Memex 1.1 - SoundSage

Sunset in a wing mirrorSeen while driving on a Summer evening in West Cork, many years ago.

Quote of the Day

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, 1995

Prescient, eh? Thanks to Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) for spotting it.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBud Powell Trio | Blues for Bessie

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Long Read of the DayThe 3 AI Use Cases: Gods, Interns, and Cogs

A lovely, clear-sighted view of the technology by Drew Breunig, who cuts through the noise and extracts the signal.

We talk about so many things when we talk about AI. The conversation can roam from self-driving cars to dynamic video generation, from conversational chatbots to satellite imagery object detection, and from better search engines to dreamlike imagery generation. You get the point.

It gets confusing! For laypeople, it’s hard to nail down what AI actually does (and doesn’t) do. For those in the field, we often have to break down and overspecify our terms before we can get to our desired conversations.

After plenty of discussions and tons of exploration, I think we can simplify the world of AI use cases into three simple, distinct buckets: * Gods: Super-intelligent, artificial entities that do things autonomously. * Interns: Supervised copilots that collaborate with experts, focusing on grunt work. * Cogs: Functions optimized to perform a single task extremely well, usually as part of a pipeline or interface.

Let’s break these down, one by one…

Read on.

Thanks to Andrew Curry for pointing me to it.

My commonplace bookletDoc Searls (Whom God Preserve) is an Elder of the Web and one of the most perceptive observers of the online world.

I’ve just read a lovely tribute he’s written to his long-term friend, Paul Marshall, who has passed away.

Paul also taught me to believe in myself.

I remember a day when a bunch of us were hanging in our dorm room, talking about SAT scores. Mine was the lowest of the bunch. (If you must know, the total was 1001: a 482 in verbal and a 519 in math. Those numbers will remain burned in my brain until I die.) Others, including Paul, had scores that verged on perfection—or so I recall. (Whatever, they were all better than mine.). But Paul defended me from potential accusations of relative stupidity by saying this: “But David has insight.” (I wasn’t Doc yet.) Then he gave examples, which I’ve forgotten. By saying I had insight, Paul kindly and forever removed another obstacle from my path forward in life. From that moment on, insight became my stock in trade. Is it measurable? Thankfully, no.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

AI Chatbot Added to Mushroom-Foraging Facebook Group Immediately Gives Tips for Cooking Dangerous Mushroom

An AI chatbot called “FungiFriend” was added to a popular mushroom identification Facebook group Tuesday. It then told users there how to “sauté in butter” a potentially dangerous mushroom, signaling again the high level of risk that AI chatbots and tools pose to people who forage for mushrooms.

One member of the Facebook group said that they asked the AI bot “how do you cook Sarcosphaera coronaria,” a type of mushroom that was once thought edible but is now known to hyperaccumulate arsenic and has caused a documented death. FungiFriend told the member that it is “edible but rare,” and said “cooking methods mentioned by some enthusiasts include sautéing in butter, adding to soups or stews, and pickling.” The situation is reminiscent of Google’s AI telling people to add glue to pizza or eat rocks on the advice of a Redditor named Fucksmith.

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Time was when ‘magic mushrooms’ used to cause hippies to hallucinate. Now the ‘hallucinations’ of an AI can kill you, it seems.

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Night lightsWalking through Upper River Court in St John’s on Monday night on my way to a lecture by Marietje Schaake I pulled out my iPhone to see how it would handle the lighting. Fairly well is my verdict. But what struck me most was how peaceful the scene was, even though it’s right in the middle of a busy town. Kids who are able to live and study in places like this have the luck of the devil.

Quote of the Day

”Rationality is leverage — a strong man lifts a block, but a clever man invents a pulley. It’s how Socratic nerds defeat Homeric jocks.”

Zohar Atkins, poet, rabbi and theologian

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsTaj Mahal & Ry Cooder | 2:10 Train | Rising Sons

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Long Read of the Day How It Went

John Gruber is one of the Elders of the Web. His Daring Fireball blog is something I read every day because he’s such an acute observer of the tech world, and in particular anything to do with Apple. With the late (and much lamented) Aaron Swartz, he created the Markdown language in which (and many thousands of others) write every bit of text I produce (including this blog).

Last Friday, though, his blog was about something else, and it turned out to be an entrancing and moving essay in which a personal story was interwoven with reflections on Election night and its aftermath.

Here’s how it opens:

My mom died at the end of June this year.

I know, and I’m sorry — that’s a hell of a way to open a piece ostensibly about a depressing, worrisome, frightening election result. But here’s the thing I want to emphasize right up front: my mom’s death was OK. It really was. She was 78, which isn’t that old, but her health had not been great. She was hospitalized for several days in May, just a month prior, after she had collapsed at home, too weak to stand, and for days it wasn’t clear what was wrong. Then some more test results came back and we had the answer. She had ovarian cancer, bad. It had already metastasized. The prognosis was grim: months to live, at best. And those months, toward the end, would inexorably grow ever more painful and profoundly sad.

Her mental acuity had begun to slip in recent years, too. Not a lot, but if you knew her you’d notice. But she faced this prognosis with remarkable dignity, courage, and clarity. She knew the score. It was what it was, and she’d make the best of the time she had left. She was tired but still felt pretty good most days. There were flashes of her younger self, the Mom I remember growing up with. It was wonderful to see those flashes. The bad times were coming, but they laid ahead. On the last Monday night in June she and my dad went out to eat at their favorite restaurant. They had a good meal and a good time. It was a great day. Tuesday morning she played Wordle and reported her score to our family group chat. Then around noon, she just fell over, dead. My dad found her unresponsive, called 911, and they arrived in minutes, but she was gone. No suffering. The whole dreadful grind of battling cancer never came. It’s such a cliché but clichés are often true: given what she faced, it was a blessing she died how and when she did. She never wanted to suffer and she didn’t. I loved her and I miss her.

Like I said, it was all OK, in the end — the way and how and when my mom died.

But my dad…

Do read on. It’s long, but I don’t think you’ll regret it.

My commonplace bookletAs long-time (long-suffering?) readers know, I’ve been a keen photographer since I was a teenager. (Full story of how I became addicted is here, if you’re interested.) For much of that time I’ve used Leica cameras — rangefinder cameras with interchangeable lenses. This year is the 70th anniversary of the company’s ‘M’ range — the bigger cameras with a bayonet mount for the lenses.

These cameras are a prime example of German engineering excellence. They’re outrageously expensive, have terrific lenses, are amazingly strong, solid and heavy. (One of my friends used to say they were made from melted-down WW1 battleships, but he was just jealous because I had one and he didn’t.) But some of the greatest photographers of the 20th century relied on them. (Henri Cartier-Bresson was never seen without one, for example.)

Two Leicas. On the left is a M4-P film model which I bought in 1980; on the right a 2022 M10 Monocrom with a digital black-and-white sensor. Both devices feel the same in use, and accept all the lenses that Leica offer.

But the most remarkable thing about Leica cameras was that they are all ‘backwards-compatible’: the newest lenses will fit every M camera, and so will the oldest. For example, I have a 60-year-old 135mm Elmar lens which fits on the 2022 digital camera body and works perfectly (though it’s not as sharp as newer lenses).

It’s this consistent quality and backwards-compatibility that seemed (to me, anyway) what was quintessentially German about these cameras. And I naively imagined that in that sense they were paradigmatic of the society in which they were made.

But now comes a shocking book by Wolfgang Münchau which suggests that my view of German enterprise may need updating. At any rate he paints a picture of (as an FT review puts it) “an economy, political system, and society dysfunctional to the point of being terminally broken, i.e. kaput. Germany faces a choice, but is unable to summon the political and intellectual resources to make any decisive response”.

I’ll have to get the book to see how Münchau makes his case, but there are some corroborating straws in the wind. In particular, the German car industry seems to be in trouble. VW, the country’s biggest auto manufacturer, recently announced that it was closing some plants and laying off workers. Given how important the car industry to the image of German invincibility, maybe Münchau is reading too much into it. We’ll see.

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Walking the planksOn a boardwalk in an RSPB reserve, yesterday.

Quote of the Day

“Moral seriousness in public life is like pornography: hard to define but you know it when you see it.It describes a coherence of intention and action, an ethic of political responsibility. All politics is the art of the possible. But art too has its ethic. If politicians were painters, with FDR as Titian and Churchill as Rubens, then Attlee would be the Vermeer of the professional: precise, restrained — and long undervalued. Bill Clinton might aspire to the heights of Salvador Dali (and believe himself complimented by the comparison), Tony Blair to the standing — and cupidity — of Damien Hurst.”

Tony Judt, in The Memory Chalet

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsTaj Mahal Ry Cooder | Statesboro Blues

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Ry Cooder (Lead Guitar), Buddy Miller (Guitar), Don Was (Bass), Joachim Cooder(Drums), Tim Lauer(Piano), Taj Mahal (Vocals)

Long Read of the DayThe night after the election before

I woke up in the middle of Wednesday night and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I got up and started scribbling. Here’s the result. It’s long, so if you’re not interested in this stuff, feel free to skip it. After all, I’m no expert, just an interested spectator (aka blogger).

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Trump’s victory is being billed the greatest comeback since Lazarus and accordingly he is being retrospectively canonised by the new realists, including the high-class savants of the Hoover Institution, the Economist, the so-called ‘serious’ newspapers, etc. They may, of course, be holding their noses as they do it, but they all regard his election as a pivotal event, which it undoubtably is. Accordingly, the party line of the ‘new realism’ is that we all have to adjust to that reality. Trump may be a son-of-a-bitch, but at least he’s our SOB. (Which remains to be seen. To me he looks like his own SOB: the rest of us don’t figure in his narcissistic universe.)

More worrying is the fact that he is now being feted as a political genius — the guy who intuited the ‘real’ nature of the’ real’ Americans: white racists, misogynists and authoritarians. Cue Adolf Hitler. But whereas Hitler reshaped the German people into the master-race Herrenvolk, Trump merely intuited what his’ Volk’ were like and celebrated (and exploited) it.

The inescapable conclusion I had reached from watching videos of some of his rallies was that Trumpism had most of the hallmarks of a cult. He’s the leader who can do no wrong – except to those defined as the “enemies of the people”. So, to his followers, Trump has many of the qualities of a prophet who will lead his people into the promised land.

His comeback triggers some uncomfortable thoughts. Here are a few:

The election result reveals how chronically dysfunctional American’ democracy’ has become – and in particular how the vaunted founding principles of the ‘checks and balances’ ensured by the separation of powers between the Executive branch, the two houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, has broken down. Trump now controls all four. Game over.
Also, we have learned from his first term as President that the unwritten conventions that lubricate the working of functioning democracies are useless in the face of an authoritarian who chooses to ignore them. Peter Hennessy’s ‘Good chap theory of government’ no longer applies.
Trump’s success confirms what critics like Thomas Frank pointed out decades ago – that the Democrats had lost touch with the people whom the party ostensibly represented – and became instead an enabler of the elites who were the beneficiaries of a neoliberal society. In that sense Hilary Clinton was the most inappropriate candidate imaginable in 2016, and Kamala Harris had some of the same disabilities in 2024.
There’s something in the theory that Joe Biden’s cussedness in wanting to run again made Harris’s task impossible. But my hunch is that even if the Democrats had had a ‘normal’ process with primaries etc. they might not have beaten Trump. In any event, that’s now just an interesting but irrelevant counterfactual.
All the passionate, grief-stricken expressions of determination to ‘restore’ or ‘rescue’ democracy in America are doomed to fail without a recognition that Trump’s win was actually a ‘democratic’one. It seems to have been a fair and legally-sound election. (I read somewhere that the alt-right sites which had been incessantly relaying the charge that the election would be ‘stolen’ by the Democrats suddenly went quiet when it became clear that Trump was going to win!)
The underlying problem – the reason why Trump’s campaigning rhetoric fell on such fertile ground – lies deeper. It is that American democracy has been twisted out of recognition by the economic system to which it is in thrall. The fact that the neoliberal thinking — to which Western governments have been addicted for decades — produces gross social inequality is not an externality; it’s what the system is designed to do. Or, as geeks say, it’s a feature, not a bug.
In that context the British economic sage Martin Wolf published an interesting book a few years ago based on a metaphor: that the relationship between democracy and capitalism is a marriage – and, like all marriages, it has its ups and downs. In the decades since 1970, it’s been mostly downs. In fact the marriage has become a chronically abusive one, with democracy being bent out of shape to facilitate the needs and priorities of the exploitative partner. Which is why bleating about ‘restoring’ the ‘democracy’ that Trump now threatens is just that – bleating. Much more fundamental change is needed.
The big question, therefore, is whether this latest dramatic lurch into authoritarianism by the world’s most important democracy can be reversed. We need to adjust to the unpalatable thought that Trumpism may be a longer-term phenomenon than we think. Although he’s ageing and displaying unmistakable signs of cognitive decay, so we should be paying more attention to J.D. Vance, who is hale and hearty and may be president sooner than we think.
Can liberal democracy be saved? In principle, maybe. But it would require pretty radical changes to revitalise democracies that have been hollowed out by capitalism. And democracies are slow-moving beasts, as David Runciman pointed out years ago. More ominously, though, history suggests that fundamental social change happens only through two processes — revolution or war. The explosion in liberal democracies that we have grown up with was a reaction to the cataclysmic horrors of the Second World War, as Tony Judt demonstrated so vividly in his book Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. It has become our ‘normal’, something to be taken for granted. But what we are now discovering is that it’s much more fragile than we realised. And it may not last.
Which leads to a really nightmarish thought. If humans endure for another millennium, might future historians looking back at our period see the post-war proliferation of liberal democracies not as an enduring phenomenon, but as a statistical blip in the history of governance? So might it be time to begin re-reading Thomas Hobbes?
The fevered speculation about what Trump will do when he takes office in January is already in overdrive. He has said really wild things during the campaign — including proposing to round up and deport 20 million ‘illegal’ immigrants, prosecuting and imprisoning Joe Biden and the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, firing tens of thousands of civil servants and so on. Some people have taken comfort from the thought that much of this stuff is too wild to be realistic. After all, as a friend put it to me, “last time he wasn’t able even to build that bloody wall!”.
As Francis Fukuyama put it in the FT at the weekend, “The real question at this point is not the malignity of his intentions, but rather his ability to carry out what he threatens.” It would require, for example, “years of investment in the infrastructure necessary to carry it out — detention centres, immigration control agents, courts and so on.” And then I open the Sunday Times yesterday and find the front page story on how the guy Trump proposes to put in charge of the operation describes his plans for carrying it out. And then I remember from reading Richard Evans’s fascinating new book that the original Nazi idea in the 1930s was to force Jews to emigrate, and it was only when that proved slow and inefficient that they built an infrastructure for achieving the same objective by different means.
Predicting how Trump’s second term will play out is a mug’s game, but there is one racing certainty: there will be tariff wars which will have predictable consequences, most of them bad. And interestingly, this is not because Trump — as Will Dunn puts it in the New Statesman — has “bought a copy of Eighteenth-Century Mercantilism For Dummies” but because just about the only issue on which he has been consistent since he first broke cover in the 1980s is… tariffs. “This is the thread”, wrote Janan Ganesh in the FT, “that runs through his more than four decades on the public record: an intense belief that to run a current account deficit with another nation is to ‘lose’ to it.” And now he believes that by imposing much higher tariffs on imports he can force companies to return manufacturing jobs to the US — which is bad news for the UK, whose biggest single trading partner happens to be the US. (The EU is, of course more important, but that’s a trading bloc.)

Er, that’s it. If you have been, thanks for reading.

Those images of Spain’s floods that went viralYesterday’s Observer column:

My eye was caught by a striking photograph in the most recent edition of Charles Arthur’s Substack newsletter Social Warming. It shows a narrow street in the aftermath of the “rain bomb” that devastated the region of Valencia in Spain. A year’s worth of rain fell in a single day, and in some towns more than 490 litres a square metre fell in eight hours. Water is very heavy, so if there’s a gradient it will flow downhill with the kind of force that can pick up a heavy SUV and toss it around like a toy. And if it channels down a narrow urban street, it will throw parked cars around like King Kong in a bad mood.

The photograph in Arthur’s article showed what had happened in a particular street. Taken with a telephoto lens from an upper storey of a building, it showed a chaotic and almost surreal scene: about 70 vehicles of all sizes jumbled up and scattered at crazy angles along the length of the street.

It was an astonishing image which really stopped me in my tracks. Not surprisingly, it also went viral on social media. And then came the reaction: “AI image, fake news.”

Read on

My commonplace bookletThe Berlin Wall Never Fell

We (me included) often use the phrase “after the Berlin Wall came down” as shorthand when writing about Gorbachev, the end of communism, the collapse of the USSR, etc. So this blog post by the historian Timothy Snyder comes as an embarrassing reproof.

In summer and autumn 1989, amidst Gorbachev’s perestroika and reforms and gestures among neighboring communist countries, East Germans were finding ways to visit or to emigrate to West Germany. The East German regime, in turmoil itself amid protests, was trying to formulate a new set of rules for the border. Amidst a great deal of confusion, a regime spokesman seemed to announce, in response to a question by an Italian journalist, that the border posts at the wall would allow East Germans to depart for the West.

That was on November 9th, 1989. The Berlin Wall did not topple over because of that press conference. What happened was that tens of thousands of East Berliners took advantage of the pronouncement and crowded the border checkpoints, one of which eventually opened. People rushed through to forbidden West Berlin, where they were greeted with champagne and flowers. It was a night that changed the history of Germany, which would unify less than a year later.

But no wall actually fell. People eventually clambered on it, and chipped off pieces of it…

They did, and I have a piece of it on the window-sill of my study as I write this. It was given to me by a journalistic colleague who had been sent to Berlin by our newspaper to report on the story. Sigh.

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Wheels within Wheels

Quote of the Day

”The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

Flannery O’Connor

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsVaughan Williams | How cold the wind doth blow | Ellen Leslie, soprano

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Long Read of the Day Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are

This remarkable essay by Carlos Ozada appeared in the New York Times on Wednesday. It captures the central, unpalatable message of the Trump victory, which is that the America the readers of the NYT live in is not the real America. The piece is behind the Times paywall but the link is a gift one, so it should work for most readers. If it doesn’t, you can find the text on Robert Reich’s Substack.

It’s a perceptive piece, worth reading in full. But here’s the nub of it:

The Harris campaign, as the Biden campaign before it, labored under the misapprehension that more exposure to Trump would repel voters. They must simply have forgotten the mayhem of his presidency, the distaste that the former president surely inspired. “I know Donald Trump’s type,” Harris reminded us, likening him to the crooks and predators she’d battled as a California prosecutor. She even urged voters to watch Trump’s rallies — to witness his line-crossing, norm-obliterating moments — as if doing so would inoculate the electorate against him.

It didn’t. America knew his type, too, and it liked it. Trump’s disinhibition spoke to and for his voters. He won because of it, not despite it. His critics have long argued that he is just conning his voters — making them feel that he’s fighting for them when he’s just in it for himself and his wealthy allies — but part of Trump’s appeal is that his supporters recognize the con, that they feel that they’re in on it.

Books, etc.After Trump won in 2016 this book was the most interesting thing I read. It’s a searing critique of the Democratic Party in which Frank argues that, in failing to curb growing economic inequality, the left in America had abandoned its roots to pursue a new class of supporter — college-educated elite professionals.

That lesson failed to land. But people had noticed that the people Obama — a Democratic president — reached for in 2008 to rescue the banks were the self-same elite professionals who had caused the crisis. And maybe then they started to wonder whose side the Democrats were on.

My commonplace bookletWhat happens if Americans claim asylum from a Trump regime?

A sobering post by Chris Bertram on the wonderful Crooked Timber blog.

Donald Trump has made very public threats to persecute his political opponents should he be re-elected and statements by him and by other leading Republicans suggests that he might persecute others on the grounds of their religion or their membership of certain social groups. If this were happen (rather than simply being bluster) then it could turn out, very soon, that some US citizens will find themselves outside of their country, with a well-founded fear of persecution on grounds outlined in the 1951 Refugee Convention, and on the territory of a state signatory of the Convention. Some of those states will also be allies of the US through NATO and other treaties and will have extradition treaties with the US. In which case what might happen?

Bertram then outlines four possibilities for Americans fleeing persecution or prosecution by Trump’s agencies.

The basic pattern, he says, is clear:

Liberal democratic states allied to the US would face a choice between their state interests as allies of the US on the one hand and upholding the right to asylum and defending liberal democratic values on the other. Nobody can be confident about what would happen in practice. If I were a US dissident, I would choose my place of asylum carefully.

Although it’s not a parallel, the case of Julian Assange comes immediately to mind.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Watch SpaceX Catch A Starship Booster In Air An astonishing video of a SpaceX booster rocket returning to its nest. (The ‘boosting’ in this case is providing propulsion of a rocket into space, not boosting Musk into the Trump administration.)

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Presidential doodlesDwight Eisenhower (34th President of the US) seems to have been quite a good artist, as the nice detail in this doodle suggests.

(From Presidential Doodles: Two Centuries of Scribbles, Scratches, Squiggles and Scrawls from the Oval Office.)

Quote of the Day

“LLMs are quite good at reproducing culture, but not so good at introducing cultural variation.”

Alison Gopnik

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBob Dylan | A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

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Seems prescient when listened to 62 years after it was first recorded.

Long Read of the DayWhat comes after Moore’s Law? Why, Huang’s Law, of course…

…and why that might not be such good news.

Last Sunday’s Observer column:

Although Moore’s “law” was bound to run out of steam eventually, it shaped an entire industry and – more importantly – changed the way we thought about computing. In particular, it fostered a hubristic mindset: confidence that if a problem could be solved by computing, if today’s machines weren’t powerful enough, Moore’s law guaranteed that it would be soluble really soon.

As the ancient Greeks knew only too well, after hubris comes nemesis. In the computing world it came in the computational needs of machine learning, which were orders of magnitude greater than those of more conventional serial processing – computing in sequence, one thing at a time (albeit at astonishing speeds). In one of those happy accidents, there was a part of the computer industry – gaming, which needed processors that could do several calculations simultaneously, or “in parallel” – to ensure that fast-changing scenes could be rendered realistically. And one particular company, Nvidia, was a prominent caterer to this esoteric requirement by providing what became known as graphics processing units (GPUs).

