation ever assembled.
New satellites are not the only cause behind the increasing need for orbital swerving. The amount of space debris — defunct spacecraft, old rocket stages and various fragments — also continues to grow, making it increasingly difficult for operators to keep their spacecraft safe.
SpaceX currently conducts an avoidance maneuver every time orbital models show a probability higher than 1 in 100,000 that one of the Starlink satellites will cross another object’s path. That threshold is 10 times lower than the standard upheld by NASA and other international agencies.
Lewis, however, questions whether SpaceX will be able to maintain such a high standard as the number of “conjunction alerts” continues to snowball. He adds that, despite the company’s efforts, the residual risk of a collision will continue to rise as well.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and another frequently heard voice of caution in the satellite megaconstellations debate, agrees with Lewis: “SpaceX are convinced that they can handle the increasing maneuver load,” McDowell told Space.com in an email. “I am not convinced that SpaceX have properly taken into account the non-statistical errors (the potential for independent and unpredictable screwups combining to give a bad result – a collision) – so I am concerned that we are operating at the edge of what is safe.”
Starlink relies on an autonomous collision avoidance system that instructs satellites to maneuver based on models of orbital trajectories of objects in space. These models provide alerts several days in advance and may not always get it right. Moreover, other factors, such as the changes in the density of Earth’s atmosphere at high altitudes caused by space weather, may affect the accuracy of these calculations.
The past and expected growth of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband megaconstellation. (Image credit: Hugh Lewis)
“There is a concern about the conjunctions that are occurring where no maneuvers are being made,” said Lewis. “You could argue that the probability [of a collision in these cases] is very low, but given the very large number of them, they represent a quite substantial risk. It’s like buying a ticket in a lottery. If you buy just one, you are unlikely to win, but if you buy a million tickets, you stand a pretty good chance.”
Lewis expects that, unless regulators cap the number of satellites in orbit, collisions will soon become a regular part of the space business. Such collisions would lead to rapid growth in the amount of space debris fragments that are completely out of control, which would lead to more and more collisions. The end point of this process might be the Kessler Syndrome, a scenario predicted in the late 1970s by former NASA physicist Donald Kessler. Depicted in the 2013 Oscar-winning movie “Gravity,” the Kessler Syndrome is an unstoppable cascade of collisions that might render parts of the orbital environment completely unusable.
In the morning after release, users were quick to spot a clause in Threads’ Supplemental Privacy Policy that mentions “You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account.”
Threads uses an Instagram account to access the app, even though they remain two separate applications. Another part of the policy page reads: “Your Threads profile is part of your Instagram account, and may be deleted at any time by deleting your Instagram account.”
Gizmodo reached out to Meta for comment on whether it plans to eventually separate Instagram and Threads profiles to allow users to delete one without deleting the other. We did not immediately hear back.
Meta’s Twitter killer is very much like the bird app, but it’s rife with the company’s data-hungry practices and the current app feels like utter chaos. Instagram head Adam Mosseri posted a video of him in bed saying he stayed up all night to watch 10 million people sign up for the new app. Zuckerberg also reiterated that number in some of his Thread posts.
Mosseri responded to complaints that Threads notifications were bombarding users by saying “we didn’t anticipate quite this much interest on day one, you may want to limit notification to ones from people you already follow for now.”
Threads is a Meta app, and it feels like it. The main feed is rife with content from people you don’t follow, showing you things that the algorithm thinks you want rather than the stuff you actually do. In addition to the lack of a “Following” tab, the current search function fails at looking up topics and simply identifies other users. In response to complaints, Mosseri promised that both a feed dedicated to people you follow and a proper search are “on the list.”
Similarly, Instagram product manager Tom Bender wrote on Threads “we haven’t even launched the cool stuff yet!” If the “cool stuff” would include the option to delete your Threads profile without bricking your Instagram account, that would indeed be a nice addition. The company seems to be flying high on the newfound Threads interest, with developers like Bender actively responding to questions about the need for view counts and whether they should be “public or private?”
For now, the algorithmically-run feed is the main part of the plan. The company said in its announcement post that “Your feed on Threads includes threads posted by people you follow, and recommended content from new creators you haven’t discovered yet.”
Meta added that the new Twitter clone wants to push “positive, productive conversations.” The company wants Threads to be a kind of saccharine utopia, where positivity is pushed compared to Twitter owner Elon Musk’s “if it bleeds, it leads” sensibility all while pushing far-right, conspiracy content.
According to a book by tech reporter Nick Bilton, Zuckerberg once reportedly said back in 2013 that Twitter was “such as a mess—it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.” The Meta chief twice tried to buy the bird app, once through the company and another time through co-founder and former-CEO Jack Dorsey. If this is what he wanted to turn Twitter into, we would have seen today’s current great Twitter migration a lot sooner.
