The Download: recreating the early internet, and 2023 in climate data

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The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Child sexual abuse photos have been found in AI training data sets
It’s a shocking demonstration of how little we know about the massive amounts of data generative AI models are trained on. (WP $) 
+ The biggest AI image training data set, LAION, has been temporarily taken offline while it scrambles to respond. (404 Media)

2Apple’s headset could be ready as early as February 2024
Then we’ll find out the answer to the big question: who will buy it? (Bloomberg $)
+ These minuscule pixels are poised to take augmented reality by storm. (MIT Technology Review)

3 TikTok moderators are struggling to assess Israel-Gaza content
The big problem is a lack of local language skills in content moderation teams. (The Guardian)
+ Meta’s oversight board has said AI is leading the company to remove too many posts related to the conflict. (Quartz)
+ Search engines help to boost misinformation. (Scientific American $)

4 The US pumped more oil than any other country in history in 2023
Sounds dreadful, but the reality below the headline is complex. (The Atlantic $)
+ Fossil-fuel emissions are over a million times greater than carbon removal efforts. (MIT Technology Review)

5 What will Ozempic’s next act be? 💊
These types of drugs are being studied as treatments for everything from addiction to liver disease to infertility. (NYT $) 
+ Weight-loss injections have taken over the internet. But what does this mean for people IRL? (MIT Technology Review)

6 YouTube is one of the last bastions of unbiased journalism in India
And even then, reporters who run their own channels work with few protections and a lot of fear. (Rest of World)

7 X went down for more than an hour
It’s not the only major outage for the site in recent days either. (The Verge)
+ How Twitter died in 2023. (Engadget)

8 Science fiction is kinda ruining the world
Billionaires grew up reading dystopian novels, and now they’re determined to make them a reality. (Scientific American $)

9 What happens to our planet when the sun dies?
Read this for a healthy helping of perspective over the holidays(!) (Quanta $)

10 How 2023 went down on social media
It wasn’t a vintage year in honesty, but there were still plenty of lolz—and drama—to go around. (NYT $)

Quote of the day