At some point, Jensen Huang, a smart cookie who is the founder and chief executive of Nvidia, realised that his company had the technology that the burgeoning new field of machine learning (afterwards rebranded AI) needed, and he pivoted his entire company to focus on it. The rest, as they say, is history. Irrational exuberance about AI took over the tech industry, fuelling a gold rush in which Huang was the premier supplier of picks and shovels, and his company is now the second most valuable corporation on the planet, just behind Apple…

Read on

Books, etc.On glutinous prose

Julian Barnes has a lovely review of Adam D. Zientek’s book, A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front, in the current edition of theLRB. His review contains the following passage:

Zientek is a professor of history with a strong sociological approach. His preface contains this forbidding statement of intent: ‘The model I propose to elaborate below is this: the alcohol supplied by the French army generated shared interoceptive and affective sensations that were then interpreted through culturally learned and contextually bound intoxication concepts, making for distinct and entraining emotional experience and group behaviours that tended to bolster the war effort.’ It’s tempting (if facetious) to rephrase this as: ‘French soldiers liked to get pissed with their mates, and it was good for morale.’

The book, says Barnes, “features tracts of prose as glutinous as Flanders mud”. And it makes one wonder why Humanities scholars write such constipated prose in a book ostensibly aimed at the general reader (what academics disdainfully call “trade books”).

Many years ago, I succeeded Julian as the Observer’s TV critic. Reading this review (or indeed anything he writes), you can see what a hard act he was to follow.

My commonplace bookletDarwin and Dawkins: a tale of two biologists

The Economist has an informative review (probably paywalled) of Richard Dawkins’s intriguing new book — his 19th!

Its working hypothesis is that modern organisms are, indeed, like books, but of a particular, peculiar, variety. Dr Dawkins uses the analogy of palimpsests: the parchments scraped and reused by medieval scribes that accidentally preserved enough traces of their previous content for the older text to be discerned.

At the moment, only fragments of the overwritten messages of these biological palimpsests can be parsed. A human genome, for example, contains many “pseudogenes” that once encoded proteins related to the sense of smell, but which have now been disabled because, presumably, they are no longer needed in an animal whose dominant sense is vision. Similarly (and more familiarly), a human spine’s ancestral role as a suspension bridge from which the body hangs, rather than as a pillar that holds it upright, is clear from the compromises in its modern structure.

Dr Dawkins’s contention is that, by proper scrutiny of genetics and anatomy, a scientist armed with the tools of the future will be able to draw far more sophisticated and connected inferences than these. This will then illuminate parts of evolutionary history that are currently invisible.

As an analogy, describing organisms as palimpsests is a bit of a stretch. A palimpsest’s original text is unrelated to its new one, rather than being an earlier version of it, so it can tell you nothing about how the later text was composed. But that quibble aside, the tantalising idea is that reading genomes for their history is an endeavour that may form the basis of a new science.

What I like about Dawkins is his fearlessness, which I guess is why someone once described him as “Darwin’s Rottweiler”, and echo of the soubriquet given to TH Huxley of “Darwin’s Bulldog”.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Rolls Royce has finally given up on internal combustion and gone electric. Its new ‘Sceptre’ EV will set you back $420,000 without extras, and on a good day you’ll get up to 266 miles from its 102kWh battery.

The Verge was granted an audience with the beast. Here’s a sample from the review.

It’s a rolling cocoon made inherently anti-acoustic thanks to the tireless work of some surely big-eared scientists. So, to inject a little more life into the driving experience, the Spectre plays a little digital tone when you accelerate.

Yes, nearly every modern EV emits some kind of synthetic whir or trill when you get on the accelerator — but nothing like the Spectre. This car makes the kind of sound that you would expect to hear when an omniscient, all-powerful alien force swoops through the clouds in a sci-fi movie, the gut-shaking tone backing the moment when everyone realizes that humanity is about to get served.

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American optionsScreenshot

This is a flow-chart that the economist and blogger John Quiggin drew up on the Crooked Timber blog to help him think about the various possible paths that the US could follow after tomorrow’s presidential election. The diamonds denote decision nodes — points in the process where things could go either way — and the numbers on the arrows coming out of the nodes represent the probability of that outcome happening. I’m not sure about the logic behind the numbers in bold type beside the various destination boxes. Quiggin says they are the (cumulative) probability of reaching that box. The numbers next to arrows coming out of decision nodes (diamonds) are the probability of that decision.

The chart doesn’t include all the possible decision-nodes that might emerge. But it’s an interesting way of thinking about what could happen. And the only unproblematic path is the vertical one on the left.

Quote of the Day

”If history has a lesson, it is that we don’t learn from it.”

Stephen Bush, FT, 19/20 October, 2024

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsDvorak | Symphony No. 9 “From the New World” | 3rd movement | Wiener Phil and Karajan

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Long Read of the DayRituals of Childhood

A remarkable (and sobering) essay by Kieran Healy which explains why one might not want to bring up children in the US now.

Sociologists like me often highlight these rituals of childhood in our writing and teaching. One of the founders of our field, Émile Durkheim, made them the centerpiece of his work. Institutions, he argued, are rituals that bind people to one another as a group. In a ritual, each person finds their place and does their part, and expects everyone else to do the same. Crucially, those involved all see one another participating in the event. By doing so, they enact their collective life in view of one another, demonstrating its reality, expressing its meaning, and feeling its pulse in their veins. That, Durkheim thought, is at root what a society is.

In any given week in America, you can watch as a different ritual of childhood plays itself out. Perhaps it will be in El Paso, at a shopping mall; or in Gilroy, at a food festival; or in Denver, at a school. Having heard gunshots, and been lucky enough to survive, children emerge to be shepherded to safety by their parents, their teachers, or heavily-armed police officers…

Do read it.

Books, etc.Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be

We were talking about the power of nostalgia in contemporary politics and my friend Gerard told me about this novel which won the Booker Prize in 2023. The blurb is intriguing. Here’s an excerpt:

An enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a ‘clinic for the past’ that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time.

As Gaustine’s assistant, the unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a ‘time shelter’, hoping to escape from the horrors of our present – a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present.

It seems timely. One reviewer wrote that “Gospodinov’s vision of tomorrow is the nightmare from which Europe knows it must awake”. That struck a chord with me. As the first videos of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began to appear, my first thought was they they were reminiscent of the celluloid newsreels of 1940 — shattered buildings, rubble-strewn streets, shell-shocked people — except this time the ‘newsreels’ were in colour. And I remember thinking that Europe’s long post-war holiday from history is over.

So, of course, I’ve ordered a copy.

My commonplace bookletLast week Andrew Sullivan asked “Does Liberal Democracy End Next Week?” — and came up with a definite maybe.

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Listening to the UniverseA radio telescope of the astronomy lab at Lord’s Bridge near Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”A writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own — that is, the written word. All the honours he may receive expose his readers to a pressure I do not consider desirable.”

Jean-Paul Sartre explaining his refusal to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJ.S. Bach | Double Violin Concerto in D minor – 2nd Movement, Largo Ma Non Tanto (BWV 1043)

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Long Read of the DayIs Donald Trump a fascist?

The question on everyone’s mind. Here’s David Runciman’s take on it. As ever, he’s judicious. Here’s a sample:

In Paxton’s 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism, he identified a willingness to summon up the violence of the streets to intimidate and if necessary overpower established institutions as a defining characteristic. It is what distinguishes fascism from other kinds of authoritarianism. Illiberal authoritarians invariably want to control government institutions but they aim to do so from the inside by bending them to their will. They are wary of conjuring up an independent source of power in violent paramilitaries and other kinds of street politics. True fascists such as Mussolini and Hitler have no such compunction. Their political authority was built on establishing parallel party structures – from the Blackshirts to the SS – willing to bypass the institutions of the state whenever necessary and answerable to the leader personally. It is what marked them out from other dictators of the period. Stalin in the Soviet Union simply replaced state institutions with their Bolshevik equivalents, which monopolised all political coercion. Franco in Spain worked with existing state institutions – and the Catholic church – to keep a lid on political chaos. Hitler and Mussolini called up the chaos of untamed violence when it suited them.

In that respect, Project 2025 is not a fascist document. It has a lot more in common with the governing philosophy of illiberal authoritarians such as Victor Orbán in Hungary, including in its strong embrace of traditional Christian values. Its approach is more consistent with the goal of getting sympathetic judges on the courts than a private militia into gear…

Do read the whole piece. I can’t help thinking, though, that the terminological argument about whether Trump fits the definition is beside the point — which is that he is very bad news for the US and for the world

Books, etc.Screenshot

I finished reading Richard Evans’s book and went to the launch event for it in my College last night. I found the book compulsively readable and informative — but also disquieting because earlier in the week I had watched (a) a BBC Panorama report based on travelling to Trump rallies with some of his most dedicated fans, and (b) watching a video of his Madison Square Garden rally. In both I heard and saw echoes of the behaviour of Hitler and his entourage, right down to the use of the ‘blood libel’ of immigrants “poisoning the blood” of ‘real’ Americans (whoever they may be). The overwhelming impression I had, though, was that Trump worship has the overtones of a personality cult, much as public worship of Hitler was.

My commonplace bookletFrom Charlie Warzel…

”Only Musk can know what he thought he was buying two years ago, though it seems clear the purchase was ideological in nature. In any case, the true value of X—the specific, chaotic return on his investment—has become readily apparent in these teeth-gnashing final days leading up to November 5. For Musk, the platform has become a useful political weapon of confusion, a machine retrofitted to poison the information environment by filling it with dangerous, false, and unsubstantiated rumors about election fraud that can reach mass audiences. How much does it cost to successfully (to use Steve Bannon’s preferred phrasing) flood the zone with shit? Thanks to Musk’s acquisition, we can put a figure on it: $44 billion.”

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

AI datacenters are keeping coal-fired power stations busy

From The Register:

With AI still the hot new trend, demand for compute to operate it is pushing the growth of bit barn capacity along with the need for ever more energy to power it all. This growth is having some unintended effects, at least in America.

In Omaha, one power company has had to abandon plans to stop burning coal to produce electricity because of the need to serve demand from nearby datacenters, according to The Washington Post, picking out Google and Meta in particular.

It claims that rising energy demands from those facilities mean that two coal-burning generators at the North Omaha power plant cannot be decommissioned without risking a power shortage for that district…

But don’t fret: According to Sam Altman & Co, AI will ‘solve’ climate change in due course.

Yeah, and pigs will fly in close formation.

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Autumn bouquetWhat an imaginative gardener can rustle up in a few minutes, just before dinner guests arrive.

Quote of the Day

”Democracy is not a spectator sport. It’s not what governments do. Democracy is what people do.”

Robert Reich

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsVaughan Williams | Symphony no. 5 in D. 3rd movement | “Romanza”

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Sometimes, in times like this, you just need music like this to wash over you. It was premiered in 1943, in the middle of wartime, in the Albert Hall. I can imagine the impact it must have had on an audience traumatised by war.

Long Read of the DayElon Musk is not the only tech bro to worry about

My OpEd in the Observer of Sunday 20 October.

Way back in the 1960s “the personal is political” was a powerful slogan capturing the reality of power dynamics within marriages. Today, an equally meaningful slogan might be that “the technological is political”, to reflect the way that a small number of global corporations have acquired political clout within liberal democracies. If anyone doubted that, then the recent appearance of Elon Musk alongside Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania provided useful confirmation of how technology has moved centre-stage in American politics. Musk may be a manchild with a bad tweeting habit, but he also owns the company that is providing internet connectivity to Ukrainian troops on the battlefield; and his rocket has been chosen by Nasa to be the vehicle to land the next Americans on the moon…

Read on

Later Having seen how Musk has gone all-in for Trump, though, I now think he’s the most dangerous tech mogul in history.

Books, etc.I’ve just finished reading Pauline Terreehörst’s riveting book on what she discovered in — and from — a vintage Gucci suitcase she bought at Sotheby’s in 2016. I’m hosting an event in my college (Wolfson) on Friday evening to celebrate the publication of the English edition, in which Pauline will be in conversation with Nicci Gerrard, the co-author of the Nicci French series of psychological thrillers. If you’re in Cambridge on Friday why not come along? To register, just click here.

My commonplace bookletOn a subject that’s of perennial interest — not just to me, but to some readers and colleagues — namely how to focus on what needs to be done when there are innumerable items clamouring for attention. I’m a fan of Dave Allen’s bible Getting Things Done — to the extent that I even bought and use a software package called Omnifocus which implements the Allen method on all my (Apple) devices.

I first heard about him from Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve), who is the most productive person I’ve ever met. So when I saw a recent blog post by him about a trick he has invented for keeping track of things that the Allen method doesn’t really help with, I jumped to attention. Cory calls it “Keeping a Suspense File.

While good to-do lists can take you very far in life, they have a hard limit: other people. Almost every ambitious thing you want to do involves someone else’s contribution. Even the most solitary of projects can be derailed if your tax accountant misses a key email and you end up getting audited or paying a huge penalty.

That’s where the other kind of GTD list comes in: the list of things you’re waiting for from other people. I used to be assiduous in maintaining this list, but then the pandemic struck and no one was meeting any of their commitments, and I just gave up on it, and never went back…until about a month ago. Returning to these lists (they’re sometimes called “suspense files”) made me realize how many of the problems – some hugely consequential – in my life could have been avoided if I’d just gone back to this habit earlier.

My suspense file is literally just some lines partway down a text file that lives on my desktop called todo.txt that has all my to-dos as well…

Smart idea. I’ve shamelessly copied it.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Skyscraper-high sewage plume erupts in Moscow When I saw this headline in The Register I thought it must be a spoof. But no. See the video for yourself.

ErrataApologies for the various errors in Monday’s edition, and thanks to those who spotted them quickly.

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Westward Ho!Donegal coast, Ireland.

Quote of the Day

Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.”

Michel Foucault

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBird Song | The Wailin’ Jennys

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Long Read of the DayBack to the Thirties

Way back in 2015, David Runciman and I had a small research project in Cambridge on “technology and democracy” which was about trying to figure out what the implications of digital technology might be for democracy. (Spoiler alert: the prospects were not good.) This little project was the inspiration for the Minderoo Centre for Technology that I co-founded with Steve Connor in 2020; but another major outcome was David’s book, How Democracy Ends, which came out in 2019.

In it, David argued that liberal democracy will end eventually, but when we think about how it might end we shouldn’t assume that the failure mode will be like earlier periods of failure — military coups, revolutions etc. When it fails, he argued, democracy will fail forward in novel and unexpected ways. For that reason, it was no good looking back to the past for lessons — say to Germany in the 1930s, as many people were doing after Trump won in 2016.

At the time, I found that reassuring, but now I don’t. The reason? I’ve been reading Richard Evans’s new book, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich which is on the one hand spellbinding and on the other hand alarming because of the eerie echoes of it that one hears in what is currently going on in the US. A while back I saw the beginnings of an odious parallel between the way tech titans were starting to cosy up to Trump, and how the corporate giants of inter-war Germany started to line up behind Hitler. (I wrote an OpEd about this in the Observer on October 20.)

Then on Saturday morning I wake up to discover that both the Washington Post and the LA Times have decided that they will not endorse a candidate in the upcoming election. I find that really chilling; it means that two powerful and wealthy newspaper proprietors are second-guessing the outcome of the election; they think that Trump might win and don’t want to be on the wrong side of him when he does.

Like the directors of I.G. Farben and its corporate ilk in the 1930s, these folks have skin in the game. The owner of the Post, for example, is Jeff Bezos, who has a spacecraft business and hopes to suck on the teats of the federal government in that context. He is probably incensed that a rival spacecraft hustler, Elon Musk, (who has been sucking on the aforesaid teats for some years) has now gone the whole hog and is vigorously campaigning for Trump in Pennsylvania, the state that could well decide the outcome of the election. Characteristically, though, Musk currently sees Trump as a kind of useful idiot (aka Trojan horse) for his own imperial delusions — just like von Papen and others in the 1930s thought that Hitler could be their idiot.

The historian Tim Snyder, who — like Richard Evans — is an expert on Nazi Germany. On Saturday he posted a sobering short video about the newspapers’ decision on his blog. It’s four minutes long and worth watching, but if you’re stretched for time, here’s a lightly-edited transcript:

I’m thinking today about the First lesson of On Tyranny, which is: do not obey in advance. The reason why that’s the first lesson is that, for me, it’s the first thing that we should be remembering, the first thing we should be learning from the horrors of the 20th century, that each of us does have some responsibility, and perhaps the wealthy and the powerful, maybe just a tiny bit more.

The reason why this is the lesson of the 20/20 century, the reason why it’s the first lesson in On Tyranny, is this: those who work on the Nazi period, the period of the Nazi takeover, know that much of Hitler’s rise to power had to do with people making adjustments in 1933 and 1934 — people anticipating what he would want from them and then going halfway.

A very similar lesson was drawn by the anti-communist dissidents of the 1970s who realized that every little thing that we do has consequences for those around us. They counselled as well, not to obey in advance, but to instead live as if we were free.

I have all this in mind, of course, because of these decisions by newspapers owned by very wealthy Americans not to endorse a presidential candidate. I gotta say, this strikes me as ignoring the essential thing that we were supposed to have learned from the 20th century — which is, in circumstances like these, do not obey in advance. If what you do is based on your anticipation — as it so obviously is — that an authoritarian might be about to come to power, and what you are doing is making it more likely that that authoritarian will come to power, and since you have already made concessions before he came to power, you’re preparing yourself for making more concessions after he comes to power.

And what’s worse, if you’re in a position of wealth and power yourself, you’re discouraging all the other people who are less wealthy and less powerful; and aside from being politically wrong and morally outrageous this is just simply unfair, because it puts the burden on taking action to those who are less fortunate than you, puts them in the position of having to be more courageous than you. And of course, what it really means when someone who’s wealthy and powerful makes adjustments, obeys in advance, what it really means is that they think, “Well, I’m going to be fine when democracy dies in darkness, I’m going to enjoy the shadows”. That’s what it really means.

So for all these reasons, this is outrageous. I hope these decisions will be changed, and regardless of that, I hope that the rest of us will keep in mind that we ought not to be obeying in advance. What we do always matters. What we do in the next few days matters a great deal, and the fact that people are obeying in advance is just a sign of how great the threat, really is. So, let’s all do what we can again.

Tim Snyder 25 October 1024, Oklahoma City.

The aphrodisiac effect of obscene wealthThe megalomaniacs who control X and Facebook are only able to pollute the public sphere and undermine democracy because of our deference to money

Yesterday’s Observer column:

There are two kinds of aphrodisiac. The first is power. A good example was provided by the late Henry Kissinger, who could hardly be described as toothsome yet was doted upon by a host of glamorous women.

The other powerful aphrodisiac is immense wealth. This has all kinds of effects. It makes people (even journalists who should know better) deferential, presumably because they subscribe to the delusion that if someone is rich then they must be clever. But its effects on the rich person are more profound: it cuts them off from reality. When they travel, writes Jack Self in an absorbing essay: “The car takes them to the aerodrome, where the plane takes them to another aerodrome, where a car takes them to the destination (with perhaps a helicopter inserted somewhere). Every journey is bookended by identical Mercedes Vito Tourers (gloss black, tinted windows). Every flight is within the cosy confines of a Cessna Citation (or a King Air or Embraer)… The ultra-rich never wait in line at a carousel or a customs table or a passport control. There are no accidental encounters. No unwelcome, unapproved or unsanitary humans enter their sight – no souls that could espouse a foreign view. The ultra-rich do not see anything they do not want to see.”

Mr Self estimates that there are currently 2,781 of these gilded creatures in the world. He divides them into two kinds: “self-made” and “second gen”…

Read on

My commonplace bookletFrom Nicholas Harris, writing in this week’s New Statesman:

”A sort of Weimar without the sex”, was how Christopher Hitchens unimprovably described joyless Britain in the late 1970s. The country has returned to a similar condition of bleak, stagnant ungovernability over the past few years. The least we might have expected is a debauched youth subculture to accompany it – even if not quite to the degeneracy of 1920s Berlin. Instead, the old dynamic has recurred, and even by English standards the nation seems locked in a condition of anti-festivity.

This week, new findings from the Night Time Industries Association found that clubbing could be “extinct” by end of the 2020s, with 37 per cent of venues having permanently shut since March 2020.”

Don’t you just love the idea of a ‘Night Time Industries Association’? It’s a bit like the Amalgamated Union of Underwater Basket-Weavers and Muff Divers, one of my favourite trade unions.

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Picture at an exhibitionAt the terrific Paris 1924 exhibition in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

And Moussorgsky was nowhere to be seen.

Quote of the Day

“In a nutshell: companies are artificial social constructs that offload all their externalities onto the state they are embedded in.”

Charlie Stross (Whom God Preserve)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMike Oldfield | She Moved Through the Fair

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Interesting take on a venerable Irish tune.

Long Read of the DayThe Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think

Perceptive and thought-provoking Noema essay by Shannon Vallor.

Today’s generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini are routinely described as heralding the imminent arrival of “superhuman” artificial intelligence. Far from a harmless bit of marketing spin, the headlines and quotes trumpeting our triumph or doom in an era of superhuman AI are the refrain of a fast-growing, dangerous and powerful ideology. Whether used to get us to embrace AI with unquestioning enthusiasm or to paint a picture of AI as a terrifying specter before which we must tremble, the underlying ideology of “superhuman” AI fosters the growing devaluation of human agency and autonomy and collapses the distinction between our conscious minds and the mechanical tools we’ve built to mirror them.

Today’s powerful AI systems lack even the most basic features of human minds; they do not share with humans what we call consciousness or sentience, the related capacity to feel things like pain, joy, fear and love. Nor do they have the slightest sense of their place and role in this world, much less the ability to experience it. They can answer the questions we choose to ask, paint us pretty pictures, generate deepfake videos and more. But an AI tool is dark inside…

This is a refreshing perspective on the current ballyhoo about ‘super intelligence’. Shannon is pointing out that the tech industry’s conception of a’ human’ — as in ‘superhuman’ — is basically that of a faceless operative who is currently a sub-optimal performer in the ‘efficiency’ stakes. The goal of the AGI evangelists is simply to build machines that match or outperform us on a vast array of economically valuable tasks.

Books, etc.Further to the above… Shannon Valor has an interesting new book out — which I’m currently reading.

