11 Things from the week | 10 May 25
News from the past week, and a few other things.
This week: cocaine, Kashmir, craft beer and more. But first, this from our friend Zuck:
1. Zuckerberg’s Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI
Mark Zuckerberg wants you to have AI friends, an AI therapist and AI business agents. In Zuckerberg’s vision for a new digital future, artificial-intelligence friends outnumber human companions and chatbot experiences supplant therapists, ad agencies and coders. AI will play a central role in the human experience, the Facebook co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms has said in a series of recent podcasts, interviews and public appearances.
NOTE: You can watch an interview of Zuckerberg on this topic here. Below is the transcript, with my comments between sections. Call me cynical.
“I think as the personalization loop kicks in and the AI just starts to get to know you better and better, I think that will just be really compelling.
“Compelling.” Gee, that’s a vague word that could convey a good or bad result.
You know one thing just from working on social media for a long time is—there’s this stat that I always think is crazy—the average American, I think, has fewer than three friends. Three people that they consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it’s like 15 friends, or something. I guess there’s just some point where you’re like, “I guess I’m just too busy, I can’t deal with more people.” But the average person wants more connectivity, connection, than they have.
Zuck, we want more connection to people, not digital connection.
So, there’s a lot of questions that people have of stuff, like, “Is this stuff going to replace kind of in-person connections or real-life connections?” And my default is that the answer to that is probably no. I think, you know, that there are all these things that are better about kind of physical connections when you can have them, but the reality is that people just don’t have the connection and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.
So instead of promoting human connection, we should continue to fill, and widen, the gap by promoting digital connection?
So I think that a lot of these things that today there might be a little bit of a stigma around, I would guess that over time we will find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why it is valuable and why the people who are doing these things, why they are rational for doing it, and how it is adding value for their lives.
But we do have vocabulary, and statistics, to explain that digital devices are creating more harm than good.
But also, I think that the field is very early. I mean, like I think are a handful of companies and stuff are doing virtual therapist. There’s like virtual girlfriend type stuff. But, it’s very early.
Because people are overwhelmed in this digital age, we should use digital solutions, like AI, to help them? I get that there are useful things for AI, but friends is not one of them.
2. AI Code Hallucinations Increase the Risk of ‘Package Confusion’ Attacks
AI-generated computer code is rife with references to nonexistent third-party libraries, creating a golden opportunity for supply-chain attacks that poison legitimate programs with malicious packages that can steal data, plant backdoors, and carry out other nefarious actions, newly published research shows. The study, which used 16 of the most widely used large language models to generate 576,000 code samples, found that 440,000 of the package dependencies they contained were “hallucinated,” meaning they were nonexistent. Open source models hallucinated the most, with 21 percent of the dependencies linking to nonexistent libraries. A dependency is an essential code component that a separate piece of code requires to work properly. Dependencies save developers the hassle of rewriting code and are an essential part of the modern software supply chain. Also known as package confusion, this form of attack was first demonstrated in 2021 in a proof-of-concept exploit that executed counterfeit code on networks belonging to some of the biggest companies on the planet, Apple, Microsoft, and Tesla included. It's one type of technique used in software supply-chain attacks, which aim to poison software at its very source in an attempt to infect all users downstream.
NOTE: I hope AI doesn’t get confused when it’s used as your therapist or friend, Zuck.
3. Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College
In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. (That wasn’t an anomaly: Traffic dipped again over the summer in 2024.) Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a human. Two and a half years later, students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education. Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but also Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others — take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays. STEM students are using AI to automate their research and data analyses and to sail through dense coding and debugging assignments.
“College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.
Before OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, cheating had already reached a sort of zenith. At the time, many college students had finished high school remotely, largely unsupervised, and with access to tools like Chegg and Course Hero. These companies advertised themselves as vast online libraries of textbooks and course materials but, in reality, were cheating multi-tools. For $15.95 a month, Chegg promised answers to homework questions in as little as 30 minutes, 24/7, from the 150,000 experts with advanced degrees it employed, mostly in India. When ChatGPT launched, students were primed for a tool that was faster, more capable.
The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT. The combination of high costs and a winner-takes-all economy had already made it feel transactional, a means to an end.
Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills; one found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants. In February, Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University published a study that found a person’s confidence in generative AI correlates with reduced critical-thinking effort. The net effect seems, if not quite Wall-E, at least a dramatic reorganization of a person’s efforts and abilities, away from high-effort inquiry and fact-gathering and toward integration and verification. This is all especially unnerving if you add in the reality that AI is imperfect — it might rely on something that is factually inaccurate or just make something up entirely — with the ruinous effect social media has had on Gen Z’s ability to tell fact from fiction.