Have you ever put on a new shirt and discovered that it makes you feel itchy? Or taken off a new pair of pants at the end of the day to find that the fabric has given you a rash? This problem is increasingly common as more chemicals are added to our clothing when they’re dyed or treated with additives that make them resistant to stains, wrinkles, and odors. Some of these chemicals are irritants that can cause breathing problems or skin issues. Others are toxic enough to trigger life-altering autoimmune diseases. Since the fashion industry operates within loose regulations, the problem of toxic apparel isn’t going away anytime soon.
This week on Gadget Lab, we’re joined by journalist and author Alden Wicker. Her new book is called To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion Is Making Us Sick—and How We Can Fight Back. We discuss the wide range of chemicals, dyes, and treatments that go into our clothes and offer tips on how to avoid the worst offenders while shopping for a new wardrobe.
You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:
If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for Gadget Lab. If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Podcasts app by tapping here. We’re on Spotify too. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.
Transcript
Michael Calore: Lauren.
Lauren Goode: Mike.
Michael Calore: Lauren, I like this shirt that you’re wearing. Where did you get it?
For her 38th birthday, Chela Robles and her family made a trek to One House, her favorite bakery in Benicia, California, for a brisket sandwich and brownies. On the car ride home, she tapped a small touchscreen on her temple and asked for a description of the world outside. “A cloudy sky,” the response came back through her Google Glass.
Robles lost the ability to see in her left eye when she was 28, and in her right eye a year later. Blindness, she says, denies you small details that help people connect with one another, like facial cues and expressions. Her dad, for example, tells a lot of dry jokes, so she can’t always be sure when he’s being serious. “If a picture can tell 1,000 words, just imagine how many words an expression can tell,” she says.
Robles has tried services that connect her to sighted people for help in the past. But in April, she signed up for a trial with Ask Envision, an AI assistant that uses OpenAI’s GPT-4, a multimodal model that can take in images and text and output conversational responses. The system is one of several assistance products for visually impaired people to begin integrating language models, promising to give users far more visual details about the world around them—and much more independence.
Envision launched as a smartphone app for reading text in photos in 2018, and on Google Glass in early 2021. Earlier this year, the company began testing an open source conversational model that could answer basic questions. Then Envision incorporated OpenAI’s GPT-4 for image-to-text descriptions.
Be My Eyes, a 12-year-old app that helps users identify objects around them, adopted GPT-4 in March. Microsoft—which is a major investor in OpenAI—has begun integration testing of GPT-4 for its SeeingAI service, which offers similar functions, according to Microsoft responsible AI lead Sarah Bird.
In its earlier iteration, Envision read out text in an image from start to finish. Now it can summarize text in a photo and answer follow-up questions. That means Ask Envision can now read a menu and answer questions about things like prices, dietary restrictions, and dessert options.
Another Ask Envision early tester, Richard Beardsley, says he typically uses the service to do things like find contact information on a bill or read ingredients lists on boxes of food. Having a hands-free option through Google Glass means he can use it while holding his guide dog’s leash and a cane. “Before, you couldn’t jump to a specific part of the text,” he says. “Having this really makes life a lot easier because you can jump to exactly what you’re looking for.”
Integrating AI into seeing-eye products could have a profound impact on users, says Sina Bahram, a blind computer scientist and head of a consultancy that advises museums, theme parks, and tech companies like Google and Microsoft on accessibility and inclusion.
Bahram has been using Be My Eyes with GPT-4 and says the large language model makes an “orders of magnitude” difference over previous generations of tech because of its capabilities, and because products can be used effortlessly and don’t require technical skills. Two weeks ago, he says, he was walking down the street in New York City when his business partner stopped to take a closer look at something. Bahram used Be My Eyes with GPT-4 to learn that it was a collection of stickers, some cartoonish, plus some text, some graffiti. This level of information is “something that didn’t exist a year ago outside the lab,” he says. “It just wasn’t possible.”
Twenty-five years after the Game Boy Camera first debuted back in 1998, fans are not only still enjoying lo-fi, black and white, pixelated photography, they’re also re-engineering the camera to make it better, even going so far as to shrink it down to the size of a regular Game Boy cartridge.
Panic’s Playdate Handheld is Almost Here
The last time we had checked in with Christopher Graves, a Game Boy Camera fan who knows their way around a 3D printer and a circuit board, they were showing off a custom creation called the Game Boy Camera M. It turned a sacrificed Game Boy Pocket into a mirrorless shooter with swappable lenses, a custom shell with a leatherette wrapped finish, a rechargeable battery, and a repositioned action button repurposed as a shutter trigger.
At the time, the Game Boy Camera M seemed like the perfect tool for those who prefer shooting images at just 0.001434-megapixels (128×112 pixels), but after seeing Graves’ latest creation, we’re not so sure any more.