My commonplace bookletMany years ago, when the only computer to which I had access was a DEC Vax (of beloved memory) I thought that I would know that ‘AI’ had really arrived when a machine could write plausible excuses. Little did I know that one of Alan Turing’s colleagues, Christopher Strachey, had long ago written a program that wrote love-letters. The code is still on Github, but you can try it out here. So I did.

Hmmm… Room for improvement, as my headmaster would have said. But apparently Turing and Strachey would print these out and leave them around the Lab just to see what would happen.

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Ireland’s Lake DistrictThe view from Aghadoe Heights over Killarney.

Quote of the Day

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”

Albert Einstein.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news‘Fairytale of New York’ played at Shane MacGowan’s funeral

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Shane McGowan’s funeral in Dublin was never going to be a staid affair, and so it proved.

Long Read of the DayThe American historian Heather Cox Richardson was one of the first big stars on Substack. Her Letter from an American remains a must-read for anyone interested in the madness going on over there, because she writes calmly and brings to bear her wide knowledge and historical perspective on every subject she touches. Tuesday’s edition of her blog was particularly gripping and revelatory. It starts with J.D. Vance’s persistent lying in the vice-presidential debate and then goes back to a gripping account of what went on in the run-up to the ‘insurrection’ on January 6, 2021.

Here’s an extended sample that gives a flavour of the essay.

By late November, neither the legal challenges nor the threats had worked. So in early December the conspirators decided to get the people who would have been the electors if Trump had won to sign certifications saying that they were the legitimate electors and were casting their electoral votes for Trump. The lawyer who came up with the plan, Ken Chesebro, admitted that “the votes aren’t legal” but thought Congress could use them to challenge the real votes.

Many of the electors were wary of the plan, but Trump and his conspirators managed to get the slates of fake electors on December 14, the appointed day for real electors to meet. The plan was for Vice President Mike Pence, who as president of the Senate would preside over the counting of the electoral votes, to use the fake electors to say there were competing slates of electors and thus to “negotiate a solution to defeat Biden.” On December 19, Trump posted: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6. Be there, will be wild!”

But the plan hit a snag. Pence maintained he did not have the power to do any such thing. The more Pence refused, the more insistent Trump became. After another argument on January 1, 2021, Trump told Pence that “hundreds of thousands of people are going to hate your guts,” “people are gonna think you’re stupid,” and, finally, “You’re too honest.”

Trump, Bannon, and Trump’s lawyers all continued to pressure Pence, and Bannon normalized the plan on his podcast. Trump continued to talk publicly of fighting to make sure his opponents didn’t take the White House and continued to pressure Pence. On January 5—the day before the election certification proceeding—he talked to Bannon, and less than two hours later, on his podcast, Bannon told his listeners: “All Hell is going to break loose tomorrow” in Washington, D.C.

Concerned at Trump’s escalating fury at Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short alerted Pence’s secret service detail…

You get the point. Do read it.

Books, etc.This arrived yesterday. I knew that Kissinger had been thinking about AI for a while, but not that he was working on a book with the former CEO of Google and a former senior Microsoft executive. It’s now on my list. Strange title, though.

My commonplace bookletHow Hurricane Helene became a monster storm.

Great report in The Verge. I particularly liked a quote from Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who “likens the effect of climate change to the world having a weakened immune system. ‘It doesn’t mean that you will become sick. It just increases your tendency to become sick’”.

In a British tabloid the headline would have been “A Perfect Storm”.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

London saw a surprising benefit to fining high-polluting cars: More active kids Link

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ColourSometimes, B&W just doesn’t cut it!

Quote of the Day

“I’m very careful to only predict things which have already happened.”

Marshall McLuhan

Great advice for anyone covering the tech industry.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsThe Band | I Shall Be Released (The Last Waltz)

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Wonderful album.

Long Read of the DayJimmy Carter’s First Century.

He was 100 yesterday. James Fallows — a great journalist who had once been Carter’s speechwriter — had a nice essay on his blog looking back on his life, times and fate.

On October 1, 1924, James Earl Carter Jr. was born in the small southwestern Georgia town of Plains. It was a different world. Calvin Coolidge was in office, as the 30th US president. Electricity had not yet come to the rural South, which was still officially segregated and the scene of lynchings. Radio broadcasts were in their infancy. TV did not exist. The most popular US car was the Ford Model T.

Today, October 1, 2024, the 39th US president, Jimmy Carter, turns 100. He is by far the longest-tenured former president, having spent nearly 44 years in that role. In distant second place is Herbert Hoover, who lived for 31 years after he left office. Five others former presidents—John Adams, Hoover, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and the first George Bush—survived into their early 90s. Only Carter has made it this far.

Early last year, when Carter announced that he was entering hospice care, I wrote an appreciation of his time in and out of public office, for The Atlantic. I had worked for Carter as a speechwriter during his 1976 campaign and then as chief speechwriter for his first two years in office. With the magazine’s permission I quoted the story on this site when it first came out. Nineteen months later, on the occasion of Carter’s centennial, I do so again. I have updated two or three date references but otherwise have left this unchanged. I think it stands up…

It does. Carter — like Joe Biden — played a bad hand well. But the Iranian hostage crisis did for him, largely I think because an ambitious rescue effort failed when one of the helicopters crashed. He later used to say that he came within one broken helicopter of re-election!

Books, etc.John Steinbeck’s tips on writing

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it — bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

From Steinbeck: A Life in Letters.

My commonplace bookletI love fountain pens and whenever possible write with one. (I also collect them.) One day, some years ago, Victoria Smith, a talented artist friend, looked at my open notebook and became fascinated by the sheet of blotting paper lying in it and asked if should could have it. She later asked for some more of blotter sheets, and I readily but (puzzedly) complied. And then, one day, she sent me a note to say they had featured in an exhibition of her work! This was one of them.

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Mellow fruitfulnessOur small vineyard is coming along nicely.

Quote of the Day

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”

Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsFredrik Pacius | Studentsång

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It’s in Finnish (obviously), but I think it’s a student song for Mayday.

Long Read of the DayAsking the wrong questions

Lovely essay by Benedict Evans arguing that “with fundamental technology change, we don’t so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things”.

The essay opens with a story about his grandfather, Will Jenkins.

In 1946, by which time he’d become a notable writer of science fiction, he published a story called ‘A Logic named Joe’, which described a global computer network with servers and terminals, that starts giving people the information that it thinks they ought to know as opposed to waiting for them to search for it – the Singularity, if you like, or maybe just Alexa. He also, as I recall, predicted reality TV somewhere.

And yet, despite predicting half of our world, as a father in the 1950s he could not imagine why his daughter – my mother – wanted to work.

This isn’t an uncommon observation – plenty of people have pointed out that vintage scifi is full of rocketships but all the pilots are men. 1950s scifi shows 1950s society, but with robots. Meanwhile, the interstellar liners have paper tickets, that you queue up to buy. With fundamental technology change, we don’t so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things. (And, of course, we now have neither trolleys nor personal gliders.)

I was reminded of this photo recently when I came across a RAND ‘long-range forecasting’ study, from 1964…

Do read on. Evans is an elegant, thoughtful writer, and one of the most acute observers of the tech industry.

It’s useful that Strawberry can ‘think’, but we need to know its reasoningYesterday’s Observer column

It’s nearly two years since OpenAI released ChatGPT on an unsuspecting world, and the world, closely followed by the stock market, lost its mind. All over the place, people were wringing their hands wondering: What This Will Mean For [enter occupation, industry, business, institution].

Within academia, for example, humanities professors agonised about how they would henceforth be able to grade essays if students were using ChatGPT or similar technology to help write them. The answer, of course, is to come up with better ways of grading, because students will use these tools for the simple reason that it would be idiotic not to – just as it would be daft to do budgeting without spreadsheets. But universities are slow-moving beasts and even as I write, there are committees in many ivory towers solemnly trying to formulate “policies on AI use”.

As they deliberate, though, the callous spoilsports at OpenAI have unleashed another conundrum for academia – a new type of large language model (LLM) that can – allegedly – do “reasoning”. They’ve christened it OpenAI o1, but since internally it was known as Strawberry we will stick with that…

Read on

Books, etc.From the blurb:

In The Tech Coup, Marietje Schaake offers a behind-the-scenes account of how technology companies crept into nearly every corner of our lives and our governments. She takes us beyond the headlines to high-stakes meetings with human rights defenders, business leaders, computer scientists, and politicians to show how technologies—from social media to artificial intelligence—have gone from being heralded as utopian to undermining the pillars of our democracies. To reverse this existential power imbalance, Schaake outlines game-changing solutions to empower elected officials and citizens alike.

Link

Schaake — formerly a Dutch MEP — is one of the few politicians who understood the tech industry and was sceptical of, and watchful of, Zuckerberg & Co. In recent years, she’s been a Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. Her book is a must-read for those who, like me, are condemned to watch this industry.

My commonplace bookletAs long-term readers will know I’ve always been fascinated by John Maynard Keynes. (In a way, if you live and work in Cambridge it’s hard not to be.) But Adam Tooze (who used to be an academic here and is now in Columbia) has a fascinating item on Keynes in his Substack. It’s about an essay that Keynes contributed in 1909 as a young man to the Cambridge Apostles with the intriguing title: “Can We Consume Our Surplus? or The Influence of Furniture on Love”. The post goes on to give the full text of the paper.

“Does it really make a great difference to us,” Keynes asks at one point,

in what rooms we live, whether we clothe them with chintz or with velvet, whether they are hard or padded? That it makes a difference in some ways, is obvious. These things affect our pleasure and our convenience. But do they do more than this? Do they suggest to us thoughts and feelings and occupations?

The effect on us of their external architecture is, I believe, much slighter than their internal proportions. I myself have spent most of my life inside buildings which are as pompous as possible. But what effect has a flitting between Eton, King’s, and Whitehall had? People who live in the Great Court at Trinity are very different beings from those who live in the Fellows’ Buildings at King’s. But I put it down to the inside shapes of the rooms, much more than to the different look outs. And it is consistent with this that those who live in the little rooms in Neville’s Court are not so very different from themselves in the Great Court.

The essay also has that lovely cartoon by Low of Keynes lounging in a well-upholstered armchair. It comes after this observation:

Our furniture is, after all, very unimportant, and leaves us very much where we should be without it. But I don’t think it is quite true. Our furniture may be the best we can do, and yet we may deserve something much better.

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Waiting for dinnerCote d’Azur, 2010.

Quote of the Day

”The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. “

Bertrand Russell

Thanks to John Seeley for spotting it.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsKathleen Ferrier (Contralto) | What is life? | Orfeo ed Euridice | Gluck

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This is a remastering of a 1946 recording of Gluck’s Orpheo that stopped me in my tracks one dark November day in 1977 in the Netherlands. I was living there on my own and working at home for the afternoon when I suddenly heard an announcement on the national radio station that it was about to broadcast a long-lost recording of a 1946 recording of the opera with Ferrier singing the title role. Never having heard the opera, I stopped — and did no further work that afternoon. What I didn’t know until later was that many other people in Holland had done the same, because Ferrier had been extraordinarily popular in the country in the post-war years. The audio quality of the original recording was pretty poor, so this remastered version is an improvement, but you can still hear that it’s a vintage performance.

Long Read of the DayTo Be or Not to Be

Sobering blog post by Timothy Snyder about the prospect facing Ukraine.

“To be or not to be.” President Zelens’kyi of Ukraine once told me that “everything is in Shakespeare.” Early in the war he quoted that famous line from Hamlet to the British parliament. It is certainly a propos right now. It applies, in different ways, to his administration and to that of Joe Biden. Will Ukraine win and survive? And will the Biden team assist and be remembered?

Ukrainians and Americans both want peace. Indeed, no one can possibly want peace more than the Ukrainians. For the past two weeks, Ukrainian leaders have tried to persuade American journalists and the Biden administration of how this can come about, tried to convey a simple strategic truth: Russia will make peace only when Putin believes that Russia is losing. They are now presenting what they call a victory plan to try to get into that position.

This is realism. Using the word “negotiations” in any other sense is misleading, since the Russians themselves have made clear, over and over, that their goal is the humiliation and the destruction of Ukraine as a first step towards a world order in which such actions are normal. There is a thought which one hears outside of Ukraine to the effect that one can simply choose negotiations at any point without appropriately altering the power position. This is not realism. It is wishful thinking…

You cannot choose to negotiate with a power that openly seeks to bring about the end of your nation and state.

Yep. Which is why what happens in the US on November 5 really matters. And not just for Ukraine. Because if that falls to Putin, then Poland will be next. Europe’s holiday from history will be over.

Snyder is a good historian and has been spending a lot of time in Ukraine, which is a good reason for taking him seriously.

Books, etc.In the shack with Robert Caro

Nice piece by Austin Kleon about Robert Caro, the remarkable biographer of Robert Moses and LBJ, about where he writes, and with what.

He bought the prefab shack, he says, from a place in Riverhead for $2,300, after a contractor quoted him a comically overstuffed Hamptons price to build one. “Thirty years, and it’s never leaked,” he says. This particular shed was a floor sample, bought because he wanted it delivered right away. The business’s owner demurred. “So I said the following thing, which is always the magic words with people who work: ‘I can’t lose the days.’ She gets up, sort of pads back around the corner, and I hear her calling someone … and she comes back and she says, ‘You can have it tomorrow.’”

Caro is a truly amazing writer, endowed with a work ethic and a doggedness that’s, well, superhuman.

My commonplace bookletHow power corrupts

If you still believe that British politics is relatively free from corruption then you clearly don’t read Private Eye or subscribe to Open Democracy and Peter Geoghegan’s journalism. And now there’s Simon Kuper’s new book. So, as an added treat, here’s a transcript of a conversation between Peter and him.

Sample:

Peter: What surprised you most when you were researching the book?

Simon: The degree and the shamelessness with which politicians and especially the Tory party were taking money from autocracies, or people with links to autocracies – and then the impunity of it. I realised that the UK has almost no laws about political corruption. I’d research all this material and think, “What?! Another Russian spy donating to the Tories?” or “Boris Johnson really flew to the former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev’s Italian villa while foreign minister without any aides present? He made Lebedev Junior a Lord? Cameron lobbies for Chinese interests? Blair lobbies for everyone? And this is just allowed?” It was the gap between all the stuff that was happening and the absence of any sanction that kept astounding me.

LinkblogThings I encounter when drinking from the Internet firehose.

McDonald’s touchscreen kiosks were feared as job killers. Instead, something surprising happened. An interesting sidelight on the automation vs employment debate. Link

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Always on(line)Provence, Summer 2023

Quote of the Day

”Profit models are not philosophies, and should not be gussied up as such, festooned with purloined intellectual gew-gaws and other pirate fineries. Serious thinkers should not be pressed into service merely as propagandists for the cause.”

Henry Farrell, commenting on tech industry moguls who aspire to be public intellectuals.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBob Dylan | Shelter from the Storm

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Long Read of the DayA Killer App for Large Language Models

Lovely essay by Henry Farrell about a piece that he and Marion Fourcade had published in the Economist arguing that LLMs’ most straightforward application is as “engines of organisational ritual”.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE wrote a story in which the entire universe was created so that monks could ritually write out the nine billion names of God. The monks buy a computer to do this faster and better, with unfortunate consequences for the rest of us. … Rituals aren’t just about God, but about people’s relations with each other. Everyday life depends on ritual performances such as being polite, dressing appropriately, following proper procedure and observing the law. … Organisations couldn’t work without rituals. When you write a reference letter for a former colleague or give or get a tchotchke on Employee Appreciation Day, you are enacting a ceremony, reinforcing the foundations of a world in which everyone knows the rules and expects them to be observed …

My bits of the article were inspired by two reinforcing pieces of information. One was a conversation with a friend, who works for an organization that requires Diversity, Equity and Inclusion statements. The friend described how they had spent hours writing a thoughtful serious statement; and then spun up ChatGPT to generate one. The friend ended up submitting their own handcrafted statement, but couldn’t help feeling that their organization would have preferred the bland inanity of what ChatGPT had put out, which more perfectly combined the organization’s expectations and the general form of the thing.

The second was an observation from playing around with ChatGPT, which [is that] ChatGPT is very good at generating Schelling Points…

Read on. It’s quirky and insightful.

Books, etc.I’ve just listened to a fabulous conversation between Ezra Klein and Zadie Smith, which made me realise that I need to read her essays. What clinched it was that, like me, she’s a great admirer of Neil Postman.

My commonplace bookletI love September. For me, it’s always been the first month of the year, which is why I don’t care much for January 1st. It’s a consequence of working for many years in universities, I suppose, but also of the rhythms of primary and secondary school. Cycling in to College the other day at 8am I suddenly remembered that it was 60 years ago — to the day — since I had walked up the drive of University College Cork for my first day as an engineering student. And what came flooding back were memories of what had been going through my mind that day.

Context: I was the first member of my family to go to university, and when I was growing up in a book-free household in small towns on the West coast of Ireland (what is now grandly called ’The Wild Atlantic Way’) the possibility of being able to get there had seemed exceedingly remote. But then, in 1964, a combination of luck, location and scholarships made possible what had once seemed unattainable, and there I was on my way into the ivory tower! It was, as PG Wodehouse put it in another context, “like dying and going to heaven without the trouble and expense”. And what I remember most vividly was the intense pleasure of finally getting into a place where ideas were taken seriously.

Which explains why I was so looking forward the other morning to breakfast in college with a dear friend who had just arrived from the US, and whose new book I had read and enjoyed.

Wodehouse nailed it — as usual.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

The Amazing Recording History of Here Comes the Sun. Want to see what consummate musical geniuses the Beatles were? See this fascinating account of how that beautiful recording of George Harrison’s song was made.

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Summer houseLovely little arbour in the gardens of Muckross House, Killarney.

Quote of the Day

”Where error is irreparable, repentance is useless.”

Edward Gibbon

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBilly Strayhorn | Lotus Blossom | Duke Ellington

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There’s a story behind this. In a studio at the end of a recording session, as most of the musicians were packing and getting ready to leave (and you can hear them in the background), the Duke sat down at a piano and started to play. Someone pressed the record button and here’s the result. Magical!

Long Read of the Day Why is Britain poor?

This essay by Ed West is a really long read, but a salutary one if, like me, you are puzzled by how a large country stuffed with smart people has been sliding inexorably into absolute as well as relative decline. It’s really a kind of informal executive summary of Foundations, a remarkable online pamphlet by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes and Sam Bowman on why Britain has stagnated.

Here’s a sample that captures the flavour of the piece:

France is the most natural comparison point to Britain, a country ‘notoriously heavily regulated and dominated by labour unions.’ This is sometimes comical to British sensibilities, so that ‘French workers have been known to strike by kidnapping their chief executives – a practice that the public there reportedly supports – and strikes are so common that French unions have designed special barbecues that fit in tram tracks so they can grill sausages while they march.’ Only in France.

It is also heavily taxed, especially in the realm of employment, and yet despite this, French workers are significantly more productive. The reason is that France ‘does a good job building the things that Britain blocks: housing, infrastructure and energy supply.’

With a slightly smaller population, France has 37 million homes compared to our 30 million. ‘Those homes are newer, and are more concentrated in the places people want to live: its prosperous cities and holiday regions. The overall geographic extent of Paris’s metropolitan area roughly tripled between 1945 and today, whereas London’s has grown only a few percent.’ One quality-of-life indicator is that ‘800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.’

They also do transport far better, with 29 tram networks compared to seven in Britain, and six underground metro systems against our three. ‘Since 1980, France has opened 1,740 miles of high speed rail, compared to just 67 miles in Britain. France has nearly 12,000 kilometres of motorways versus around 4,000 kilometres here… In the last 25 years alone, the French built more miles of motorway than the entire UK motorway network. They are even allowed to drive around 10 miles per hour faster on them.’

Footnote Worth noting also that the Foundations paper covers some of the same ground as the Resolution Foundation’s remarkable study, Ending Stagnation. Both carry the same message: decline isn’t inevitable; the problems are soluble — provided some things that Britons hold sacred are changed. The worrying thing is that the new Labour administration doesn’t seem interested in tackling these.

How Apple was able to get into the hearing-aid businessYesterday’s Observer column:

Like many professional scribblers, I sometimes have to write not in a hushed study or library, but in noisy environments. So years ago I bought a set of Apple AirPods Pro, neat little gadgets that have a limited degree of noise-cancelling ability. They’re not as effective as the clunky (and pricey) headphones that seasoned transcontinental airline passengers need, but they’re much lighter and less obtrusive. And they have a button that enables you to switch off the noise cancellation and hear what’s going on around you.

I remember wondering once if a version of them could also function as hearing aids, given the right software. But then dismissed the thought: after all, hearing aids are expensive, specialised devices that are often prescribed by audiologists – and also signal to the world at large that you are hard of hearing.

But guess what? On 12 September, I open my laptop, click on the Verge website and find the headline: “Apple gets FDA authorisation to turn the AirPods Pro into hearing aids.”

Read on

Books, etc.As promised, my review from yesterday’s Observer.

My commonplace bookletFrom Seth Godin’s daily newsletter:

Professional woodworkers rarely have to be reminded to sharpen their tools. Of course they know this.

The rest of us, on the other hand, regularly use digital tools we don’t understand, don’t maintain and haven’t optimized.

Sometimes, our lack of care in the choice and use of tools only wastes our time. Often, it actually degrades the quality of what we’re seeking to create.

If you’re not regularly getting better at your digital toolbox, you’re actually getting worse.

Hmmm… uncomfortable thought for a blogger who is trying to figure out how to integrate LLMs into his workflow.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Physicist Murray Gell-Mann on Einstein Entertaining snippet from an interview with the great physicist. Ends with a great story.
Your Phone Is Not a Bomb Ian Boghost, writing in The Atlantic about exploding pagers in Lebanon and related matters.
What is the Most Valuable Benefit You Got from Becoming a Mathematician? Lovely essay by Keith Devlin (Whom God Preserve).

ErrataThe lake in Friday’s photograph taken from the grounds of Glenveagh Castle is Lough Veagh, not — as I said — Lough Gartan, which is in the next valley.

Thanks to John Darch for spotting the error.

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LakeviewLough Veagh seen from the grounds of Glenveagh Castle, Co. Donegal

Quote of the Day

”There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy; it is not the bad taste of a country which knows no better; it has not the nervous vulgarity of England, or the blinded vulgarity of Germany. It observes beauty, and chooses to pass it by. But it attains to beauty’s confidence.”