The problem may be much larger than generative AI. The so-called Flynn effect refers to the consistent rise in IQ scores from generation to generation going back to at least the 1930s. That rise started to slow, and in some cases reverse, around 2006.
4. Something Alarming Is Happening to the Job Market
Something strange, and potentially alarming, is happening to the job market for young, educated workers. According to the New York Federal Reserve, labor conditions for recent college graduates have “deteriorated noticeably” in the past few months, and the unemployment rate now stands at an unusually high 5.8 percent. Even newly minted M.B.A.s from elite programs are struggling to find work. Meanwhile, law-school applications are surging—an ominous echo of when young people used graduate school to bunker down during the great financial crisis. What’s going on? I see three plausible explanations, and each might be a little bit true. The first theory is that the labor market for young people never fully recovered from the coronavirus pandemic—or even, arguably, from the Great Recession. A second theory points to a deeper, more structural shift: College doesn’t confer the same labor advantages that it did 15 years ago. The third theory is that the relatively weak labor market for college grads could be an early sign that artificial intelligence is starting to transform the economy.
5. Antarctica’s Astonishing Rebound: Ice Sheet Grows for the First Time in Decades
The Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) plays a major role in global sea-level rise. Since March 2002, the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) mission and its successor, GRACE-FO (GRACE Follow-On), have provided valuable data to monitor changes in ice mass across the AIS. Previous studies have consistently shown a long-term trend of mass loss, particularly in West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula, while glaciers in East Antarctica appeared relatively stable. However, a recent study led by Dr. Wang and Prof. Shen at Tongji University has found a surprising shift: between 2021 and 2023, the AIS experienced a record-breaking increase in overall mass.
6. Aurora launches commercial self-driving truck service in Texas
Autonomous vehicle technology startup Aurora Innovation says it has successfully launched a self-driving truck service in Texas, making it the first company to deploy driverless, heavy-duty trucks for commercial use on public roads in the U.S. The launch comes just as Aurora hits its deadline; in October, the company delayed its planned 2024 debut to April 2025. The debut also comes five months after rival Kodiak Robotics delivered its first autonomous trucks to a commercial customer for driverless operations in off-road environments. Aurora says it began running freight this week between Dallas and Houston with its launch customers Hirschbach Motor Lines and Uber Freight, and that it has completed 1,200 miles in a single self-driving truck without a driver so far. The company plans to build up to “tens of self-driving trucks” and expand to El Paso and Phoenix by the end of 2025.
7. Craft Breweries’ Plan to Combat Closures? Playgrounds.
In 2024, more breweries closed than opened for the first time in decades, not only in Texas but throughout the country. Accusing fingers point to everything from the increased popularity of hard seltzer and THC-infused beverages to younger generations ditching alcohol altogether. Rising rents in major metro areas have played a large role in closures, as have consumers choosing more commercial options due to inflation and fear of an oncoming recession. A 4-pack of high-end craft beer can easily cost $18, about the same price as 24 Lone Stars. The specter of tariffs is also looming. While barley and hops are often sourced from the United States, aluminum cans and stainless steel tanks often incorporate raw materials from overseas. Industry experts admit a craft beer bubble was fueled by ambitious home brewers with disposable time and income. The ante was upped even more when small-scale brewing became profitable, although deep pockets don’t guarantee success. Thirsty Planet and Hops & Grain live on because Austin Beerworks brews their beer in its large facility.
Two Houston breweries, Ovinnik and For the Culture, grew tired of hunting for affordable rent and decided to move into one location in northwest Houston, calling the taproom Craft Culture X. Another plan of action is a little less logistical and more philosophical: bringing the community aspect back to breweries by making them places where people want to hang out.
Breweries across the state sometimes feel like parks or events centers rather than bars or the warehouses of old. Meanwhile Brewing, in South Austin, offers fifteen of its own beers on tap while making the most of its four acres with a sizable playground, a fleet of food trucks, a mini soccer pitch, a stage, and a soon-to-come sand-volleyball court. In 2023, Austin Beerworks opened a new location in northeast Austin that sits on a whopping 64 acres and includes a dog park and a disc golf course. The pivot to selling an experience first—instead of beer first—is acknowledgment that the craft beer market has contracted over the past few years. Despite the overall economic climate, each of the brewers and industry experts I spoke with felt confident about Texas’s beer market and saw room for growth ahead.