Those who spent any amount of time shooting with Nintendo’s Game Boy Camera will remember that it was a chunky accessory with a bulbous lens sticking out over the top of the Game Boy it was attached to. There’s no doubt Nintendo did everything it could to shrink the size of the original Game Boy Camera, but the company was limited by the technology in 1998, when all digital cameras were fairly bulky. By leveraging a quarter century of technological miniaturization, Graves’ was able to create a much sleeker alternative they’re calling the Game Boy Mini Camera.
Starting with schematics for a custom reflashable Game Boy Camera PCB made by Martin Refseth, Graves created a custom board that carried over the original Game Boy Camera’s sensor, memory map controller, and “a few capacitors that were just easier to harvest,” which all fits inside a custom shell the same size as a standard Game Boy game cartridge. The Game Boy Mini Camera can actually run two different ROMs, and is upgraded with flash memory so that there’s no risk of stored photos disappearing when a backup battery dies.
As for the Game Boy Mini Camera’s lens? If it looks oddly familiar to you, slightly sticking out of the top corner of the cartridge, that’s because it’s actually a lens from an iPhone XR. The lens is screwed into a custom threaded sleeve, allowing its position to be adjusted to change the camera’s focus. Graves is also testing other iPhone lenses, including one from the iPhone 14 that will stick out even further, and potentially one from an iPhone 5S, which would eliminate that small camera bump altogether.
Despite borrowing some optical hardware from the iPhone, the images captured by the Game Boy Mini Camera are still unmistakingly low resolution and lacking in detail and color: which is exactly the aesthetic Game Boy Camera photographers are after. But with the redesign, the Game Boy Mini Camera can actually be slipped into a pocket when used with a handheld like the Game Boy Pocket.
Don’t whip out your credit card and start screaming at Graves to shut up and take your money just yet. As with their Game Boy Camera M, the Game Boy Mini Camera is described as another selfish project they made only for themselves, but they aren’t completely ruling out one day designing their own PCB schematics from scratch and making them available to other hobbyists who want to tackle a DIY project like this on their own.
Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools. If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they’re nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot.
Mr. Tweet Fumbles Super Bowl Tweet
“Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public,” the new Google policy says. “For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google’s AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.”
Fortunately for history fans, Google maintains a history of changes to its terms of service. The new language amends an existing policy, spelling out new ways your online musings might be used for the tech giant’s AI tools work.
Previously, Google said the data would be used “for language models,” rather than “AI models,” and where the older policy just mentioned Google Translate, Bard and Cloud AI now make an appearance.
This is an unusual clause for a privacy policy. Typically, these policies describe ways that a business uses the information that you post on the company’s own services. Here, it seems Google reserves the right to harvest and harness data posted on any part of the public web, as if the whole internet is the company’s own AI playground. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The practice raises new and interesting privacy questions. People generally understand that public posts are public. But today, you need a new mental model of what it means to write something online. It’s no longer a question of who can see the information, but how it could be used. There’s a good chance that Bard and ChatGPT ingested your long forgotten blog posts or 15-year-old restaurant reviews. As you read this, the chatbots could be regurgitating some humonculoid version of your words in ways that are impossible to predict and difficult to understand.
One of the less obvious complications of the post ChatGPT world is the question of where data-hungry chatbots sourced their information. Companies including Google and OpenAI scraped vast portions of the internet to fuel their robot habits. It’s not at all clear that this is legal, and the next few years will see the courts wrestle with copyright questions that would have seemed like science fiction a few years ago. In the meantime, the phenomenon already affects consumers in some unexpected ways.
The overlords at Twitter and Reddit feel particularly aggrieved about the AI issue, and made controversial changes to lockdown their platforms. Both companies turned off free access to their API’s which allowed anyone who pleased to download large quantities of posts. Ostensibly, that’s meant to protect the social media sites from other companies harvesting their intellectual property, but it’s had other consequences.
Twitter and Reddit’s API changes broke third-party tools that many people used to access those sites. For a minute, it even seemed Twitter was going to force public entities such as weather, transit, and emergency services to pay if they wanted to Tweet, a move that the company walked back after a hailstorm of criticism.
Lately, web scraping is Elon Musk’s favorite boogieman. Musk blamed a number of recent Twitter disasters on the company’s need to stop others from pulling data off his site, even when the issues seem unrelated. Over the weekend, Twitter limited the number of tweets users were allowed to look at per day, rendering the service almost unusable. Musk said it was a necessary response to “data scraping” and “system manipulation.” However, most IT experts agreed the rate limiting was more likely a crisis response to technical problems born of mismanagement, incompetence, or both. Twitter did not answer Gizmodo’s questions on the subject.
On Reddit, the effect of API changes was particularly noisy. Reddit is essentially run by unpaid moderators who keep the forums healthy. Mods of large subreddits tend to rely on third-party tools for their work, tools that are built on now inaccessible APIs. That sparked a mass protest, where moderators essentially shut Reddit down. Though the controversy is still playing out, it’s likely to have permanent consequences as spurned moderators hang up their hats.