E.M. Forster, writing in Where Angels Fear to Tread about an indifferent performance of Lucia di Lammermoor.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsRy Cooder & David Lindley | Sí Bheag, Sí Mhór

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Unexpected gem: Cooder and Lindley playing a lovely little Irish tune composed by Turlough Ó’Carolan, (1670 – 1738), a famous blind Irish harper, composer and singer.

If you’re interested, here is a lovely traditional rendition of the piece by Camerata Kilkenny and the Uileann piper David Power.

Long Read of the Day The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think

Fabulous essay by Shannon Vallor in Noema magazine on the glib and sinister barbarism of a tech industry that talks of its creations as being “superhuman”. This kind of rhetoric, she argues, “implicitly erases what’s most important about being human.”

She’s right, which is why this essay is worth your time. Here’s how she kicks it off:

Today’s generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini are routinely described as heralding the imminent arrival of “superhuman” artificial intelligence. Far from a harmless bit of marketing spin, the headlines and quotes trumpeting our triumph or doom in an era of superhuman AI are the refrain of a fast-growing, dangerous and powerful ideology. Whether used to get us to embrace AI with unquestioning enthusiasm or to paint a picture of AI as a terrifying specter before which we must tremble, the underlying ideology of “superhuman” AI fosters the growing devaluation of human agency and autonomy and collapses the distinction between our conscious minds and the mechanical tools we’ve built to mirror them.

Today’s powerful AI systems lack even the most basic features of human minds; they do not share with humans what we call consciousness or sentience, the related capacity to feel things like pain, joy, fear and love. Nor do they have the slightest sense of their place and role in this world, much less the ability to experience it. They can answer the questions we choose to ask, paint us pretty pictures, generate deepfake videos and more. But an AI tool is dark inside…

The tech crowd who use this rhetoric have a crude, ludicrously skewed, inhumane view of what it means to be human. Vallor is their most articulate critic. She’s just published a splendid book, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking which is on next week’s reading list.

My commonplace bookletThe dangers of ‘phishing’ scams have been radically increased by the advent of Generative AI, so this advice from Seth Godin is timely:

Please be on the alert for:

Spam that includes your name, address, phone number and other personal details.

Phone calls that are from human-sounding bots that pretend to be from friends or trusted brands.

Job offers.

Video mashups that include AI-generated people that seem to be made just for you.

Security alerts that are actually precisely the opposite.

Links that sure look trustworthy, but go somewhere you don’t expect.

It makes me sad that people with skills spend their time building ever-more ornate scams. It also bums me out that the emails from this blog often end up in the spam folder, but spam somehow manages to make it to my inbox.

Linkblog* Our Research Centre has an interesting online event next Wednesday on the micro-sociology of polarisation in two American towns. Click here to sign up for it.

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The LighthouseThis is not my photograph, but I wish it was, because it’s perfect. It’s by John Darch, a gifted landscape photographer who also happens to be my brother-in-law. The lighthouse is on St John’s Point in Co Donegal and I’ve often tried to photograph it. But John got it one day when it was reflected in a small pond, and the symmetry was, well, perfect. A real decisive moment.

Quote of the Day

”The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

H.P. Lovecraft

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJohn Field | Nocturne No. 5 in B flat major

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Long Read of the DayI was wrong about E.M. Forster

Lovely essay by Julian Barnes.

Sometimes, when our tastes become more defined, they become narrower. But this doesn’t have to be the case. I want to address a rarer changing of the mind, which is altogether more enriching: when a writer you had previously been indifferent to, indeed actively despised, suddenly makes sense to you, and you realise – with, yes, a kind of joy – that at last you see the point of them.

I first read EM Forster when an English master handed out a list of Great Books to be read one summer holiday. A Passage to India was on that list. I still have the Penguin edition – a reprint of 1960, costing three shillings and sixpence – in which I read the novel. There are no notes in the margin, not a single cry of “Irony!” It clearly made little impression on me. Later, of my own volition, when I was about 20, I read A Room With a View, and actively began to take against Forster. It seemed to me a fusty, musty, dusty read, with rather antique prose and a storyline and characters which failed to engage me. The English novelists of the next generation – Huxley, Waugh, Greene – spoke to me with much more clarity.

Read on to find out what changed. It’s compelling IMHO.

My commonplace booklet”Demand for High-End Cameras is Soaring”. So says the Economist in an interesting snippet.

Buying a Leica feels like buying a piece of art. Made in Germany, the cameras are sold in the swankiest neighbourhoods, sometimes in shops which double as galleries. The current models pack the latest imaging technology into sleek all-metal bodies. For decades they have been the chosen cameras of masters of photography such as Henri Cartier-Bresson (pictured) and Annie Leibovitz. Their price is extravagant. Leica’s latest compact model, the Q3, costs around $6,000 (an accompanying thumb rest is available for an extra $245). Opt for a flagship M-series camera with a couple of lenses and the bill can easily run into five figures.

Today few see the need for a dedicated camera. High-quality pictures can be snapped, edited and uploaded onto social media all with your smartphone. When in 2011 an interviewer asked Ms Leibovitz to recommend a camera, she responded by taking out her iPhone 4s, calling it “the snapshot camera of today”. The camera on Apple’s flagship device has improved with each new version, including the one released this week. Since Ms Leibovitz’s remarks, the share of photos taken on smartphones has grown from 25% to over 90%. Digital camera sales, meanwhile, have fallen by 93%. Entry-level models are steadily disappearing from the market.

Premium cameras, however, are bucking the trend. Waiting lists for Leica’s Q3, released in 2023, were initially six-months long. Its success contributed to record sales at the 110-year-old firm last year. The latest version of the premium x100 camera made by Fujifilm has been sold out since its launch in February. The cameras are being flogged online for multiples of their original price of $1,600. Rivals such as Nikon have also begun to prioritise higher-end models. As a result, the average price of a camera has tripled in the past six years, according to the Camera and Imaging Products Association (CIPA), a trade group.

One reason (mentioned in the piece) is that while modern smartphone cameras (like the one in the iPhone 15 Pro) are really pretty good, wedding photographers who showed up just with a smartphone might not impress the client.

I’ve used Leicas for aeons and only once bought a brand new one. It’s still going strong. Also, Leica has revived its M6 film camera, which apparently is selling well. Perhaps this is an echo of what’s happening with analog Hi-Fi amplifiers and turntables with the revival of vinyl?

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Smart Goose Deterrent System Link. Not a problem we have, but I like the combination of ingenuity and humaneness. Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the link.

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Picasso’s guitarAmazing what you can do with a distorting lens.

An experiment from 2007, which explains why it’s not a high-definition print.

Quote of the Day

”I’m smart enough to know I’m dumb.”

Richard Feynman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsPeter Knight | The Water is Wide

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Long Read of the DayThe Third Framing

A useful (and readable) dissection by a distinguished economist of the neoliberal international order (the so-called “Washington Consensus”) that is now falling apart.

In practice the neoliberal international regime that debuted in the 1980s is dead. The major countries that defined its rules have ceased to abide by them. We are thus facing a strange situation where the main architects and the founders of the neoliberal international order no longer believe in it and do not apply it, but somehow the system should be still apparently adhered to by the rest of the world. This is an untenable situation. There is no way in which a World Bank mission to an African, Latin American or Asian country can seriously complain about government subsidies, trade discrimination, seizure of assets of political opponents, trade bloc trading, or industrial policy while the very same policies are prosecuted by the framers of the international economic system. The contradiction can be papered over for a while, but cannot be ignored forever. If the international neoliberal rules are no longer considered the appropriate rules for the United States and Europe, should they be considered as the right rules for the rest of the world?

There is simply no current answer to this question. The new rules have to be invented and introduced or the entire system will become incoherent and internally contradictory so much that eventually no “system” at all will exist. The world will be back to individual country optimization under the rules of the jungle.

By showing Musk’s X the red card, has Brazil scored a goal for all democracies?Yesterday’s Observer column:

At 10 minutes past midnight on 31 August, Elon Musk’s X (nee Twitter) went dark in Brazil, a country of more than 200 million souls, many of them enthusiastic users of online services. The day before, a supreme court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, had done something hitherto unthinkable: ordered the country’s ISPs to block access to the platform, threatened a daily fine of 50,000 Brazilian reis (just under £6,800) for users who bypassed the ban by using virtual private networks (VPNs) and froze the finances of Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service provider in the country. The order would remain in force until the platform complied with the decisions of the supreme federal court, paid fines totalling 18.3m reis (nearly £2.5m) and appointed a representative in Brazil, a legal requirement for foreign companies operating there. Moraes had also instructed Apple and Google to remove the X app and VPN software from their stores, but later reversed that decision, citing concerns about potential “unnecessary” disruptions.

Cue shock, horror, incredulity, outrage and all the reactions in between. Musk – who has been sparring with Moraes for quite a while – tweeted: “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.” The animosity between the two goes back to 8 January 2023, after the defeat of Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, when a mob of his supporters attacked federal government buildings in the capital, Brasília. The mob invaded and caused deliberate damage to the supreme federal court, the national congress and the Planalto presidential palace in an abortive attempt to overthrow the democratically elected president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva…

Read on

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

“There are no AI-shaped holes lying around”

This is how I reconcile the facts that (a) AI is already powerful and (b) it’s having relatively little impact so far

Making AI work today requires ripping up workflows and rebuilding for AI. This is hard and painful to do…

From a tweet by Matt Clifford, a UK AI enthusiast and Chair of ARIA.

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Vanishing pointIn Donegal, after the rain.

Quote of the Day

”Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.”

Ernest Hemingway

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJ.S. Bach | Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten, BWV 202 | ”Wedding Cantata”: No. 7, Aria.

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Long Read of the DayWhat’s become of The Times & Co.?

If, like me, you’re a subscriber to the New York Times, you may be puzzled by the strangely contorted way it is covering the presidential election. In particular, the way it continues to fall into the ‘balance as bias’ trap is a mystery.

Turns out that Jeff Jarvis, the veteran journalist and NYU professor, is likewise puzzled. And on his Buzzmachine blog he’s written the most insightful analysis of the phenomenon that I’ve come across. In it he discusses — and dismisses — two of the prevailing explanations of the phenomenon (the effect of the Timess increasing reliance on subscription revenue; and the idea that liberalism is bad for business in a mainstream publication) and advances an interesting theory of his own.

His most intriguing thought (for me, anyway) is the question of why journalists seem so averse to critical reflection on what they do for a living. Jeff has a book coming out soon about this.

I began the book intending to write a defense of internet freedoms, but it became a critique of media’s moral panic over the internet and the impact that is having on those freedoms. News institutions as companies never acknowledge their own conflict of interest in covering what they see as a new competitors on the net.

I see a much larger problem at work: Journalists and news executives — and I include myself in this critique — were never equipped with the tools of theory and history to inform self-reflection on our field and to imagine alternative means and models of serving our publics.

This is why I hold that simply teaching the craft and skills of journalism in journalism schools is wholly inadequate to the profound challenges in our field. Journalists see themselves as producers of the commodity they call content and they define their value according to their roles in that process of manufacture. They would be better served to also learn from the disciplines of media studies, communication, history, sociology, ethics, and others — empowering them to reimagine and reform our field.

He’s dead right about this. And if journalism as a trade (for it isn’t a profession) is to endure, its teachers and practitioners have to grapple with more than just reporting so that they can understand what’s happening to the media ecosystem.

Books, etc.Just started on this. I’m reviewing it for Sunday 22 September in the Observer.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Mountain Bike Flips on a Moving Train. Do not try this on any British train.

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How the wind blowsThis is what happens to a tree growing up on Ireland’s so-called ‘Wild Atlantic Way’.

Quote of the Day

”Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsRandy Newman | Birmingham

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Wonderful song.

On This Day 23 Years Ago…I still think that Jeff Jarvis’s memoir is the best thing written about that terrible day.

Yes, I am blessed to be alive.

I was a block away from the World Trade Center, at Broadway and Liberty Street, when the first of the two towers collapsed yesterday morning. Completely engulfed in its debris, I joined a mob running away, screaming, unable to see, unable to breathe anything but the black cloud.

As the first of the tidal wave of debris bore down on us, some people crouched behind large concrete planters, believing they would protect them. But I kept running. I fell. Others fell around me. I got back up and kept running. I heard large pieces of the destroyed building hitting cars on the street. I heard more terrified screams.

There was no air. I breathed through my handkerchief and even so, my mouth, nose and lungs were filled with black. There was no light. I could see nothing, only black. I slammed into a building, and a tree, and another building.

I heard people and asked where we were. No one answered. I kept going and finally saw light at Chase Plaza II, where the building managers opened the doors, letting us refugees and much smoke inside…

Keep reading.

My commonplace bookletHow Joe Biden Engineered Apple’s New AirPods

Interesting blog post by Matt Stoller.

Apple said that after FDA clearance in the fall, the hearing features will be available via a software update. The AirPods Pro 2 will cost $249.

To set up hearing enhancement, users can take a hearing test inside the Apple Health app that’s based on the pure-tone test used by audiologists. The results of the test automatically adjust your AirPods’ sound levels, or you can download the test as a PDF to show an audiologist. (You can also input existing hearing test results into the Health app.)

Apple engineers turning AirPods into hearing aids is wonderful, but it’s not a uniquely difficult endeavor. In fact, what’s happening here is that a set of elected leaders opened up a market closed off by a cartel that had secured a comfortable position, shielded by the Food and Drug Administration. And engineers, many of whom care deeply about hearing, acted in this new legal space to create tools to help people live better lives…

Joe Biden’s administration enabled this, in other words.

There’s a general lesson here. It is that lots of worthwhile things that can be done (in the sense that they are technically feasible) are not being done because doing so would threaten the comfortable rents being extracted by incumbent companies — especially ones that have captured regulators in their industries.

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StonedTaken on the north shore of Galway Bay, with the ‘moonscape’ of the Burren in the far distance. The cairn was built by person or persons unknown. But it was asking to be photographed!

Quote of the Day

”Anyone can make a political case so compelling that he or she can’t see the flaws in it.”

Henry Farrell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsChet Atkins, Leo Kottke and Doc Watson | Last Steam Engine Train

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Really fine example of the emergent properties of three great guitarists when you put them together.

Long Read of the DayThere is no “woke mind virus”

Striking essay by Dan Williams about the pernicious idea that if people disagree with you they must be suffering from the cerebral equivalent of Covid.

In the past several years, talk of the “woke mind virus” has itself gone viral among right-wing culture warriors. In a recent interview, Elon Musk alleged that the mind virus had even killed his child. What he meant was not that it had actually killed his child—they are very much alive—but that his child is transgender and so, apparently, dead to him.

According to Musk, he was “essentially tricked into signing documents” allowing his child to take puberty blockers, which “are actually just sterilization drugs.” This experience radicalised him: “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.”

The only polite term for this delusion is horseshit. Or, as Williams puts it,

Ideas, including bad ones, are not infectious mind viruses. This metaphor rests on an inaccurate picture of human psychology and social behaviour that functions to demonise, not understand. Because of this, it poisons public debate, increases polarisation, and hinders our collective capacities to understand the world and each other.

Great essay. Worth your time if you are as irritated by culture wars as I am.

So tech titans are not above the law after allYesterday’s Observer column

On 24 August, a Russian tech billionaire’s private jet landed at Le Bourget airport, north-east of Paris, to find that officers of the French judicial police were waiting for him. He was duly arrested and whisked away for interrogation. Four days later he was indicted on 12 charges, including alleged complicity in the distribution of child exploitation material and drug trafficking, barred from leaving France and placed under “judicial supervision”, which requires him to check in with the gendarmes twice a week until further notice.

The mogul in question, Pavel Durov, is a tech entrepreneur who collects nationalities the way others collect air miles. In fact it turns out that one of his citizenships is French, generously provided in 2021 by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron. Durov is also, it seems, a fitness fanatic with a punishing daily regime. “After eight hours of tracked sleep,” the Financial Times reports, “he starts the day ‘without exception’ with 200 push-ups, 100 sit-ups and an ice bath. He does not drink, smoke, eat sugar or meat, and saves time for meditation.” When not engaged in these demanding activities, he has also found time to father more than 100 kids as a sperm donor and to rival Elon Musk as a free-speech extremist.

Media profiles of Durov bring to mind Churchill’s celebrated description of Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Durov left Russia because the Facebook clone he co-founded with his brother Nikolai in 2006 led to conflict with the Kremlin…

Read on

Later…

This from the New York Times:

Telegram has become a global sewer of criminal activity, disinformation, child sexual abuse material, terrorism and racist incitement, according to a four-month investigation by The New York Times that analyzed more than 3.2 million Telegram messages from over 16,000 channels. The company, which offers features that enable criminals, terrorists and grifters to organize at scale and to sidestep scrutiny from the authorities, has looked the other way as illegal and extremist activities have flourished openly on the app.

The degree to which Telegram has been inundated by such content has not been previously reported. The Times investigation found 1,500 channels operated by white supremacists who coordinate activities among almost one million people around the world. At least two dozen channels sold weapons. In at least 22 channels with more than 70,000 followers, MDMA, cocaine, heroin and other drugs were advertised for delivery to more than 20 countries.

And this fascinating account by Politico on how the French authorities closed in on Durov.

My commonplace booklet**Intel’s problems in a nutshell:

Intel doesn’t have the best manufacturing

Intel doesn’t design the best chips

Intel is out of the game in AI

Devastating summary by Ben Thompson, who for a long time had been giving Intel the benefit of the doubt.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Churchill: the naked truth

He made quite an impression during his time as the guest of two presidents. The chief usher at the White House recalled that “In his room, Mr Churchill wore no clothes at all most of the time during the day.” Churchill’s bodyguard remarked how President Franklin Roosevelt knocked on the door of the prime minister’s suite during Churchill’s first White House visit in December 1941, only to find that “Winston Churchill was stark naked, a drink in one hand, a cigar in the other.” Roosevelt, clearly flustered, offered to leave, but Churchill demurred: “You see, Mr President, I have nothing to hide.” The two leaders then spoke for an hour.

From the Economist’s review of Mr Churchill in the White House by Robert Schmuhl.

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The wisdom of dogsThis is one of my favourite photographs. It was taken in Antibes in August 2010. We were driving along the beachfront on a blisteringly hot Sunday afternoon when I suddenly saw this scene. The owners of the little dog were lying in the sunshine, baking like sausages on a spit. And it seemed to me that their pet was reflecting on the foolishness of human animals. Smart mutt.

Quote of the Day

”Asking if a machine can think is as relevant as asking if submarines can swim.”

Edsger Dijkstra, a great computer scientist.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSorcha Richardson | Map of Manhattan

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Long Read of the DayStone Age builders were good engineers.

That’s the conclusion of a study of a 6000-year old monument as reported in a recent paper published in Nature.

The Neolithic farmers and herders who built a massive stone chamber in southern Spain nearly 6,000 years ago possessed a good rudimentary grasp of physics, geometry, geology and architectural principles, finds a detailed study of the site.

Using data from a high-resolution laser scan, as well as unpublished photos and diagrams from earlier excavations, archaeologists pieced together a probable construction process for the monument known as the Dolmen of Menga. Their findings, published on 23 August in Science Advances1, reveal new insights into the structure and its Neolithic builders’ technical abilities.

A truly astonishing read. “These people had no blueprints to work with, nor, as far as we know, any previous experience at building something like this,” says study co-author Leonardo García Sanjuán, an archaeologist at the University of Seville in Spain. “And yet, they understood how to fit together huge blocks of stone” with “a precision that would keep the monument intact for nearly 6,000 years”.

My commonplace bookletThe public discourse about ‘AI’ (aka machine-learning) is messy and incoherent with everyone on a spectrum that ranges from doom/existential risk at one extreme to cynical shrugging it off as just another tech fad (like crypto, say) at the other. From the beginning I’ve been pragmatic about the technology: the thing it first reminded me of was the spreadsheet — and it looked to me to be really just a new tool for human ‘augmentation’ as dear old Doug Engelbart would have put it.

I still see it that way, but am sometimes berated by sceptics with talk of ‘hallucinations’, the alleged absence of real use-cases for the technology and so on.

All of which is by way of explaining why I welcomed something posted this week by Andrew Jassy, the CEO of Amazon and someone who really does know about use-cases. Here’s his post:

One of the most tedious (but critical tasks) for software development teams is updating foundational software. It’s not new feature work, and it doesn’t feel like you’re moving the experience forward. As a result, this work is either dreaded or put off for more exciting work—or both.

Amazon Q, our GenAI assistant for software development, is trying to bring some light to this heaviness. We have a new code transformation capability, and here’s what we found when we integrated it into our internal systems and applied it to our needed Java upgrades:

The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real).

In under six months, we’ve been able to upgrade more than 50% of our production Java systems to modernized Java versions at a fraction of the usual time and effort. And, our developers shipped 79% of the auto-generated code reviews without any additional changes.

The benefits go beyond how much effort we’ve saved developers. The upgrades have enhanced security and reduced infrastructure costs, providing an estimated $260M in annualized efficiency gains.

This is a great example of how large-scale enterprises can gain significant efficiencies in foundational software hygiene work by leveraging Amazon Q. It’s been a game changer for us, and not only do our Amazon teams plan to use this transformation capability more, but our Q team plans to add more transformations for developers to leverage.

Of course that particular use of the technology is very specific. But the numbers are impressive, and I think credible.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

My First Trip to Norway, With A.I. as a Guide. A NYT journalist asked three ‘AI’ travel planners for advice, and then wrote it up. As someone who doesn’t do package holidays, cruises (or guided tours), this wouldn’t appeal to me. But maybe it works for some people.

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Trompe-l’œilArles, 2022. Caused me to do a double-take.

Quote of the Day

“If reading is one of the pleasures – and necessities – of youth, rereading is one of the pleasures – and necessities – of age. You know more, you understand both life and literature better, and you have the additional interest of checking your younger self against your older self.”

Julian Barnes

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJohn Field | Nocturne No. 1 in E Flat Major, H.24 | Elizabeth Joy Roe

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I love all Field’s Nocturnes, but most of all this one.

Long Read of the DayHow Ireland became the world’s literary powerhouse

Slightly hyperbolic headline but still an interesting journalistic investigation by Kate McCusker into why my country seems to breed good writers.

