A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men (NYT)
BY Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Michael H. Keller
Seeking social media stardom for their underage daughters, mothers post images of them on Instagram. The accounts draw men sexually attracted to children, and they sometimes pay to see more.
Thousands of accounts examined by The Times offer disturbing insights into how social media is reshaping childhood, especially for girls, with direct parental encouragement and involvement. Some parents are the driving force behind the sale of photos, exclusive chat sessions and even the girls’ worn leotards and cheer outfits to mostly unknown followers. The most devoted customers spend thousands of dollars nurturing the underage relationships.
The large audiences boosted by men can benefit the families, The Times found. The bigger followings look impressive to brands and bolster chances of getting discounts, products and other financial incentives, and the accounts themselves are rewarded by Instagram’s algorithm with greater visibility on the platform, which in turn attracts more followers.
One calculation performed by an audience demographics firm found 32 million connections to male followers among the 5,000 accounts examined by The Times.
Inside the Booming Business of Cutting Babies’ Tongues (NYT)
BY Katie Thomas, Sarah Kliff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg
Dentists and lactation consultants around the country are pushing “tongue-tie releases” on new mothers struggling to breastfeed.
Lactation consultants and dentists have aggressively promoted the procedures, even for babies with no signs of genuine tongue-ties and despite a slight risk of serious complications, a New York Times investigation found.
A small fraction of babies are born with a bundle of tissue that attaches the tip of their tongue to the bottom of their mouth. In some pronounced cases, doctors snip that tissue. But many tongue-ties are harmless, and the evidence that cutting them improves feeding is scant.
Yet some lactation consultants and dentists pitch laser surgery to anxious and exhausted mothers like Ms. Merrell as a cure-all that will improve breastfeeding and prevent a litany of health problems, including sleep apnea, speech impediments and constipation, according to dozens of parents, dentists, doctors and consultants.
Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone (MIT Technology Review)
BY Melissa Heikkilä
This is the first time the carbon emissions caused by using an AI model for different tasks have been calculated.
Each time you use AI to generate an image, write an email, or ask a chatbot a question, it comes at a cost to the planet.
In fact, generating an image using a powerful AI model takes as much energy as fully charging your smartphone, according to a new study by researchers at the AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University. However, they found that using an AI model to generate text is significantly less energy-intensive. Creating text 1,000 times only uses as much energy as 16% of a full smartphone charge.
‘Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription’ says HP CEO gunning for 2024’s Worst Person of the Year award (PC Gamer)
BY Jeremy Laird
Not satisfied with merely bricking printers, HP now wants to own them all forever!
“This is something we announced a few years ago that our goal was to reduce the number of what we call unprofitable customers. Because every time a customer buys a printer, it’s an investment for us. We’re investing in that customer, and if this customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment,” the company’s CEO, Enrique Lores says, turning “selling at a loss” into a neat “investment” euphemism.
HP’s CFO Marie Myers has also expanded on the subscription approach, noting that the company’s existing cartridge subscription service, known as Instant Ink, can deliver a “20% uplift on the value of that customer because you’re locking that person” in.
French regulator fines Amazon $35M over its surveillance system of warehouse workers (TechCrunch)
BY Romain Dillet
France’s data privacy watchdog, the CNIL, has fined Amazon’s logistics subsidiary in France €32 million, or $35 million at today’s exchange rate. The CNIL says that Amazon France Logistique has implemented a “surveillance system” that is “overly intrusive.”
“Indicators tracking the inactivity time of employees’ scanners were put in place. The CNIL ruled that it was illegal to set up a system measuring work interruptions with such accuracy, potentially requiring employees to justify every break or interruption,” the French regulator wrote.
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