Numlock News: September 26, 2025 • Drones, Scandal, Prime
By Walt Hickey
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Drone
The Shahed drone from Iran is the piece of military hardware that is becoming the envy of armies around the world. It is cheap, easy to mass-produce and has been licensed in considerable numbers to Russia in its war on Ukraine. Russia can produce a version of the Shahed for $35,000 to $60,000 apiece, which is a key appeal of the projectile for a country that has been as economically constrained as Russia. It can fly up to 1,553 miles and can be launched by the score. While lots of drones made in the West are, in many ways, clearly superior when it comes to the tech involved, cost efficiency is not exactly a highlight. Anduril Industries sold 291 Altius long-range drones to Taiwan last year at $1 million each. Britain’s MGI Engineering has managed to produce a long-range drone called the SkyShark capable of flying 280 miles per hour (much faster than the 115 miles per hour a Shahed-136 can pull), but is being pitched at $50,000 to $65,000 each.
Alistair MacDonald, The Wall Street Journal
Prime
Amazon will pay a $1 billion civil penalty and pay $1.5 billion in refunds to 35 million customers related to a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit that accused the company of making it frustratingly hard to cancel Amazon Prime. That is the largest civil penalty in a case involving an FTC rule violation, and the refund is the second-highest restitution ever obtained by the FTC.
Spam
Spotify removed 75 million tracks in its library that the streaming titan characterized as “spammy,” a reaction to the flood of generative AI-produced music that has flooded streaming platforms. Artists argue that these tracks crowd out their work and undercut their ability to make money from streaming royalties. In the announcement, the company also indicated it has introduced a new impersonation policy to expedite resolutions when AI voice clones are used to rip off artists. Spotify has also implemented some new anti-spam features that the company thinks will cut down on mass uploads and duplicates.
Abid Rahman, The Hollywood Reporter
Scandal
A new analysis of CEO scandals found that chief executives caught up in personal scandals are five times as likely to exit the company as executives who committed financial misconduct. The study looked at 59 CEO personal misconduct events and 324 CEO financial misconduct events to compare the precise manner of a head honcho’s fall from grace. The thinking goes that financial misconduct could perhaps be written off as a simple misunderstanding in the enthusiastic quest for shareholder value or the misbehavior of an underling. Personal misconduct, on the other hand, like drugs or an inappropriate relationship, more directly reflects the CEO’s capacity for error in judgment and necessitates moving in another direction.
Michael Nalick, The Conversation
Everything’s Seen To, Down on the V-2, Under The Sea
Two studies explored the marine life that has reclaimed weapons from the two world wars sitting at the bottom of various waterways. One, published in Scientific Data, produced a high-resolution map of 147 wrecks from WWI that were sunk in Mallows Bay on the Potomac after the war. The other looked at discarded munitions — including warheads from V-1 flying bombs used by Nazi Germany in World War Two — and found that there’s a lot more marine life on the munitions than on the rest of the sediment. The munitions averaged 43,000 organisms per square meter compared to 8,200 organisms per square meter on the rest of the sediment.
Lost In Translation
Lots and lots of AI got their original training from Wikipedia, especially the many different languages of Wikipedia. That’s a problem, because Wikipedia has gradually come to the conclusion that the encyclopedia’s use of machine translation over the years actually produced a lot of unintelligible translations into smaller languages. Since lots of AI was trained on bad translations, it’s imperiling the ability to digitally sustain those languages. For instance, one professor at the University of Hawai’i reported that 35 percent of the words on some pages of Hawaiian Wikipedia are incomprehensible.
Jacob Judah, MIT Technology Review
Cuts
The proposed US federal budget drastically cuts the National Institutes of Health funding by 40 percent, and a clever study published in Science seeks to put that into perspective. We know the priority score of all NIH grants from 1980 to 2007, and can retroactively figure out which grants would not have received funding over the past decades had the NIH budget been 40 percent lower. Then we can see which drugs would not, in fact, exist as a result. Among 557 drugs approved from 2000 to 2023, 60 percent of the patents cited NIH-funded research, half the patents cited at least one at-risk grant and 12 percent of patents credited at least a quarter of their citations to grants that would have been otherwise unfunded. Particularly affected would have been cancer treatments and treatments for genetic disorders.
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Really interesting newsletter!