“The Irish just chat about everything. We love telling tales and yarning. There’s no other country where you could talk for an hour about the weather,” says Aisling Cunningham, 57, the owner of Ulysses Rare Books on Duke Street in Dublin.

Sure enough, I have been here for 50 minutes and we have talked at length about everything from the biblical rains of Donegal to why more people who stop into her antiquarian bookshop end up leaving with a copy of James Joyce’s Dubliners than Ulysses itself. (Cunningham reckons it’s because the former is more accessible – although there is also the small matter of the Shakespeare and Company first edition of the latter costing just short of €30,000, about £25,500.)

I am in Dublin to find out why Ireland, a country that you can drive the length of in a few hours, punches so far above its weight when it comes to literature. It has contributed four Nobel literature laureates and six Booker prize winners; its capital was the fourth Unesco City of Literature in 2010; and it’s home to a booming network of magazines, publishers, bookshops, festivals and (whisper it) decently funded libraries…

One of those libraries played a key role in the education of this blogger.

My commonplace bookletI spent more time than I should have watching the main speakers at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week. What struck me was the level of oratory on display, particularly in speeches by Kamala Harris, Michelle and Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Tim Walz. Even Joe Biden seemed energised and eloquent. And I was left struggling (and failing) to think of any British (or European) politician who could deliver a speech as good or as eloquent as any of these.

A knowledgeable historian friend to whom I said this afterwards observed that the prevalence of evangelical rhetoric in American public life might have something to do with it. I wonder.

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Petrolhead nostalgiaAs long-suffering readers of this blog know, I am a recovering petrolhead — and the only member of my extended family who can recognise vintage cars at sight. I spotted this beautifully-preserved 1960s Alvis TD21 in a car park the other day. When I was a kid I thought of an Alvis as the kind of car a gent with private means and handmade tweed suits might own, rather than a Jaguar MkII which would seem — to him — a bit raffish. (I can say this because I once had a blue MkII, and I was definitely a bit raffish then. Fortunately, the Yom Kippur war and the quadrupling of oil prices cured me of that particular addiction.)

Quote of the Day

“Just as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”

Paul Valery, Pieces sur l’Art, 1934.

Amazingly prescient. Just like David Bowie about ‘music like water’ (in 2002) and E.M. Forster about the Web (in 1909.

Thanks to Philip Steadman for pointing me to it.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsLong Time Traveller | Wailing Jennys

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Long Read of the DayReal estate shopping for the apocalypse

Wonderful New Yorker essay by Patricia Marx on the market for domestic nuclear bunkers in the US.

What if they’re right? What if a nuke drops, or climate change turns the world into a foaming puddle, or the next pandemic is spread through selfies? Billionaires have recently been spending millions building themselves customized bunkers, in the hope that they can ride out the apocalypse in splendor. In January, a video surfaced of the rapper Rick Ross bragging that his bunker will be better than Elon Musk’s bunker. (Musk is not known to have a bunker, but that’s a detail.) Ross’s bunker will have multiple “wings” and a “water maker.” Also, plenty of canned goods. Ross’s bunker might even have its own bunker. But what about me—and, if I’m being generous, you? Are there affordable underground shelters available for us to hole up in?

A few months back, I started to scan real-estate Web sites. Hmm, I wondered. Might throw pillows brighten up the underground scheelite mine in Beaver County, Utah, that was converted into a community fallout shelter during the Cold War (a steal at nine hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars, when you consider how many light-bulb filaments you could make from the leftover tungsten you could knock loose)? Or how about the concrete-and-steel stronghold in Hilliard, Ohio, built by A.T. & T. and the Army in 1971 to protect the nation’s communications system in case of nuclear attack? It comes with a “1970’s-era smoking room.” (Note to self: Take up smoking a few months before world ends.) Would house guests get the hint if I mentioned that my new home had three-thousand-pound blast-proof doors? ($1.25 million for nine acres.)

Keep reading. It’s a scream.

Books, etc.I’ve just discovered this — a book by Dan Mulhall about my native land as the 19th century morphed into the 20th. The blurb says that

“it describesthe political and cultural ferment that gripped Ireland the last time a century turned. Based on contemporary books and newspaper sources, and copiously illustrated with photographs from the period, this book offers a stark insight into the conditions that prevailed in the Ireland of 1900. There is an account of the crimes that captured public attention at a time when urban and rural poverty were rife, the emigrant ship remained a common experience and the workhouse often provided a last refuge for the poor and the old.”

I know Dan slightly. He was the Irish Ambassador to the UK when I first met him (and was later Irish Ambassador to the US, after which he retired). He’s also a keen and knowledgeable Joycean (he wrote a chatty, readable guide to Ulysses, for example), and he was the only diplomat I knew of who tweeted regularly about Joyce, the poetry of W.B. Yeats and related matters. So I’d better catch up with A New Day Dawning before I run into him again.

My commonplace bookletFrom Tortoise media’s newsletter yesterday:

Time capsules rarely attract more fanfare at their unveiling than their installation, but an unexpected one at London’s National Gallery certainly has. Constructors uncovered a letter entombed within one of two false concrete columns in the foyer of the Sainsbury Wing. The letter was written in 1990 by donor John Sainsbury (Sainsbury and his two brothers Simon and Timothy originally donated £40 million to the National Gallery for its extension) and snuck into the column during its installation. It details Sainsbury’s great disdain for the column, which he described as “a mistake of the architect” that the National Gallery would “live to regret”. Regret indeed, as more than 30 years on, the letter was discovered in the pillar’s demolition during the wing’s redevelopment, due to reopen in May next year. John Sainsbury died in 2022, but the 1990 letter makes clear how he would have felt. It reads: “Let it be known that one of the donors of this building is absolutely delighted that your generation has decided to dispense with the unnecessary column.” A gloriously petulant “I told you so” from beyond the grave.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From the current issue of Private Eye (Which God Preserve)

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The millennial spireA church that is over 900 years old, framed by autumnal leaves.

Quote of the Day

”When confronted with magical thinking by dictators, historians feel out of place, like a bridge player invited to judge prestidigitation, say, or a surgeon hired to care for wax figures.”

Timothy Snyder

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsPeter Maxwell Davies | Lullaby for Lucy (1981)

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Words by the Scottish poet George Mackay Brown for the birth of Lucy Randall, the first child born in Rackwick, Hoy, in 32years.

Long Read of the DayStranded Astronauts and the Biggest Disruption In (modern) Business History

An interesting and instructive essay by Andrew McAfee whose book The Geek Way on how corporations have changed and evolved over a century or more. There’s a whiff of techno-worship and whiggery in his writing, but he’s invariably interesting and knowledgeable. I found this particular essay informative, and it contains some charts that make one sit up, especially the ones that compare the West and East coasts of the US. He begins with the irony of how Boeing (an old-style industrial corporation) took an unconscionable time to build a spacecraft that could take astronauts to the International Space Station, but is unable to take them back to earth. So they will have to be rescued by — guess what? — by a SpaceX rocket built by Elon Musk’s geeks! And it turns out that they only brought underwear for a short stay.

My commonplace bookletBarry Blitt’s front cover of the current issue of the New Yorker.

LinkblogStolen iPhone. I Survived.

David Birch’s iPhone was stolen. He’s written a really helpful account of how he mitigated the potential damage. He sums up the lessons thus:

If your iPhone is snatched:

First, use your laptop (or a friend’s laptop) log in to your Apple account immediately, wipe the iPhone and change your iCloud password. Do this before you call the police or anyone else.

Second, use your spare phone (or a friend’s phone) and call the phone company get the number blocked.

Third, call the police and get the crime number you will need for your insurance. The police are not going to do anything about getting your phone back (it would take every police officer in Britain to do something about this).

To which I would add — if you’re in London (and especially in Westminster — where almost a third of the thefts occur — do not walk around with your iPhone in your hand or in an accessible pocket.

The latest figures (from the Office of National Statistics) show that over the last decade mobile phones have overtaken cash and payment cards as the items most often stolen from individuals in the UK.

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Before the FallSeen on a woodland walk yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”

David Bowie, speaking to the New York Times — in 2002!.

Amazingly perceptive. Apple’s iPod was just a year old and we were all carrying our music around with us, rather as Victorian tourists in India carried bottles of boiled water. And now we just turn on the tap marked ‘Spotify’.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMozart | Piano Sonata No. 12 in F Major, K. 332: II. Adagio | Seong-Jin Cho

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Long Read of the DayYou may think that; I couldn’t possibly comment

Lovely blog post by Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve) on the vexed topic of the comments that appear under many articles published online.

When you arrive at the bottom of a story on a news site, you will—especially if the story appears in the “Opinion” section—often find yourself effectively being invited to comment on what you’ve just read. Come on, you’re not just a reader now: you’re also one of the people with the power to make your voice heard! At last you can stick it to The Man!

So what’s your reaction when you find that 1,500 people have already commented on the article?

So when you see that number, do you think: wa-hey! This must have some fun going on, it’s time that people heard my view on this too.

Or do you think: there cannot possibly be any value in being the 1,501st comment below this story.

My guess is that you fall into the latter category. And yet there are plenty of people out there who do not. They see an article with 200 comments—arguably more than even a quite devoted reader who reaches that point is going to bother with—and think to themselves what this really needs is my opinion, because that’s what people have been missing in all this.

Read on.

Speaking personally…. I’ve always been opposed to comment streams that are not moderated — and many (most?) are not because moderation costs money. What unmoderated commenting reveals is that most people haven’t the faintest idea of how to formulate an argument.

Years ago I had an interesting conversation with a well-known journalist who had recently taken up photography and was delightedly posting his work on Flickr — and also following other photographers on the platform. He particularly liked the pictures of one of his followees and one day wrote to him complimenting him on an image but suggesting that it might have been even more effective if it had been cropped in a certain way.

And the response? “Go f**k yourself.”

Constructive criticism is an art not widely understood..

Books, etc.David Spiegelhalter (Boris Johnson’s least favourite statistician) has a new book coming in September. Hooray!

AI cheating, the education system and common senseYesterday’s Observer column:

LLMs are a burning issue for the humanities in particular because the essay is such a key pedagogical tool for teaching students how to research, think and write. More importantly, perhaps, the essay also plays a central role in how they are graded and assessed. The bad news is that LLMs threaten to make that venerable pedagogy untenable. And that there’s no technical fix in sight.

The good news is that the problem isn’t insoluble – if educators in these disciplines are willing to rethink and adapt their teaching to the new reality. Other pedagogies are available. But they require, if not a change of heart, two changes of mindset.

The first is an acceptance that LLMs – as the distinguished Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik puts it – are “cultural technologies”, like writing, print, libraries and internet search. In other words, they are tools for human augmentation, not replacement.

Second, and more importantly perhaps, is a need to reinforce in students’ minds the importance of writing as a process…

Read on

My commonplace bookletOn the language of LLMs

Rob Nelson has a marvellous essay on his Substack

At its core, the debate over how to treat LLMs is about the relationship between computation and cognition. Enthusiasts don’t see a problem with using the concepts of human cognition to describe the behavior of LLMs. For skeptics, human thought is vastly more complex than the computational processes happening in even the largest models, and because LLMs do not understand context, they do not know anything. Using words like think, write, or speak to describe what LLMs do is a category error. As Edsger Dijkstra analogized, asking if a machine can think is as relevant as asking if submarines can swim.

The essay is particularly good on the confusions that arise when machine-learning researchers use terms like ‘attention’ in a very specialised way — as a word to describe the information processing that occurs in a transformer-based LLM, but which is totally unlike how we use the term in ordinary human-to-human discourse. Just to underline the problem, the seminal 2017 research paper in which Google researchers announced the conceptual breakthrough represented by the ‘transformer’ model had the provocative title “Attention Is All You Need”.

FeedbackMy comments on how the Breugel painting in last Wednesday’s edition highlighted the ways agriculture has changed over the centuries reminded Joe Dunne of another painting — John Constable’s ‘The Cornfield’.

(For a zoomable version click here)

Joe thinks that in the painting Constable was criticising the impact of the Industrial Revolution on farming. Young people were moving to the cities to work in factories where they could get better and stable wages. And he lists evidence in the painting supporting this conjecture. For example:

There are only three workers in the field compared to 20 in Breugel’s 1565 ‘The Harvesters’.

The gate is hanging off its hinges – nobody to fix it (the donkeys & sheep have access to the wheat field so it’s vulnerable to damage).

The farmer inside the gate of the wheat field is quite old (stooped) indicating the youth have left for the city.

The plough is still out in the open and therefore rusting even though it’s now August (corn is ripe) and the ploughing was done in March. No staff to look after it properly.

The tree on the left of the painting is dead – no staff to render the lane safe by cutting it down.

The young boy in the foreground is looking after the sheep – no mature adult available to do this job.

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I Love NiceActually, I don’t. Taken at 11pm outside the bus station in Nice during an interminable wait for my grandson to arrive from Florence.

Quote of the Day

“Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising. Those whom the public criticizes most, usually end up as full-blown mediocrities. A writer who has produced a respectable body of work and still writes on may be past his prime. He may go into a decline of intellectual menopause, producing more and more of what he does best with less and less feeling until the mechanical becomes habitual and the habit becomes invincible.”

Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise.

Hmmm……see below.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsAndy Irvine, Donal Lunny & Paul Brady at The Embankment in 1976

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I think the two tunes are ‘Munster Buttermilk’ and ’Tripping up the Stairs’. The incorporation of the Greek bouzouki into Irish folk music in the mid-1960s was a major event, and the instrument was subsequently retuned by Andy Irvine who, according to Wikipedia “replaced the octave strings on the two lower G and D courses with unison strings, thus reinforcing their lower frequencies” making it an Irish bouzouki!

Long Read of the DaySteve Bannon’s Dangerous “Dharma” Boston Review

This is a transcript of an interesting interview that Deborah Chasman had with the documentary-maker Errol Morris marking the release of his new documentary on Donald Trump’s former advisor, Steve Bannon, “who is loathed on the left at least as much as the president himself”.

Morris is a great director who made The Fog of War, a memorable series of interviews with Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense who oversaw the US’s war in Vietnam. In more recent times, he made a film on Donald Rumsfeld, who was George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense. So the obvious first question put to him by Ms Chasman is: what draws him to obnoxious characters?

Errol Morris: In the case of the two secretaries of defense and now Bannon, they’re people who have wielded enormous power. It’s the power and the destructiveness combined that is fascinating. The psychology of these people is hard to parse. With Rumsfeld, I felt I put my finger on it: at the heart of it was this almost impossible vanity and self-satisfaction. I call him the least Jewish person I’ve ever met because of his lack of self-knowledge, lack of self-loathing, guilt, remorse. All that was left when you sieved everything out was this enormous pleasure at himself and his own sense of righteousness—“I am right, and you are wrong.” McNamara was never trying to convince you that he was smart; he just was smart, and tortured.

Bannon has this odd career because you would assume, having been tossed out of the Trump administration, that that would be more or less the end of him; he might appear as a pundit on Fox News and otherwise we wouldn’t hear from him again. But of course that’s not what has happened. And that in itself is really interesting, this life after life. It bears out a lot of his claims, one of which was that he saw himself as bigger than just a political advisor to Trump. Evidently, bigger means he wants to take his message—his crusade—global; he’s in love with the Crusades and he himself has started yet another. He wants to destabilize Europe and he’s having some success. He wants to put an end to the European Union. He wants to put an end to the euro. He wants to undermine the May government, the Merkel government, and the Macron government and install right-wing administrations in their place. And he’s already been successful to the extent that he played a major role in the political coalition that now governs Italy…

‘dharma’, btw, is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “The principle or law that orders the universe.” (No, I didn’t know either, but it’s an interesting interview despite that.)

Footnote: For an intriguing little film by Morris that conveys what he’s like, see this New York Times video on “the umbrella man”. He’s also written a rather good book on documentary photography, Believing is Seeing.

My commonplace bookletVenkatesh Rao’s definition of ‘intellectual menopause’ from his essay on the subject.

Intellectual menopause is an individual disease that men of particular temperaments and a particular age range (40-50) are particularly vulnerable to. It is especially liable to be triggered if they’re part of a paradigm that’s beginning to exhaust itself when they begin their careers, and is likely to infect entire cohorts. It is likely to manifest through behaviors like a focus on abstract values, manifestos, bestowing advice upon younger people, “attitudinizing” one’s own past, or retreating from frontline creative endeavors to supervisory and managerial ones. It is is a symptom of a phase in the lifecycle of complex social systems.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Is the Gartner ‘hype cycle’ generalisable?

The Economist decided to do some empirical work.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to test whether a hype cycle is an empirical regularity. “Since it is vibe-based data, it is hard to say much about it definitively,” notes Ethan Mollick of the University of Pennsylvania. But we have had a go at saying something definitive, extending work by Michael Mullany, an investor, that he conducted in 2016. The Economist collected data from Gartner, which for decades has placed dozens of hot technologies where it believes they belong on the hype cycle. We then supplemented it with our own number-crunching.

We find, in short, that the cycle is a rarity. Tracing breakthrough technologies over time, only a small share—perhaps a fifth—move from innovation to excitement to despondency to widespread adoption. Lots of tech becomes widely used without such a rollercoaster ride. Others go from boom to bust, but do not come back. We estimate that of all the forms of tech which fall into the trough of disillusionment, six in ten do not rise again. Our conclusions are similar to those of Mr Mullany: “An alarming number of technology trends are flashes in the pan.”

Interesting. I have found the Hype Cycle to be a good way of opening a conversation about tech, but maybe it doesn’t capture the overall reality of tech evolution. As the Economist notes, cloud computing went “from zero to hero” in a straight line. And the same may be happening with solar power. But how will the ‘AI’ bubble play out?

FeedbackThanks to a reader, Melwyn Godinho, I discovered that the BBC World Service’s Moving Pictures documentary strand had a lovely episode about the picture which had led Wednesday’s edition of this blog. From it I learned how much more there is to the painting than I had imagined. As a result I’ve been brooding on it all week.

Great works of art do that — they have a way of burrowing into one’s consciousness, so that you can’t stop thinking about them. I was the Observer’s television critic for many years, and when I decided to move on to other things I was asked to name the best TV productions I’d seen during that time. And I used that criterion — of whether a work had taken up a space in my head — to decide. Top of the list was Edgar Reitz’s Heimat trilogy, which chronicled life in Germany from 1918 to 2000 through the eyes of a family from the Hunsrück area of the Rhineland-Palatinate. The family’s personal and domestic life is set against the backdrop of wider social and political events in Germany, and when I was watching it, week by week, I simply could not get its characters — and their stories — out of my head. Other works that had the same effect included Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, Alan Plater’s The Barchester Chronicles (and especially Alan Rickman as Mr Slope) and Alan Bleasdale’s The Boys from the Blackstuff.

Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography

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Harvesting then and nowThis remarkable 1565 painting by Pieter Breugel the Elder stopped me in my tracks the other day. It’s fascinating in its detail (for a much bigger version click on the image here) — right down to the people who may be skinny-dipping in a small lake in the far distance, the man bringing a pitcher of water to the others sitting under the tree, and the exhausted man asleep. But it’s also an interesting illustration of how agricultural practices have changed over the centuries.

Consider the number of people involved in harvesting that crop, and then look at this:

This field, which is farmed by a neighbour of ours, is truly vast — stretching almost as far as the eye can see. Yet its cereal crop was harvested in three days by two men (albeit with a couple of enormous machines). And then it was ploughed by a single man in a huge tractor in (I think) two days.

Quote of the Day

“If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking”

Benjamin Franklin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMark Knopfler | Ruth Moody | Wherever I Go

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Long Read of the DayFixed Narratives, Fixing Narratives

Fabulous essay by Timothy Burke which starts with a scorching critique of the New York Times’s delusional (and dangerous) pursuit of editorial ‘balance’ at a time when that requires ‘balancing’ rational thinking and analysis with the ravings of a deluded ex-President and his supporting cast of right-wing nutters.

The NYT is really at its worst in this year’s campaign cycle, to the point that I’m a bit at a loss to imagine what’s going on in the newsroom. Their behavior is so programmatic that I have to think they’re consciously pursuing an obsessive, almost lunatic version of “balance” in their coverage of both presidential campaigns. It’s so over the top and calculated that it ends up feeling less like news coverage and more like an attempt to be a third side—not even being a referee but an advocate set against both campaigns on behalf of some imagined and very Rube Goldberg jerry-rigged “centrism”. Nate Cohn’s weird freak-out about how Harris was far to the left on economic policy right after she moved into the lead spot was a foretaste of what we’ve had ever since.

Today’s piece on why Harris is wrong that inflation has anything to do with price gouging is a good example of what this drive is doing to the clarity and structure of NYT news analysis. It’s not a patient laying out of the concept of inflation, nor an exploration of the history of inflation in post-Bretton Woods global economies. It’s not a methodical sector-by-sector look back at price increases during the pandemic and its immediate aftermath. It’s not a detailed analysis of whether there have been supply chain issues and which commodities have been affected most, or even what “supply chains” mean in the contemporary globalized situation, which is something quite different than what they meant in 1974, 1980, or 1990. The whole piece reads as if the conclusion was reached first and then the authors tried to find ways to make the conclusion hold. Which, I know, is not an unfamiliar habit in journalism or academia, but it’s a bad look when it is this obvious and this motivated.

Two junctures where I really found myself frustrated with the article was first that in fact some economists do say that “price gouging” and profit-seeking were one reason inflation remained high into 2022 and 2023. The article acknowledges that fact, but way down near the bottom of the inverted pyramid, whereas the lede frames the story as “politicians who have a message vs. the strong consensus of experts.” “Gouging” of some kind, fueled in part by the stimulus provided to consumers and nominal increases in wages in response to workers quitting their jobs, was so visible in 2022 and 2023 that some companies touted their continuing strategy of increasing prices to pad profits a part of their annual reports and have developed a marketing narrative to go along with it—that they want consumers to normalize a preference for “premium” brands where the main thing that’s premium about them is the price.

What really drove me nuts is a paragraph early on that sets out to rubbish the idea that companies are keeping supplies artificially low in order to pump demand and keep prices high. It drove me nuts first because there have been demonstrated cases of price manipulation of that kind in the last seventy-five years of global economic history. This is not folklore or conspiracy theory. Sometimes it’s not the companies, it’s speculative buyers that keep supplies low, but it absolutely can happen. More importantly, what the article offers as disproof that this was happening between 2021 and 2023 the following: “At least in theory, such a situation should be only temporary. New competitors should enter the market and provide products at a price people can afford.”