Even though Texas is such a huge and highly populated state, it’s only fortieth in the nation for the beer industry’s economic impact per capita and forty-eighth for number of breweries per capita.
8. The Potent Powder and ‘Narco-Subs’ Driving Cocaine’s Global Surge
Cocaine supply is at a historic peak worldwide, according to U.S. and United Nations antidrug officials. The U.N. last fall estimated Colombia’s annual cocaine yield at 3,000 tons, about eight times what it was in 2012, when interdiction efforts were at their peak. A loosening of antidrug enforcement in Colombia—combined with expansive coca cultivation, supply chain improvements and strong consumer demand—have since pushed the cocaine trade to new highs.
NOTE: There are lots of reasons not to use cocaine. Here are a few more that I gleaned from the article, emphasis mine.
Cocaine use among Americans has remained at steady levels over the past decade or so, but the way it is sold and its composition have changed: Drug dealers take orders via text and provide home delivery. And government lab tests found that a quarter of the cocaine sold in the U.S. by street dealers contained fentanyl, the highly addictive synthetic opioid, according to Derek Maltz, the acting DEA director.
The coca harvested by Rosero and others in Colombia’s Micay Canyon is moved to open-air laboratories, where workers transform the dried coca leaves into a more potent derivative, a concoction called coca base or coca paste. At one roadside lab, men in tall rubber boots mulch the leaves underfoot into dust. They mix it with gasoline, lime, sulfuric acid and other components in oil barrels to tease out the alkaloid. “The gasoline is what pulls out the alkaloid,” said Daimer Mosquera, a 41-year-old worker.
Chemists at more sophisticated lab operations near the Pacific coast purify the coca base into cocaine powder. Colombia’s labs at one time used three kilos of coca base to make one kilo of cocaine. Now, the labs need only a kilo of base to make a kilo of cocaine. Traffickers have learned to smuggle coca base by chemically dissolving it in everyday items—clothing, animal hides, rubber, beeswax, fertilizer and even paint. Chemists working for drug gangs later extract it.
That coca sure looks pretty on the hillside, not so much in your body:
9. ‘It’s Like a War Zone’: What Happened When Portland Decriminalized Fentanyl
Drug overdoses killed some 87,000 Americans over a 12-month period ending in September 2024 — more lives lost than the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined. Although the death toll is down significantly from a peak of almost 114,000 the year before, Oregon and other Western states have lagged behind the downward national trend, making them ground zero of the decade-long fentanyl crisis. Nowhere has the social and economic impact been more acutely felt than in Portland, a proudly progressive, midsize city of more than 600,000 that not long ago was one the most desirable places to live in the country, despite stubbornly high rates of unsheltered homelessness and substance abuse.
In late 2020, Oregon voters overwhelmingly passed the most liberal drug law in the country, decriminalizing possession of small amounts of hard drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine. Instead of jail time, Ballot Measure 110 aimed to expand addiction treatment services in a state that ranked last in such offerings nationwide, through hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue redirected from a cannabis tax and savings resulting from decreases in arrests and incarceration. Additional funding went to harm reduction services — naloxone distribution, needle exchanges, testing kits — that make drugs “safer” to use. Advocates hoped to follow in the footsteps of trailblazing countries like Portugal and France, where nuanced approaches that prioritize health care over punishment have curtailed overdoses and public drug use. In some respects, it was the closest any place in the U.S. had yet come to The Wire’s “Hamsterdam”: a drug zone where police permit dealers to operate as long as they don’t fight over territory and confine sales to a limited number of blocks, enabling addiction service providers to focus their efforts.
The timing could not have been worse. Months into decriminalization, Mexican drug cartels ratcheted up the flow of fentanyl across the border and up the Interstate 5 corridor, where it flooded onto city streets, plunging prices to less than a dollar a pill. As lockdown despair from the Covid-19 pandemic deepened, the killing of George Floyd sparked monthslong racial justice protests that turned violent and engulfed parts of downtown. With police turning a blind eye, Portland became a honeypot for local and out-of-state addicts to score cheap dope and use it freely. “It was like a perfect storm that brought us from this really vibrant, amazing downtown to a tourist destination [for drug users],” says Rick Graves, a spokesman for Portland Fire and Rescue. Overdose deaths, retail theft, and homicides surged to record levels, running law enforcement and first responders ragged. “We’d revive the same people, and revive them again and again,” says Dave Friedericks, a veteran paramedic and firefighter whose downtown station responded to 36 overdose calls in a 48-hour period in the summer of 2023.