Among other things, the essay supports the view that if the US does finally sink into unshackled authoritarianism in November, then the country’s mainstream media will have — wittingly or unwittingly — been an accessory after the fact.

Books, etc.Corporate BS

This looks interesting. Blurb reads:

From praising the health benefits of cigarettes to moralizing on the character-building qualities of child labor, rich corporate overlords have gone to astonishing, often morally indefensible lengths to defend their profits. Since the dawn of capitalism, they’ve told the same lies over and over to explain why their bottom line is always more important than the greater good: You say you want to raise the federal minimum wage? Why, you’ll only make things worse for the very people you want to help! Should we hold polluters accountable for the toxins they’re dumping in our air and water? No, the free market will save us! Can we raise taxes on the rich to pay for universal healthcare? Of course not—that will kill jobs! Affordable childcare? Socialism! It’s always the same tired threats and finger-pointing, in a concentrated campaign to keep wealth and power in the hands of the wealthy and powerful.

If in doubt, see Cory’s review!

My commonplace booklet’Decisive moment’ 2.0

Many thanks to the readers who wrote to me after this pic headed Monday’s edition. Writing back to one of them (a fellow-photographer) I explained that it was the result of a conjunction of a few things: a lovely afternoon; me happening to be in the churchyard; I had a Leica with me (as usual); over to the left, out of view, was an almost extinct bonfire, smoke from which was gently drifting rightwards. The conjunction of all those things made for the ‘decisive moment’ that Henri Cartier-Bresson famously wrote about in his book of that title.

But when I raised the camera to my eye, the scene didn’t look right in colour. So I took out my iPhone, switched on its monochrome filter and took the picture.

“Ah”, wrote my friend, “the decisive moment! That time when you had a Leica and an iPhone and chose to use the iPhone…”. Touché.

But actually, that particular decisive moment happened a long time ago. See this chart.

Most of those ‘digital cameras’ (blue colour) are in smartphones.

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The silence of the graveA photograph taken on Saturday afternoon in the beautiful old churchyard where my beloved Sue lies buried. Her death from cancer in August 2002 left me and our two young children devastated. We’ve recovered as best we can, but for us, August is still a sombre month.

Quote of the Day

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsThe Wailin’ Jennys | Bird Song

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Long Read of the DayThink before you post

An interesting blog post by Ed West, which makes for uncomfortable reading, not least because it highlights the inconsistency (and possible injustices) of sentencing policy in the British justice system, and partly because of the way that stupid or naive users of Twitter/X get fingered and punished while the Great Enabler of toxic misinformation, Elon Musk, goes scot free (and is fawned upon by a former British Prime Minister).

Julie Sweeney had spent a ‘quiet, sheltered life in Cheshire’ for most of her 53 years, living in the village of Church Lawton caring for her sick husband the past decade.

She had never been in trouble with the law before, but reading the news on July 31 about the clear-up at Southport mosque, Sweeney posted on Facebook: ‘It’s absolutely ridiculous. Don’t protect the mosque. Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.’

For this she will spend 15 months in HMP Styal, a prison notorious for its menace, violence and self-harm. She cried as she was taken down, saying only ‘thank you, your honour’.

As he jailed Sweeney, Judge Stephen Everett said: ‘You should have looked at the news with horror, like right minded people. Instead, you chose to take part in stirring up hatred. It was a truly terrible threat.’ Although she had no intention of taking part in violence, ‘so called keyboard warriors like her, have to learn to take responsibility for their inflammatory and disgusting language’. A letter from her husband did not sway the judge’s heart.

You get the drift. Read on.

Books, etc.The Best Books on the Politics of Information

Transcript of a fabulous interview by Sophie Roell of the political scientist Henry Farrell on the five key books he would choose for building a curriculum for a course on ‘the politics of information’. In the case of each, Henry explains its significance — and outlines the main thrust of its argument — with insight and conceptual clarity.

The books are:

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
The Market System by Charles Lindblom
The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert Simon
Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Wehl and Posner
Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

Of these, I’ve read only #1 and #3.

It’s worth reading the transcript just to why Henry thinks each book is significant. For me, the most surprising thing was that he puts Uncanny Valley in the same league as Red Plenty. Which means that now I have to read the latter!

If Google’s monopoly is broken, it will be good for consumers – and the company tooYesterday’s Observer column:

Earlier this month, a district court in Washington DC handed down a judgment in an antitrust case that has shaken up the tech industry. In a 286-page opinion, Judge Amit Mehta announced his conclusion. “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”

Now I know that for normal, well-adjusted people, antitrust cases are an excellent antidote to insomnia, but stay tuned for a moment because this is a really big deal. Apart from anything else, it shows that an ancient legal warhorse, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, still has teeth. And to see it successfully deployed to bring an overbearing tech company to heel is a delight. After all, it was the statute that in 1911 broke up John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil as well as American Tobacco, and AT&T in 1982. It was also used to prosecute Microsoft in 1998…

Do read the whole piece

LinkblogOK, I know you’re busy. But if you have a spare 35 minutes and need cheering up, then can I respectfully suggest you make a coffee and watch this edition of the Daily Show on how Donald Trump can’t get over the fact that he’s not now campaigning against Joe Biden.

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The Amphitheatre next doorArles, 2024

Quote of the Day

”S&P Global is paying Accenture to train all 35k staff in ‘generative AI’. I used to joke that if you say ‘Digital Transformation’ three times, an Accenture partner will appear in a puff of smoke and offer you a contract – now the same happens for ‘AI’. Welcome to enterprise IT.”

Benedict Evans

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsYou Raise Me Up | Life in 3D

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I got this from Quentin who discovered these three musical siblings while browsing. Their names are Devon, Daylon and Daura, hence the ‘3D’!

Long Read of the DaySeeing Like a Matt

Fascinating essay by Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) on the intellectual blind spots of anti-anti-neoliberalism. Sounds arcane, I know, but if you’re interested in the ideology that got us into this mess (and I, for one, am), then it’s great read. It’s basically a response to a recent blog post by Matt Yglesias in his series on “Neoliberalism and Its Enemies.”

This is how it opens:

In brief (lots more below), Matt’s diagnosis of the state of affairs seems to me to be as follows. Once, and not so long ago, Democrats like Obama had a technocratic approach to policy which was dubbed neoliberalism by its enemies, but was actually pretty good! This approach involved letting markets do their thing so as to produce lots of delicious economic growth, and redistributing the proceeds to make people happy. Good policy making required careful thinking about the concrete costs and benefits of proposed measures – you calculated the tradeoffs and made the appropriate policy choices, ignoring the complaints of lefties. With notably rare exceptions, such as trade with China, this worked out pretty well. Sadly, in the last few years, many Democrats have fallen off the path of righteousness, seduced by the brazen idols of political economy. They have lost any understanding of tradeoffs, or of proper policy analysis, and are wandering the mazes of their own confused rhetoric in a condition of utter bewilderment. There is a cure. We Must All Return to the One True Path of Technocratic Neoliberalism, Though We Don’t Have To Call It That If It Makes You Feel Sad!

My own take (or, more precisely, my crude riff on other, more intelligent people’s ideas) is unsurprisingly very different. As I see it, there is no realistic prospect of going back to the technocratic shake-and-bake of letting markets rip and divvying up the benefits. It had its virtues, but we live in a different world, in part thanks to its equally substantial flaws.

Do read it. Henry is a fine writer and very erudite, and he’s intellectually combative but never rude. This essay is a model of how to disagree productively.

Books, etc.Screenshot

The historian Richard J. Evans, my distinguished former colleague, has a new book out, which is on my list. I’ve just seen the NYT review and look forward to reading it. Years ago, Richard, David Runciman and I ran a big, Leverhulme-funded research project on ‘Conspiracy and Democracy’. We started in late 2012 and for the first three and a half years our academic colleagues — who subscribed to the conventional wisdom that conspiracy theories had very little significance for democracy — wondered about our sanity. And then Brexit happened and Trump was elected and our colleagues were no longer incredulous!

My commonplace bookletTrump’s ‘Affirmative Action Program’: the media

The inability of mainstream media in the US to dispassionately report on Trump is shocking. One sees it everywhere, but it was particularly egregious in the imbalance between the incessant focus on Joe Biden’s frailties and the apparent inability of leading newspapers and broadcast outlets to report truthfully on Trump’s manifestly obvious cognitive disintegration.

So it was refreshing to read John Stoehr, editor of ‘The Editorial Board’ newsletter, on the subject:

Every single person in Washington knows Trump is weak, but he rarely comes off that way to the American public, and that’s thanks to the press corps. In a sense, the press corps is Trump’s “affirmative action program” (if we accept the illiberal definition of affirmative action). It doesn’t matter how much he fails. It doesn’t matter how weak he is. The press corps can be trusted to inject something – anything – he says into any story, even ones where he does not belong, and as a consequence, he will come off as stronger than he is. Case in point: “Biden, Trump exchange jabs as Russia prisoner swap turns political.”

(Trump’s “affirmative action program” was on display this week after he humiliated himself during a televised interview at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. The audience laughed at him when he doubted Kamala Harris’ Blackness. That was funny! But the press corps bailed him out, again, by framing the story as if Harris were responsible for his buffoonery, not him.)

And because Trump comes off as stronger than he is, Biden comes off as weaker than he is. Remember: Biden really did get those prisoners out.

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Gee-upStriking mural, Brignoles, Provence

Quote of the Day

”I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy . . . the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

John Maynard Keynes in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

Dead relevant when contemplating the ways in which neoliberal ideas have shaped our world over the last half-century.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJ.S. Bach | Prelude No. 1, BWV 846 (Das Wohltemperierte Klavier) | Alexandre Tharaud

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Hypnotically beautiful. It doesn’t get much better than this.

Long Read of the DayExpress Elevator

Truly interesting and subtle essay by the gifted sci-fi writer Karl Schroeder on the flaws in our conventional ways of thinking about — and imagining — possible futures. The title comes from a term devised aeons (probably in the Sixties) for the practice of taking uppers and downers simultaneously. (Spoiler alert: do not try this at home.)

The sad truth is that coherent, single-message futures are easier to understand. That’s why there are more of them. Full stop, end of story. They’re easier to dream up, easier to flesh out if you’re worldbuilding or developing a scenario, and they’re easier to explain. “It all goes to shit!” is a concise enough description of the year 2050 for most people to nod their heads and get right into the action.

But the real world doesn’t work that way.

For example: ending fossil fuels is unquestionably a good idea. But as it turns out, aerosols in the air, mostly produced by burning those fuels, currently mask about .5 degrees C of global warming. There’s a term in geoengineering—”termination shock”—which is the sudden spike in temperature that would go along with ending a geoengineering effort to manage global temperatures. Termination shock is such an evil thing that Neal Stephenson wrote a whole novel about it (guess what the title is). Meanwhile, even as we pontificate about how bad geoengineering is because it has the potential to cause termination shock, we are experiencing actual, for-real termination shock because we’re eliminating coal plants, and the aerosols they’ve blanketed the Earth with for decades.

Coal phase-outs are an express elevator: simultaneously good and bad…

Do read it. It made me think, which is quite an achievement.

Books, etc.Somewhat to my surprise, I’m finding Nick Wapshott’s book on the clash between two epochal thinkers of the 20th century enjoyable and informative. It helps that it also has the occasional nice anecdote. Like this one about Joan Robinson, the great (but initially under-appreciated) economist who worked closely with Richard Kahn, another of Keynes’s proteges.

She and Austin Robinson were ostensibly happily married with two daughters, but her close intellectual collaboration with Kahn led them to become lovers. The couple was once surprised by Keynes in flagrante, Keynes telling [his wife] Lydia that the pair were “lovingly entangled on the floor of Kahn’s study, though I expect the conversation was only on ‘The Pure Theory of Monopoly’”.

My commonplace bookletSusan Wójcicki RIP

speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 at Pier 48 on September 14, 2016 in San Francisco, California.

She originally rented her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were starting Google — and then joined the company, eventually becoming CEO of YouTube. “As one of the earliest Googlers — and the first to take maternity leave”, writes Sundar Pichai (CEO of Alphabet and Google), “Susan used her position to build a better workplace for everyone. And in the years that followed, her advocacy around parental leave set a new standard for businesses everywhere. Susan was also deeply passionate about education. She realized early on that YouTube could be a learning platform for the world and championed ‘edutubers’ — especially those who extended the reach of STEM education to underserved communities”.

She always seemed to me to be a force for good in the industry. Unlike some other — more famous — women one could name.

NYT obit is here

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

The Babylonian Map of the World with Irving Finkel This delightful talk by a great scholar of antiquity is unmissable IMHO.

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Sunset over the Hall

Quote of the Day

”Whether it was a good idea to print the prefaces in a single volume is a moot point, since they were not designed by their author to be encountered in a block. Together they cast much light on what James thought of his own work, on the art of fiction, and on how towards the end of his life he thought about his earlier career. But the process of reading them one after another, without the intervening joys of the fiction, is a bit like being forced to eat a roll of linoleum thickly spread with jam (to make it a little more digestible), while being overseen by a nostalgic nanny who repeatedly attempts to recall the precise origins of each splodge of jam, and of the fruit from which it was, meticulously and with much boiling and concentration, originally confected.”

Colin Burrow, reviewing The Prefaces by Henry James (CUP, 2024) in the London Review of Books.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsWailin’ Jennys | The Parting Glass

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This came to mind as I watched the athletes gathering for the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games last night.

Long Read of the DayRichard Nixon: My Part In His Downfall

Nice memoir by Lawrence Freedman of his youthful participation in the 1972 Democratic convention.

In July 1972 I was 23, and on my first visit to the United States. As a political junkie – I’d been active in student and Liberal Party politics – I was keen to experience American politics at first hand. Having spent time protesting against the Vietnam War my natural affinities were with the McGovern camp. So a week after arriving in New York and then meeting up with family in New Jersey I took a Greyhound Bus to Miami, itself something of an experience.

On Monday 10 July 1972 I wrote to my parents from the Doral Hotel telling them that I was working as a McGovern volunteer and able to watch was happening behind the scenes. Having been unable to find my relation’s friend who was supposedly a big shot in the campaign I saw a sign which said ‘Volunteers for McGovern: Accommodation Provided.’ As I had nowhere to stay close to the Convention I duly volunteered and was soon filling envelopes with campaign material. This is the sort of thing volunteers often do though it is not very exciting. But I was diligent and keen and when an opportunity came to do something more interesting I took it…

Great read. But to get to understand why the title of the essay (kind-of) makes sense, you have to read to the end!

What opposition to delivery drones shows about big tech’s disrespect for democracyYesterday’s Observer column:

Tech determinism is an ideology, really; it’s what determines how you think when you don’t even know that you’re thinking. And it feeds on a narrative of technological inevitability, which says that new stuff is coming down the line whether you like it or not. As the writer LM Sacasas puts it, “all assertions of inevitability have agendas, and narratives of technological inevitability provide convenient cover for tech companies to secure their desired ends, minimise resistance, and convince consumers that they are buying into a necessary, if not necessarily desirable future”.

But for the narrative of inevitability to translate into widespread general deployment of a technology, politicians eventually have to buy into it too. We’re seeing a lot of this at the moment with AI, and it’s not clear yet how that will play out in the long run. Some of the omens are not good, though. One thinks, for example, of the toe-curling video of Rishi Sunak fawning on Elon Musk, the world’s richest manchild, or of Tony Blair’s recent soppy televised conversation with Demis Hassabis, the sainted co-founder of Google DeepMind.

How refreshing it is, then, to come across an account of what happens when the deterministic myth collides with democratic reality…

Read on

My commonplace bookletThink before you post At last, maybe the UK Crown Prosecution Service is getting serious about prosecuting people who make threats on social media. I’ve never understood how, Twitter/X male users who threaten female politicians with rape are not prosecuted. In related news, Irish police have arrested a guy who made online threats about the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and his family. So maybe the democratic worm is beginning to turn.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

‘It made me cry’: photos taken 15 years apart show melting Swiss glaciers Intriguing (though depressing) story in the Guardian.

A tourist has posted “staggering” photos of himself and his wife at the same spot in the Swiss Alps almost exactly 15 years apart, in a pair of photos that highlight the speed with which global heating is melting glaciers.

Duncan Porter, a software developer from Bristol, posted photos that were taken in the same spot at the Rhône glacier in August 2009 and August 2024. The white ice that filled the background has shrunk to reveal grey rock. A once-small pool at the bottom, out of sight in the original, has turned into a vast green lake.

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Free spiritsFunny how plants refuse to do what you want them to do. This rose bush was supposed to enliven a dull patch in the garden fence, but instead has decided to reach for the sky.

Quote of the Day

“Empire will leave behind only two monuments: the game of Association Football, and the expression ‘Fuck off’ ”

Richard Turnbull, (Governor of Tanganyika 1958-1961)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsChris Rea | Stainsby Girls

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Long Read of the DayLeveraged buyouts are not like mortgages

If, like me, you think that so called ‘private equity’ operators are the hyenas of capitalism, then you’ll enjoy this blast by Cory Doctorow. I’ve known Cory for years, and admired him for even longer. He pulls no punches and takes no prisoners.

Exhibit A:

Here’s an open secret: the confusing jargon of finance is not the product of some inherent complexity that requires a whole new vocabulary. Rather, finance-talk is all obfuscation, because if we called finance tactics by their plain-language names, it would be obvious that the sector exists to defraud the public and loot the real economy.

Take “leveraged buyout,” a polite name for stealing a whole goddamned company:

I. Identify a company that owns valuable assets that are required for its continued operation, such as the real-estate occupied by its outlets, or even its lines of credit with suppliers;

II. Approach lenders (usually banks) and ask for money to buy the company, offering the company itself (which you don’t own!) as collateral on the loan;

III. Offer some of those loaned funds to shareholders of the company and convince a key block of those shareholders (for example, executives with large stock grants, or speculators who’ve acquired large positions in the company, or people who’ve inherited shares from early investors but are disengaged from the operation of the firm) to demand that the company be sold to the looters;

IV. Call a vote on selling the company at the promised price, counting on the fact that many investors will not participate in that vote (for example, the big index funds like Vanguard almost never vote on motions like this), which means that a minority of shareholders can force the sale;

V. Once you own the company, start to strip-mine its assets: sell its real-estate, start stiffing suppliers, fire masses of workers, all in the name of “repaying the debts” that you took on to buy the company…

Do read on. What’s striking about this racket is the way it has been used to destroy a number of venerable UK companies. It should be outlawed — just as permitting companies to buy their own shares should be banned. But because democracies have spent over half a century devising legal regimes that prioritise the interests of corporations and private capital these abuses continue.

You can see why Cory is not exactly popular in some quarters. He’s always welcome here, though.

Books, etc.Sometimes, serendipity works. This is one of my favourite books. It uses the arguments about the real source of true knowledge between Thomas Hobbes (hence the Leviathan of the title) and the scientist Robert Boyle (of Boyle’s Law and other things) to make us ponder how we came to regard experimental science as the preferred way of producing knowledge.

During the pandemic I lent my copy to a bright graduate student after she and I had had a discussion about Hobbes, but then (of course) forgot to whom I had given the volume. (I keep meaning to keep a list of borrowers, but…) And then, the other day, it turned up in my pigeon-hole in College: she’s leaving to take up a Fellowship in a place hear Swindon-which-shall-not-be-named and was clearing out her apartment before departing.

It’s so nice to have it back.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From The Register: WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free. The preferred writing tool of Arthur C Clarke and William Buckley Jr. And, for a time, of this blogger.
How the KKK Scammed Its Members for Cash. Gripping article by Rosie Cima. Turns out that the Klan was basically a pyramid scheme “fueled by an army of highly-incentivized sales agents selling hatred, religious intolerance, and fraternity in a time and place where there was tremendous demand”. And the two things that brought it down were: the conviction in 1925 of its ‘Grand Wizard’ for rape and murder; and being sued by the federal government in 1944 for $685,000 in back taxes!

ErrataMax Whitby writes:

Congratulations on your bees taking up residence. Judging by their front doors, these are Leaf-cutters (Genus: Megachile) rather than Masons (Genus: Osmia). There are seven species in the UK… including Willughby’s Leaf-Cutter Bee (Megachile willughbiella) named after Francis Willughby (1635-1672) of Trinity College Cambridge.

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Air Bee’n BeeOne of my boys and his partner gave me a ‘bug hotel’ for my birthday and we decided to pin it to the garden fence and await developments. So far, five Mason Bees have booked accommodation.

Quote of the Day

“Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.”

E.B. White

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsEva Cassidy | Autumn Leaves

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I know I know, it’s not Autumn yet. But this was new to me and I liked it. Hope you do too!

Long Read of the DayGordon Brown on his experience of the Murdoch press

Compelling piece in the Guardian by the UK’s former Prime Minister, in which he details what these rags had been up to — including deleting millions of potentially embarrassing (and perhaps legally problematic) emails.

The kicker is that the guy who presided over much of this chicanery has been appointed Editor of the sainted Washington Post. Truly, you couldn’t make it up.

Books, etc.Human Voices

I’m currently reading Penelope Fitzgerald’s biography of her uncles, The Knox brothers, and am deeply impressed by it, particularly by her ability to provide contextual detail about four men who had complicated and interesting lives (one was an early cryptographer and code-breaker; two were priests; and one was Editor of Punch).

I hadn’t read anything by her before, and indeed only got the ‘brothers’ book because of reading Henry Oliver’s Second Act and discovering that she was fifty-eight before she published a book and yet is now recognised as one of the best English writers of her generation. So I started wondering which of her novels I should start with. Sarah Harkness’s recent essay solved the problem: Human Voices it shall be.

Which is why her essay is worth reading.

My commonplace bookletI’m a sceptic about AGI and deeply suspicious of the giant tech corporations which aspire to control the technology. But from the outset I’ve been a pragmatist about Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Llama, Claude, Gemini et al. I see these as (a) what Alison Gopnik calls (cultural technologies — like libraries, language, books, etc.) and (b) as potentially useful tools — like spreadsheets, and in that context use them a bit as unpaid but assiduous interns. And I find them useful.

Which explains why I liked this post by Nicholas Carlini. He’s a security researcher and a sceptic about most things, but in the essay he outlines how he’s been using LLMs in his work. His view is that,

current large language models have provided the single largest improvement to my productivity since the internet was created. Honestly, today, if you gave me the choice of solving a randomly selected programming task from my work either with access to the internet or access to a state of the art language model, I’d probably pick the language model more than half the time.

Which is interesting, is it not?

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Director’s cutI don’t suffer from house envy, but if I did — and had won the lottery — this is the kind of house I’d go for. It’s Cory Lodge, which used to be the residence of the Director of Cambridge University’s Botanic garden (maybe it still is, but given the utilitarianism of university administrations, it could well have been turned into offices). It’s a perfect example of a certain kind of Victorian villa.

In the late 1980s, when I desperately needed a place of my own, I rented a wing of a house of this type and vintage for a year and a half, and it was a lovely, restorative experience. There’s something about this kind of architecture that’s good for the soul.

From 1951 to 1973 John Gilmour was the Director of the Garden and his three daughters gave a nice interview looking back on what it was like growing up in such a lovely home.

Quote of the Day

”The cognitive dissonance the Olympics produces for me: You’re watching these amazing athletes push their bodies to the limits of their abilities, you tear up at the drama and the joy and the excitement and the pain and disappointment of it all, you’re maybe even thinking about what it means to be human and how much intelligence is the result of being an embodied creature… and then every tech company ad wants you to buy into artificial intelligence.”

Austin Kleon

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsVance VP – a parodic adaptation of ABBA’s Dancing Queen about Trump’s running mate .

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Some very sharp lyrics reminding listeners that if Trump were to win in November, this Hillbilly elegist will be just “One Big Mac away” from the nuclear button.

Thanks to Timothy Garton Ash, who spotted it first.

Long Read of the DayThe Friedrich Hayek I knew, and what he got right – and wrong

There’s an interesting essay in the New Statesman by John Gray about one of the most enigmatic thinkers of the 20th century. What I hadn’t realised was that Gray actually knew Hayek. The essay is interesting throughout, but particularly good on the relationship between Hayek and Keynes.

The two men had quite different kinds of minds – Keynes’s swift and mobile, with an almost clairvoyant power of entering into the thinking of others; Hayek’s slowly probing, inwardly turned and self-enclosed. They were nonetheless on cordial terms.

Keynes found Hayek rooms in King’s College when the London School of Economics (where Hayek became a professor of economics in 1931) moved to Cambridge for the duration of the Second World War, and for a time the pair shared fire-watching duties on the roof of the college when it was feared that Cambridge might be bombed…

Like many of these Long Reads, it made me want to read something else related to its topic.

(Memo to self: check out Nicholas Wapshott’s book Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics in the University Library this morning.)

Back to the 1930s: Silicon Valley’s Trump supportersYesterday’s Observer column:

In How Democracy Ends, his elegant book published after Trump’s election in 2016, David Runciman made a startling point. It was that while the liberal democracy that we take for granted won’t last for ever, it will not fail in ways familiar from the past: no revolutions, no military coups, no breakdowns of social order. It will fail forwards in an unexpected manner. The implication was that people making comparisons to what happened in 1930s Germany were misguided.

But then something changed. Significant sectors of Silicon Valley – which for decades had been a Democrat stronghold – started coming out for Trump. In 2016, Peter Thiel, the contrarian billionaire and co-founder of PayPal, had been the only prominent Valley figure to support Trump, which merely confirmed the fact that he was the region’s statutory maverick. But in the past few weeks, quite a few of the Valley’s big hitters (Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, to name just three) have revealed themselves to be supporters of – and donors to – Trump. Musk has set up and donated to a Republican-aligned political action committee (or Super Pac). On 6 June, the venture capitalist Sacks hosted a $300,000-a-plate fundraising dinner for Trump at his San Francisco mansion. And so on.

Why all this sudden interest in politics?

Read on

Books, etc.John Simpson, the BBC’s veteran Foreign Editor, reviews of Anne Applebaum’s new book, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

Until around 2015, I tended to be moderately positive about the world. There were far more democracies than when I started at the BBC in 1966, I would tell myself, and markedly fewer dictatorships. Africa and Latin America, once host to so many military dictatorships, were now mostly run by elected leaders. The terrible threat of nuclear war had receded. A billion people were being lifted out of poverty. Yes, what Vladimir Putin had done in Crimea in 2014 was worrying, and Xi Jinping was starting to make disturbing speeches about Muslims and Uyghurs; but given that I’d seen Soviet communism melt away across eastern Europe and in Russia itself, I still felt there was reason for optimism.

That pretty much ended in 2016. Brexit damaged the European project, and Donald Trump shook the columns of American leadership. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, based on the completely false assumption that most Ukrainians would welcome the return of Russian domination, and China’s ruthless suppression of political freedom in Hong Kong have darkened the 2020s much as German, Italian and Japanese intervention darkened the 1930s. And the tide of democracy has turned. Elections have so often become shams. Corruption in government has turned into a major global industry. Well-intentioned but indigent governments welcome Chinese cash because no one else will supply it, and pretend not to notice the strings attached – or even welcome them. Populist movements well up in countries that have traditionally been moderate and calm.

And so the kind of neo-Whig version of history, which taught that trade would bring us all closer together and economics would make war impossible, has collapsed…

Good piece. So much for that Neo-Whig interpretation of post-war history.

My commonplace bookletWhat’s going on…

”The far right here and in other countries trawl violent and sexual crimes in the hope that they have been committed by migrants or non-whites. Instances are posted on social media and widely shared, often with a sneering reference to the “joys of multiculturalism”. I hardly need to add that when these crimes are the work of white people, the perpetrator’s origins or ethnicity won’t rate a mention. The absolute jackpot crime would be a child sex murder committed by a Muslim asylum seeker who arrived on a boat. This wouldn’t just rate a mention by your unfriendly local social media nazi and a bevy of YouTube influencers but by half a dozen Telegraph columnists and a score of GBNEWS and Talk TV hosts and their guests.

Within hours of the murders for which Axel Rudakabana has been charged – and in the absence of his identification, far right social media decided that they had completed its blame-bingo card. (Note, however, that despite a judge taking the unusual step of having an under-18 suspect named, it has made no difference whatsoever to those rioting in several towns in England.)…

From David Aaronovitch’s Substack.

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Morning conference8:30am, Provence, June

Quote of the Day

“If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving definitely isn’t for you”

Steven Wright

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMozart | Soave sia il vento | Così fan tutte

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Beautiful and so, so cynical. From the 2006 Glyndebourne performance. I’ve often thought that this would make great going-out music for one’s funeral.

Long Read of the DayIntellectual Diary of an Iconoclast

Background: This is a beautiful essay by the great social scientist James Scott, looking back on his intellectual development in which, instead of him leaving his original discipline of political science, political science left him. After I learned of his death, I wrote a little piece about him in last Wednesday’s edition in which I mentioned how generative his book Seeing Like a State had been — in the sense that it triggered a lot of productive thinking in its readers.

As if on cue, a really thoughtful post about Scott popped into my inbox the other day. It’s by Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) and his essay is an insightful meditation on the significance of Scott’s work, and worth reading just for that. But for me it had an added delight — of alerting me to Scott’s own reflection on his intellectual development.

A pivotal movement in his life was a decision to spend a year and a half living in a remote Malay village with 75 inhabitants in order to understand how real people lived rather than doing statistical surveys of the kind beloved by political scientists. One of the ideas that emerged from that experience was an understanding of what he called ‘below-the-radar-resistance’ by powerless peasants or political dissidents in authoritarian regimes.

One example of this kind of resistance that he cites comes from Poland during the period of martial law.

When the Solidarity Movement was strong at the end of martial law in Poland, there were forms of symbolic protest that drove the government crazy. The government news broadcast took place at 6:00 PM and people decided by the hundreds of thousands to leave their houses. The moment the news broadcast began, they took a walk in the street for a half hour, until the news broadcast was over, with their hats on backwards. There was no law against taking a walk, and there was, of course, no law about wearing your hat backwards. You could understand, however, that this was a huge morale booster for much of the Polish opposition to martial law.

The government responded by forcing a curfew at exactly 6:00 that would require people to be in their houses during the news broadcast. Within a few days, the Polish opposition had discovered a workaround. Since they could no longer be in the street during the news broadcast, what they did was to take their television set, put it on the windowsill, and blare out the news broadcast—which they considered to be largely lies—to the security forces, who were the only people in the street. This, as you can imagine, was also a huge morale booster and a symbolic victory for the opposition to martial law, even though it did not change the power dynamic in the short run.

Well worth a read. Even though it’s an academic article, it’s open-access. Go to the link and click on the “PDF” button.

Books, etc.Feeling pessimistic: why not try reading a book?

Lovely essay by Henry Oliver.

According to the Pew Centre, back in the 1970s, when news coverage wasn’t so pessimistic, only 8% of Americans reported not having read a book in the last year. That figure now stands at 23%. A new survey from the Reading Agency shows that only 50% of UK adults are regular readers. 35% are “lapsed”. And 15% have never been regular readers. In 2015, 58% of adults were regular readers. And only 8% of adults were non-readers back then. The figures for the 16-24 bracket suggest these figures will continue to decline.

Many reasons are given for this decline: distraction of social media, lack of ability to focus, and feeling bored or uninterested by the reading material. Those who did read reported better mental health, improved sleep and concentration, and better understanding of other people’s feelings. Readers have better life satisfaction.

The reason, I think, is that reading is a solitary activity. Reading requires us to leave the world of arguments, ideologies, news coverage, and TikTok feeds and to exist inside our imaginations for a while. Many solutions are sought to the wide-spread mood of dissatisfaction, not least the prevalence of therapy. But this keeps us focussed on what is making us miserable: our own lives, our own problems, the people around us.

It does, because misery is contagious. And listening to music and reading books are two antidotes to it. Which partly explains the structure of this little newsletter.

ErrataApologies to the inimitable Heather Cox Richardson for renaming her ‘Helen’ in Wednesday’s edition. Usual culprits: Apple autocorrect and slack proofreading by a sleepy blogger. And thanks to Andrew Brown for pointing it out so tactfully.

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The First WebcamThis was the world’s very first webcam. In 1991 my friend Quentin Stafford-Fraser and his colleague Paul Jardetzky set it up to watch a coffee-pot in the Cambridge Computer Laboratory’s Trojan Room (a large space previously occupied by an early mainframe computer) which housed a number of graduate students. Quentin and Paul connected it to the lab’s internal network so that graduate students everywhere in the building (rather than just the privileged denizens of the Trojan Room) — could see when the coffee had been brewed. Quentin wrote the X-Coffee program that displayed the live image in a small box on the top right-hand corner of every student’s desktop computer, and Paul wrote the server software to underpin it.

In 1993, when Mosaic — the first web browser that could handle images — appeared, the coffee-pot was hooked up to the Internet and broadcast on the web, and for a brief period was the most watched pot in the world! (Fittingly, it never boiled.) Many years later, when the Computer Lab moved from central Cambridge to its new, vast, building on the West Cambridge site, the venerable pot was auctioned for charity, and Quentin became the first person I’ve ever known who appeared on the front pages of the London and New York Times on the same day!

All of this was brought back by having lunch with him last week, when he suddenly produced the ancient relic from his bag. (It had been briefly liberated from its usual display case in the Lab for a TV interview he had done the day before.)

Quentin wrote a nice memoir of the webcam which was published in the Proceedings of the ACM in 2001.

Quote of the Day

”Me no Leica”.

Headline on Dorothy Parker’s review of Christopher Isherwood’s I Am A Camera.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsThe Wailin’ Jennys | Light of a Clear Blue Morning

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A distinctive take of a Dolly Parton song.

Long Read of the DayDemocratic fragility and resilience.

I know, I know, I/we pay too much attention to what’s going on in the US at the moment. That’s one of the curses of living in the ‘Anglosphere’, as my European friends often point out. But on the other hand, what happens in the US in the next 90-odd days will affect us all. If you doubt that, ask President Zelensky.

In brooding on it I’ve been oscillating between two frames of mind, both triggered by what James Joyce would have called epiphanies.

The first, triggered by Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the televised ‘debate’ between him and Trump, was a memory of an afternoon many years ago when my youngest son was revising for his GCSE exams. He was sitting at the dining-room table while I was in the kitchen cooking supper and he suddenly exclaimed, “Dad, I’ve got it! Tragedy is when you can see the disaster coming but you know there’s nothing anybody can do about it.”
The second was a moment in 2013 when I was reading The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present by my friend and colleague David Runciman. In it he argued that democracies are good at recovering from crises but bad at avoiding them. The lesson they draw from their mistakes is that they can survive them — and that no crisis is as bad as it initially appears. This breeds complacency rather than wisdom, leading to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything. (The ‘confidence trap’ of the book’s title.)

The dangerous thing, of course, is that muddling through takes time, and if democracies are slow to appreciate the next crisis then there may not be enough time to adjust before it’s too late. Watching how agonisingly slow Biden and the Democrats seemed to be in realising the danger led me to conclude that muddling through was no longer an option and that the US would wind up in the grip of a fascist administration with all that implied.

But then Biden conceded to reality and suddenly light appeared at the end of the tunnel. It was an astonishing moment, and of course it may not in the end derail the Trump bandwagon, but there’s now a tangible sense that the US may not fall into Runciman’s confidence trap.

This sense of democratic resilience is admirably captured in a post by Helen Cox Richardson on her admirable Substack blog, which I recommend reading in its entirety.

Here’s how it opens:

Just a week ago, it seems, a new America began. I’ve struggled ever since to figure out what the apparent sudden revolution in our politics means.

I keep coming back to the Ernest Hemingway quote about how bankruptcy happens. He said it happens in two stages, first gradually and then suddenly.

That’s how scholars say fascism happens, too—first slowly and then all at once—and that’s what has been keeping us up at night.

But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe democracy happens the same way, too: slowly, and then all at once.

At this country’s most important revolutionary moments, it has seemed as if the country turned on a dime…

Do read the whole thing.

My commonplace booklet

Linkblog Two plus two = 22?*. Clever and instructive film about the MAGA mindset.

Thanks to Chris Hall for suggesting it. He uses it in his teaching.

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Safely grazingA photograph taken on a rural cycle ride yesterday morning. Made me think of Bach — see today’s Musical Alternative.

Quote of the Day

“Get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians…. Get out, you’ve got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

Donald Trump, speaking to Christians at the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida on July 26.

I have to say that when I first read that I wondered if it might have been Trump’s favourite form of media — fake news. So I dug out the CSPAN video of the speech and watched it. And it’s there, towards the end — spool forward to 1.03:12 and you can see for yourself.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJ.S. Bach | Schafe können sicher weiden — Sheep May Safely Graze — from the Hunt Cantata, BWV 208

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Long Read of the DayHow to fix the UK? Let me count the ways

Really interesting essay by Tim Harford of the Financial Times

Here’s the bad news: it is going to take more than a change of government to cure what ails Britain. The symptoms are wearyingly familiar, but worth summarising. Waiting lists for NHS treatment have soared above 7.5mn, from 4.2mn in 2019 and 2.5mn in 2010. Prisons are at capacity, and the court system long since exceeded it. Local government funding has been squeezed for years, with obvious effects on local services such as social care, libraries and leisure centres.

The simple explanation for all this is that 14 years of Conservative-led governments have cut taxes, preferring to trust citizens with their own money even if it leaves the public realm looking threadbare. But that’s not what has happened. While headline taxes on average earners are indeed low, as a proportion of national income the total tax burden is — infamously — near the highest level since the 1940s, while the UK continues to borrow and add to the largest pile of debt in living memory. In short, we are spending more than ever and somehow getting less than ever for it.

Those are the symptoms. The cause is familiar, too: productivity has stagnated since 2008…

It’s good, but a newspaper column can only scratch the surface of the UK’s problems. For a really thorough analysis the best place to look (as Tim suggests) is the Resolution Foundation’s report.

You can download it for free. It’s quite a read, believe me.

AI and the Sigmoid CurveYesterday’s Observer column

I bought an iPhone 15 the other day to replace my five-year-old iPhone 11. The phone is powered by the new A17 Pro chip and has a terabyte of data storage and accordingly was eye-wateringly expensive. I had, of course, finely honed rationales for splashing out on such a scale. I’ve always had a policy of writing only about kit that I buy with my own money (no freebies from tech companies), for example. The fancy A17 processor is needed to run the new “AI” stuff that Apple is promising to launch soon; the phone has a significantly better camera than my old handset had – which matters (to me) because my Substack blog goes out three times a week and I provide a new photograph for each edition; and, finally, a friend whose ancient iPhone is on its last legs might appreciate an iPhone 11 in good nick.

But these are rationalisations rather than solid justifications. The truth is that my old iPhone was fine for the job. Sure, it would need a new battery in time, but apart from that it had years more life in it. And if you take a cold, detached look at the evolution of the iPhone product line, what you see from the 2010 iPhone 4 onwards is really just a sequence of steady incremental improvements…

Read on

Books, etc.If, like me, you’re struggling to work out the impact(s) of digital technology on democracies, then the re-issue of Karl Polyani’s great 1944 book is quite an event. It was a prescient and powerful argument for keeping capitalism under democratic control — and in that sense was read as a rebuttal of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which, ironically, was also published in 1944.

The economist Branko Milanovic has written a really informative review of the new edition which I think will be helpful to those who didn’t know about Polyani.

For those who may be new to the area, let me just summarize the main insights of Polanyi’s. Market economy, defined as an economy that entirely depends on prices of commodities including market-determined prices of factors of production (what Polanyi called “fictitious commodities”) of labor, land and money is an impossibility. It is impossible in practice because such an economy would annihilate society. This, Polanyi writes, was only imperfectly understood when the first time in history such an attempt was made during the British Industrial Revolution. “The Industrial Revolution was merely the beginning of a revolution so extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians, but the new creed was utterly materialistic and believed that all human problems could be resolved given unlimited amount of material commodities. (p. 40). Self-regulating market society would result (and in Britain it did initially result) in pauperism, vagrancy, alcoholism, insalubrious living conditions, “satanic mills”, much longer hours of work, shorter lives, lack of education, all the elements well known from economic history and from the works of literature.

Thus, the “society” (a rather capacious term that Polanyi overuses) had to defend itself against a self-regulated market economy…

My commonplace bookletOne of the great things about having a blog is that one has readers that know more than the blogger! I’m continually learning this. On Friday, I posted a picture of a lovely little vintage car that we saw on our drive northwards from Provence, and asked if anyone knew what it was.

You can guess what happened. Some readers knew immediately what it was — and told me. Others deployed search techniques to come up with the answer — a Renault 4CV!

Max Whitby (Whom God Preserve) had the idea of showing the image to Anthropic’s LLM (Claude 3.5), which replied as follows:

This appears to be a Renault 4CV, a small economy car produced by the French automaker Renault from 1946 to 1961.

The 4CV was one of France’s first post-World War II car designs and played a significant role in motorizing the French population after the war. Its nickname in France was “quatre pattes” (four paws), referring to its four doors.

The LLM also added some interesting points about the vehicle: it was designed in secret during the German occupation of France in World War II; it had a rear-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout; it was very popular, with over a million units produced during its 14-year production run; and its design influenced later Renault models, particularly the Renault Dauphine.

This was slightly annoying because I also use Claude but it never occurred to me to ask it about the car. And although my question about the car’s identity was a trivial one, Max’s use of the LLM was a reminder of how useful these tools can sometimes be.

Many thanks also to the readers who pointed me at the Wikipedia entry for the 4CV. They included James Miller (Whom God Preserve) who pointed out that this page explained how the little car came to have the mysterious letters RNUR engraved on the front badge:

On 1 January 1945, by de Gaulle’s decree, the company was posthumously expropriated from Louis Renault. On 16 January 1945, it was formally nationalised as Régie Nationale des Usines Renault.”

Thanks to all. I may not be wiser, but I am much better informed.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Plastic bottles and regulatory ‘freedom’. Jonty Bloom makes a nice point on his blog about the fact that when you now buy a bottle of water in the UK, you find that after you unscrew the cap and have a drink, the cap continues to be attached to the bottle by a thin piece of plastic. Turns out that this is the produce of a newish EU regulation.

But , writes Jonty,

Because we have left the EU the directive does not effect us, (a classic case of regulatory divergence by inertia, which I have mentioned before) but any British manufacturer of plastic bottle who wants to sell in the EU has to follow the EU rules.

As British industry, Remain and anyone with an ounce of common sense has been pointing out for years now, no company is going to run two production lines, one that meets EU standards and a British one that meets lower UK standards. They will run the one with higher standards and sell them in the UK and the rest of Europe.

Hey Presto! The Brexit fools have discovered that these new bottle tops have been “imposed” on the UK by the EU, we are not free or sovereign, EU regulations still apply, we are still in the dead clutch of Brussels, chained to a corpse and so on…

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l’AutoFollowing the Route Napoleon on our drive northwards through the Rhone Alps a couple of weeks ago, we stopped for coffee in the village of Corps and came on this quaint vehicle. It was small but perfectly formed, as they say. Intrigued, we wondered about its ancestry. The only clue was an enigmatic badge:

An early Renault, perhaps? More knowledgeable petrolheads will doubtless know.

Quote of the Day

”I really am a pessimist. I’ve always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It’s something essentially splendid because it’s not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.

Norman Mailer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBuffalo Springfield | For What It’s Worth

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Long Read of the DayBoth Sides

Thoughtful essay by historian Timothy Snyder on a pernicious delusion of mainstream media.

Why does American television and press “both-sides” our politics? Why are such different presidential candidates presented as equally flawed? Why do the outrages of Trump, for example at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, lead to the humiliation of Biden?

Both-Sidesism is the habit of reducing the world into two perspectives, treating the two as fundamentally alike, and then ignoring or adjusting the data. One cause of this odd behavior is the ownership of media companies. Another is fear.

But Both-Sidesism is not just a practice. It passes in the United States for a principle of journalism. Indeed, the dualism is almost unquestionable. Americans tends to take it for granted.

But it makes no sense. No data from the world around us indicates that two is the correct number of perspectives, nor that any two perspectives, once chosen, would be equal…

Great essay. I’m reminded of a conversation the economist Paul Krugman had with a group of Harvard undergraduates during the presidency of George W. Bush when Dick Cheney was his adult supervisor (and also Vice-President). At one stage Krugman used the phrase “balance as bias” and some of the students looked puzzled.