A highly addictive painkiller, fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin (two milligrams — or the equivalent of five to seven grains of table salt — is considered a lethal dose), with black-market analogues that are thousands of times stronger. Dealers mix fentanyl with other drugs to increase profits, and fentanyl’s effects on users are exacerbated by an evolving array of cuts, notably xylazine (a.k.a. “tranq”), an animal tranquilizer that, when injected, can rot flesh and lead to amputation. Complicating matters, many addicts in Oregon use fentanyl and psychosis-inducing forms of methamphetamine in tandem, raising the likelihood of a fatal overdose and making it even harder to get them to seek treatment.
10. India Launches Military Strikes Against Pakistan
India said it conducted military strikes on nine sites in Pakistan in retaliation for a deadly militant attack on tourists in Kashmir, intensifying a confrontation between the nuclear-armed neighbors. Pakistan’s army spokesman, Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, said 26 people were killed and 46 injured. Pakistan’s defense minister told a local news channel that Pakistan shot down five Indian aircraft. The Indian Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment. The Indian Defense Ministry said its forces carried out strikes on camps terrorists have used to stage attacks against India, according to a statement released Wednesday.
NOTE: To help understand what’s going on, here are some good articles and maps.
11. Kashmir conflict explained
Kashmir is a Himalayan region dotted with snow-capped mountains, pristine lakes, and beautiful meadows. It was previously one of the many "princely states" of India, ruled by so-called maharajas, before India gained independence from British rule in August 1947.
That independence, however, has never been a simple matter. As it ceded its colonial power, Britain partitioned India into two nations: Hindu-majority India, and Muslim-majority Pakistan. The migration of Hindus from the newly carved out Pakistan into India, and of Muslims from India into Pakistan, was marred by massacres and widespread sectarian violence. It is widely considered the deadliest partitioning of a nation in contemporary history.
At the time of partition, Kashmir was a Muslim-majority princely state, and its Hindu Maharaja Hari Singh, chose to remain independent of the two newly defined nations. But in October 1947, when tribesmen from Pakistan invaded Kashmir, the Maharaja sought India's help.
India agreed to come to his assistance, but only if Singh would let India claim dominion over Kashmir as a precondition. The Maharaja agreed. India sent its army to Kashmir, which drove out the Pakistani tribesmen and, for all intents and purposes, Kashmir became a semi-autonomous part of India.
Pakistan refused to recognize Kashmir's accession to India, dismissing it as a fraud. The standoff led the two nations into their first war that same year, and it endured into 1948. India asked the United Nations to intervene. The U.N. recommended that, after the full demilitarization of the region by both armies, a vote be held by Kashmir's residents to determine its future.
That was never achieved, and in 1949, India and Pakistan signed a ceasefire agreement that divided hotly-contested Kashmir into two parts. Both nations claim all of Kashmir as their own territory, but each controls only part of it. Another, northeastern portion of the region is administered by China, which has long been a point of friction between Delhi and Beijing.
In 1965, the tension over the region between India and Pakistan again erupted into a full-scale war. Thousands of people were killed on both sides. About seven years later, an agreement was signed that formally established a Line of Control (LoC) dividing Kashmir, which still serves as the de-facto border between the two rivals.
In 1989, a heavily armed pro-independence insurgency took root in Indian-administered Kashmir, launching deadly attacks against Indian forces. India has long accused Pakistan of training, arming and backing those militants — a charge Pakistan flatly denies. The three-decade insurgency has left tens of thousands of people dead.
NOTE: The dotted region below is Kashmir.
And, a zoomed-in view:
Here’s Texas laid over the Kashmir region for a size comparison:
Below is a map of the religions in the region. The area in the circle is Kashmir.
If you want to go further into the rabbit hole here, you can explore that other green area that’s bottom center. It’s Bangladesh, which was formerly called East Pakistan.
Lastly, if Kashmir sounds familiar, it’s likely because you’re used to hearing it as Cashmere, the wool. The goats of this region were known for their soft underbelly wool. Now, most Cashmere products come from elsewhere.
Have a great week!
The Curator
Two resources to help you be a more discerning reader:
AllSides - https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
Media Bias Chart - https://www.adfontesmedia.com
Caveat: Even these resources/charts are biased. Who says that the system they use to describe news sources is accurate? Still, hopefully you find them useful as a basic guide or for comparison.