So he gave them an illustration of how it works:

Dick Cheney says the Earth is flat. Here’s how the New York Times reports it:
“VP says Earth flat; Others Disagree.”

My commonplace bookletShortly after the Trump shooting, Charlie Warzel, a well-known American journalist, went onto Twitter/X and was appalled by what he found there. So he wrote a column about it in The Atlantic which includes this passage:

Some may wish to see the conspiracy peddling, cynical politicking, and information warfare as a kind of gross aberration or the unintended consequences and outputs of a system that’s gone awry. This is wrong. What we are witnessing is an information system working as designed. It is a machine that rewards speed, bravado, and provocation. It is a machine that goads people into participating as the worst version of themselves. It is a machine that is hyperefficient, ravenous, even insatiable—a machine that can devour any news cycle, no matter how large, and pick it apart until it is an old, tired carcass.

If you’re interested in cybernetics, this is an interesting epiphany. Why? Because, for a cybernetician, the purpose of a system is not what people who own or run it say it is. The purpose is what the system actually does.

By the same token, the fact that neoliberalism produces inequality is a feature, not a bug, as programmers say. It’s what the system is designed to do.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

tinyPod — if this makes sense to anyone, they will most likely be denizens of the Apple ecosystem. Basically, you put your Apple Watch into a neat little plastic case that evokes memories of the original iPod and away you go. Effectively turns your wristwatch into a pocket watch! And really only makes sense if your iWatch has a mobile connection. Charming, in a way, but maybe just another example of leading-edge uselessness.

Thanks to Charles Arthur, who first spotted it.

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Peak ViewingThe Peak District viewed from Stanage Edge. Note the strategically-positioned crow.

Photo by my son Pete.

Quote of the Day

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it …”

Max Planck

A striking quote often summarised as “Science advances one funeral at a time”.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBach | French Suite No 4 | Murray Perahia

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This was on the car radio the other day.

When I reached my destination, I sat, entranced, until it ended.

Long Read of the DayOn The Moral Economy of Tech

A transcript of a remarkable talk by Maciej Ceglowski, one of the sharpest observers of digital technology around (and also the creator of Pinboard.in, which he describes as “bookmarking for introverts” and which has played a central role in my workflow for many years).

I am only a small minnow in the technology ocean, but since it is my natural habitat, I want to make an effort to describe it to you.

As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you.

The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable.

But as anyone who’s worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence…

It does. This is really worth your time.

Books, etc.James Scott, RIP

One of the most distinctive social scientists of his time died last Friday. I came to his work late, when I stumbled on his book Seeing Like a State when I was trying to understand how modern states came into being. It was basically a critique of what Scott called “high modernism”, a mindset of rulers to force “legibility” on their subjects by (as Wikipedia puts it) “homogenizing them and creating standards that simplify pre-existing, natural, diverse social arrangements. Examples include the introduction of family names, censuses, uniform languages, and standard units of measurement. While such innovations aim to facilitate state control and economies of scale, Scott argues that the eradication of local differences and silencing of local expertise can have adverse effects.”

Reading the book, I was sometimes reminded of The Open Society and its Enemies, but the most amusing impact it had on me was a kind of admiration for the Norman Conquest, the relentless thoroughness of which evoked Scott’s portrayal of the search for ‘legibility’. What else, after all, was the Domesday book [italics] for [unitalics] than to give William an informed idea of who his new realm’s 268,984 landowners were, how wealthy they were, etc.?

Brad DeLong wrote an interesting review of Seeing Like a State in which he gently chided Scott for not acknowledging his debt to Hayek and the Austrian economists. “One one level”, he wrote, the book

is an extraordinary well-written and well-argued tour through the various forms of damage that have been done in the twentieth century by centrally-planned social-engineering projects— by what James Scott calls “high modernism” and the attempt to use high modernist principles and practices to build utopia. As such, every economist who reads it will see it as marking the final stage in the intellectual struggle that the Austrian tradition has long waged against apostles of central planning. Heaven knows that I am no Austrian—I am a liberal Keynesian and a social democrat—but within economics even liberal Keynesian social democrats acknowledge that the Austrians won victory in their intellectual debate with the central planners long ago…

Scott’s work seems to have been highly generative (a bit like Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty in that respect), stimulating a lot of reflective writing on his themes and preoccupations. I’m thinking, for example, of Henry Farrell’s thoughtful meditation on “Seeing like a Finite State Machine”.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Cover of the current issue of the New Yorker, showing what has become of the US Supreme Court.

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.

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EvolutionOf one thing at least we can be sure: ‘soapy Sam’ would not have approved of the graphic.

Quote of the Day

With the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth… the critic.”

Mel Brooks

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsGustav Mahler | Fifth Symphony, Adagietto | Leonard Bernstein and the Wiener Phil

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The symphony was performed at the BBC Proms last night, with Mark Elder conducting the Hallé orchestra.

Footnote Bernstein once gave an intriguing talk at Harvard on the subject of ambiguity in the piece, which convinced me that I wasn’t cut out to be a musician.

Long Read of the DayVivian Maier, the Reclusive Nanny Who Secretly Became One of the Best Street Photographers of the 20th Century

Lovely piece by Ellen Wexler in The Smithsonian about an extraordinary photographer.

It’s a great story.

Vivian Maier took more than 150,000 photographs as she scoured the streets of New York and Chicago. She rarely looked at them; often, she didn’t even develop the negatives. Without any formal training, she created a sprawling body of work that demonstrated a wholly original way of looking at the world. Today, she is considered one of the best street photographers of the 20th century.

Maier’s photos provide audiences with a tantalizing peek behind the curtain into a remarkable mind. But she never intended to have an audience. A nanny by trade, she rarely showed anyone her prints. In her final years, she stashed five decades of work in storage lockers, which she eventually stopped paying for. Their contents went to auction in 2007.

Many of Maier’s photos ended up with amateur historian John Maloof, who purchased 30,000 negatives for about $400. In the years that followed, he sought out other collectors who had purchased boxes from the same lockers. He didn’t learn the photographer’s identity until 2009, when he found her name scrawled on an envelope among the negatives…

My hunch is that if she knew how famous and celebrated she has become, she’d be appalled!

Google’s wrong answer to the threat of AIYesterday’s Observer column:

As enshittification unfolds, the experience of a platform’s hapless users steadily and inexorably deteriorates. But most of them put up with it because of inertia and the perceived absence of anything better. The result is that, even as Google steadily deteriorated, it remained the world’s dominant search engine, with a monopolistic hold in many markets across the world; “Google” became a verb as well as a noun and “Googling” is now a synonym for online searching in all contexts.

The arrival of ChatGPT and its ilk threatens to upend this profitable applecart. For one thing, it definitely disrupts search behaviour. Ask a chatbot such as Perplexity.ai a question and it gives you an answer. Search for the topic on Google and it gives you a list of websites (including ones from which it derives revenue) on which you then have to click in order to make progress. For another, if users shift to chatbots for information, they won’t be exposed (at least for now) to lucrative search ads, which account for a significant chunk of Google’s revenue. And over time, experience with chatbots will change people’s expectations about searching for information online.

Overhanging all this, though, is the fact that generative AI is already flooding the web with AI-generated content…

Read on

My commonplace bookletAs regular readers know, I have been a keen photographer for ever, and so am partial to accounts of other photo-sufferers’ successes and tribulations. So you perhaps understand why I was a sucker for Jason Koebler’s essay, “Developing and Scanning My Own Color Film: A Rewarding, Infuriating Hobby”, not least because while I used to develop and print my own black & white films, I always shirked doing the same with colour rolls.

If you read the piece, you will perhaps understand why I shirked it!

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Your Body’s Updated Terms of Service From McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

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Gehry’s towerFor the new Luna Centre in Arles. Quite a building.

Quote of the Day

“I regard not finding Lord Lucan as my most spectacular success in journalism. Of course, many of my colleagues have also been fairly successful in not finding Lord Lucan. But I have successfully not found him in more exotic spots than anybody else.”

Garth Gibbs, a famous Daily Mirror journalist who would not have been out of place in Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful satire on journalism, Scoop. (A copy of which, incidentally, David Cameron kept on his desk before he was Prime Minister, presumably as a handbook for dealing with the British tabloids.)

For readers who do not follow the excesses of these vile rags, I should explain that Lord Lucan was an elegant and dissolute peer who disappeared after murdering his children’s nanny with a lead pipe and was never seen again, despite the efforts of many tabloid journalists — all coincidentally on lavish expenses — to locate him in foreign parts.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMozart | Ruhe Sanft, Mein Holdes Leben (Zaide) | Lucia Popp

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Sublime, utterly sublime.

Long Read of the DayThe AI summer

Nice essay by Benedict Evans, one of the shrewdest observers of the tech industry writing today.

Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they aren’t. Maybe we have to go through the slow, boring hunt for product-market fit after all.

Worth reading from start to finish. The reason we’re in an AI bubble is that while everyone and his dog is talking about how revolutionary the tech is, it’s not at all clear whether — and how — this apparent potential will actually be realised. Evans thinks that history suggests that the big payoffs might be a long time coming.

Books, etc.Top ten of the NYT’s top 100 books of the 21st century.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson The only ones I’ve read are nos. 5,8 and 9. My kids are appalled that I still haven’t read Wolf Hall, and don’t regard my protestations that I’ve seen the dramatisation as satisfactory justification. I’m pretty sure they’re right.

ErrataApologies to Belinda Kitchin for getting her surname wrong — as ‘kitchen’. Of course I’d like to blame it on Apple autocorrect, but careless proofreading is a more plausible explanation.

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A rose by any other name…

Quote of the Day“I don’t think I am any good. If I thought I was any good, I wouldn’t be”

John Betjeman

Lovely man, though logic wasn’t his strong point. I never pass St Pancras station, though, without thinking fondly of him. Without him it’d be some ghastly modernist pile.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsClaude-Michel Schonberg | Bring Him Home | The Piano Guys

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Long Read of the DayPutting the Boot in

Lovely essay by Robert Hutton on British journalism, as satirised by Evelyn Waugh, and embodied by Boris Johnson.

Scoop, whatever Waugh’s intention, offered generations of unserious young journalists the hope that they might pitch up somewhere, get drunk on expenses, fail to understand what was going on, and be declared a hero.

Which brings us to Boris Johnson. As well as being Britain’s most successful politician, the prime minister has long been one of the country’s highest-paid journalists, a job he did entirely in the Scoop mould. His sympathetic biographer, Andrew Gimson, describes how, posted to Brussels, Johnson delighted in producing stories that were more entertaining than accurate. It was not that he was opposed to writing accurate stories, but he didn’t see it as in any way essential.

The Scoop character Johnson most resembles isn’t the novel’s hero, the hapless William Boot, though…

Read on to find out who’s the model.

Footnote The piece was published in The Critic in 2021 when the foolishness of the British electorate to give Johnson a mandate to screw the country was becoming obvious to even the dogs in the street.

Books, etc.One of the nicest surprises of last week was to discover that Rick Gekoski and his wife, Belinda Kitchen, were in town. We had dinner with them on Saturday evening. Rick is a writer, a successful rare-book dealer, a publisher and a former academic. So, like me, he has a foot in several graves.

He is also a consummate storyteller, which is why his essays on the book trade (and academia) are memorable. His book, Tolkien’s Gown, a set of essays about the publishing history of 20 great works, is full of stories that most of us would kill for.

I’ve known him for years and so it was great to catch up with him and Belinda. And then, towards the end of the meal, she pulled this rabbit out of her bag — a set of yarns about his dealings — both in rare books and with their authors. I was mortified that I had missed it (it came out in 2021, in the height of the pandemic). The only consolation for the embarrassment is that I now have literary entertainment for the post-EUFA week!

My commonplace bookletMy observation on Monday about the echoes of the famous Imo Jima photograph from WW2 in Evan Vucci’s remarkable photograph of a defiant Trump in the aftermath of the shooting led Joe Dunne to see another echo — Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

DJI Drone ascends Everest Link. The kind of mountaineering any couch-potato can enjoy.

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The joys of travelAn exhausted young couple trying to catch up on sleep in a crowded departure lounge.

Quote of the Day

“You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks”

Dorothy Parker

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsRenaldo Hahn | A Chloris | Susan Graham with Roger Vignoles

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I’d never heard of Hahn and so went digging. He was a Venezuelan composer who died in 1947 and had been Director of the Paris Opera. Proust portrays him in his novel Jean Santeuil .

Many thanks to Margaret Stobo for suggesting it.

Long Read of the DayTwitter’s ragebait champagne v Threads’s sparkling annoyance

When Elon Musk completed his court-mandated acquisition of Twitter, many thousands of its users fled from the platform. Sensing a commercial opportunity, Meta (neé Facebook) set up a pale imitation called Threads. The other week the company announced on the first anniversary of Threads’s launch that the platform now had 175 million users. Impressive, eh?

Sounds impressive, doesn’t it. Not to Charles Arthur, who has done a penetrating analysis of Threads’s actual performance, and of how Meta has distorted the platform to achieve that 175 million figure.

Note the two figures that aren’t in the Threads number: the 100 million that it hit in the first week. This is actually bad news: it means that in the 51 weeks since, there have only been another 75 million users added, ie only a little more than a million per week, culled from Instagram and Facebook, which have more than a billion users each (though with a lot of overlap). In other words, perhaps one in a thousand users peeled off each week to join the people already there.

The other number that isn’t being revealed is daily active users…

It’s a terrific piece of journalism. And it shines a light on the essence of the social media business model — the amplification of outrage.

Footnote Interesting also that three days ago the European Commission announced that it is investigating X/Twitter for breaking the EU’s Digital Markets Act.

We don’t need ‘scientific’ research to tell us that smartphones are bad for kidsYesterday’s Observer column:

Jonathan Haidt is a man with a mission. In his day job, he’s a professor of ethics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. But outside academia, he’s a compelling campaigner. His mission: to alert us to the harms that social media and modern parenting are doing to our children. And his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, pulls no punches. It is, said the New York Times, “erudite, engaging, combative, crusading”, which possibly explains why it has been on the newspaper’s nonfiction bestseller list for 14 weeks (it is now at No 2).

Haidt writes of a “tidal wave” of increases in mental illness and distress beginning around 2012. Young adolescent girls are hit hardest, but boys are in pain, too, as are older teens. He sees two factors that have caused this. The first is the decline of play-based childhood caused by overanxious parenting, which allows children fewer opportunities for unsupervised play and restricts their movement. This translates into low-risk childhoods in which kids don’t have the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. The second factor is the ubiquity of smartphones and the social media apps that thrive upon them. The result is the “great rewiring of childhood” of his book’s subtitle and an epidemic of mental illness and distress.

Haidt’s prescriptions for these ills include banning smartphones from schools…

Read on

My commonplace bookletIf it’s true that journalism, as the cliché puts it, is “the first draft of history”, then podcasting is the second draft. When used well, it’s an extraordinary medium for journalists because: it gives them time and space to tell complicated stories; has much more intellectual bandwidth than broadcast media (which always have to cater for the lowest common denominator); and harnesses a more intimate channel to the listener (most people listen on headphones).

All of these features were in evidence last week as I listened to The Belgrano Diary, Andrew O’Hagan’s riveting podcast series on what some people regard as ‘Britain’s Watergate’ — the Thatcher government’s attempts to conceal the truth about the sinking of an Argentinian warship during the Falklands War.

(The Watergate metaphor isn’t really accurate, though: that scandal drove Richard Nixon from office, whereas the Belgrano cover-up rescued Margaret Thatcher from electoral oblivion. So even if history rhymes, it certainly doesn’t repeat itself.)

In memoriamMy first thoughts on hearing of the assassination attempt on Trump and then seeing Evan Vucci’s remarkable photograph, with its Iwo Jima overtones, is that the American Republic’s experiment with democracy is ending. Trump, the Vietnam draft-dodger, will now metamorphose into Trump, the indomitable battle-torn hero, and the rest, sadly, will be history.

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Deux AmisNeither of the friends were around when I called, alas.

Quote of the Day

We forget most of our past but embody all of it.

John Updike

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMichael Hedges | Aerial Boundaries

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An amazing musician who died tragically young.

Long Read of the DayDoes Social Media cause anything?

Fabulous essay by Kevin Munger on the Crooked Timber blog.

In the 18 months since I quit Twitter, I can feel the atrophy of my vibe detector. I’m reading more than ever, on Substack and the FT, Discord and group chats — much of the same “content” I would’ve encountered on Twitter, in fact, but without the ever-present spiderweb of the social graph, the network of accounts, RTs and likes that lets me understand not only what someone thinks but what everyone else thinks about them thinking that.

So while I know that I’m missing the vibes, I cannot, of course, know which vibes I’m missing. Knowledge of vibes means never being surprised when someone says something: I know what kind of person they are, and I know what those kinds of people say. This is why Twitter users participate in The Discourse rather than in human-to-human dialogue: given the unknowability of another person, when we openly converse with them, we can always be surprised by what they say.

Although various Discourses now take place both on and between other platforms, the architecture of Twitter is ideal for textual Discourse and it seems to remain the hub.

The first time I was realized I was way off of the main vibe came from the response to Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation…

Read on, it’s very insightful. I came across it because I was thinking about Haidt’s book for my Observer column. Munger’s observation about Twitter/X being all about vibes rather than thoughtful discourse is spot on, IMO.

Books, etc.I’m reading Woolf’s Selected Essays and enjoying them. No. 6 is “Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a motor car”. Here’s how it opens:

Evening is kind to Sussex, for Sussex is no longer young, and she is grateful for the veil of evening as an elderly woman is glad when a shade is drawn over a lamp, and only the outline of her face remains. The outline of Sussex is still very fine. The cliffs stand out to sea, one behind another. All Eastbourne, all Bexhill, all St. Leonards, their parades and their lodging houses, their bead shops and their sweet shops and their placards and their invalids and chars-á-bancs, are all obliterated. What remains is what there was when William came over from France ten centuries ago: a line of cliffs running out to sea. Also the fields are redeemed. The freckle of red villas on the coast is washed over by a thin lucid lake of brown air, in which they and their redness are drowned. It was still too early for lamps; and too early for stars…

I’m sure I would have detested Woolf had I met her in person. But I do love her writing.

My commonplace booklet”AI Finds That AI Is Great In New Garbage Research From Tony Blair Institute”

This was the headline on a report by the 404 site.

The story reads:

A new paper from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, presented yesterday by the former Prime Minister himself, predicts that more than 40 percent of tasks performed by public-sector workers could be partly automated, saving a fifth of their time in aggregate, and potentially leading to a huge reduction in workforce and costs for the government.

The problem with this prediction, which was picked up by Politico, Techradar, Forbes, and others, is that it was made by ChatGPT after the authors of the paper admitted that making a prediction based on interviews with experts would be too hard. Basically, the finding that AI could replace humans at their jobs and radically change how the government works was itself largely made by AI…

Why is this interesting? Two reasons:

It makes me even more suspicious about Blair’s multi-million ‘think tank’ — especially given that Blair has, from the outset, been idiotically bullish about ‘AI’.
And it raises worries that Keir Starmer’s tech team might be getting ‘advice’ about technology from Blair’s gaggle of high-priced consultants/ChatGPT prompters.

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Medieval laundryIn a Provencal village

Quote of the Day

“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”

Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsWagner | Prelude to Lohengrin

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Long Read of the DayEffects of Aging

David Friedman is Milton’s son, and described by Wikipedia as “an American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and anarcho-capitalist theorist”. He’s inherited some of his old man’s qualities — particularly a libertarian streak, curiosity about ideas, and an argumentative temperament. All of which makes for a nice, readable Substack blog. I was struck by this recent post on the effects of ageing, not least because he and I are near contemporaries.

The peg for the piece is that “the effect on the presidential candidates of aging is currently a hot political topic”.

Almost everyone commenting on the subject has an axe to grind, a conclusion he wants people to reach, which makes it hard to know what claims to believe. I, however, have a source of information on the subject that, though limited — my sample size is one — I can at least trust, since it is my own experience. I am a year older than Donald Trump, two years younger than Joe Biden, so my first hand evidence of the effect of aging on me may be at least relevant to the effect on them.

Interesting and readable throughout. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

My commonplace bookletHappy FinnsAccording to the Economist, Finland has roughly 3.5m saunas, more than one for two Finns. All government buildings have saunas.

To which Stowe Boyd attaches the comment:

Perhaps that is one of the reasons that the UN — for seven years in a row — has declared Finland the happiest country in the world. That, and gender equality, free education, universal affordable health care, trust in government institutions, and family-centric social policies.

ErrataMany thanks to the readers who wrote tactfully that the date on Monday’s edition (7 July) was wrong. Monday was, in fact, the eighth day of the month. One reader inquired if my difficulty with dates might be a reflection of drinking too much Rosé in a hot climate. Naturally, I couldn’t possibly comment.

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Washing upProvence, June 2024.

Quote of the Day

“Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness”

Vladimir Nabokov

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsWagner | Tannhäuser Overture | Klaus Tennstedt with the London Philharmonic Orchestra

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Wonderful, and it made me think of Thomas Beecham, who founded the LPO and in 1936 took the orchestra to Germany, where Hitler was in the audience. A piece in the Guardian (possibly from an obituary) tells the story:

Why did they go? “He was proud of them,” says Lady Beecham, “and he wanted to take them to a country where there were many fine orchestras, to show them what a fine orchestra it was.” The story rings of an extraordinary figurative nose-thumbing that only Beecham could have carried off. Dr Berta Geissmar, personal assistant to conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, was Jewish and had fled the Nazi regime for London, where Beecham promptly employed her as his secretary. “And he took her with him to Germany,” says Lady Beecham. “She was absolutely terrified for the whole tour that they’d take her away. But with him beside her, they could do nothing at all.” At the Berlin concert, when he saw Hitler applauding, Beecham turned to the orchestra and said, “The old bugger seems to like it!” The remark went out on the radio across Europe. Had Beecham really forgotten that the concert was being broadcast?

Long Read of the DayThe Bluestocking, vol 325

Helen Lewis is one of the sharpest writers on politics and technology around, and her weekly Substack is invariably striking. Saturday’s edition was a joy, not least because she articulated thoughts that many of us were having on Friday morning:

Keir Starmer is prime minister, and that means more than getting to stand behind the lectern and do PMQs. I just read a piece saying the Rwanda plan was “dead” and my brain went: oh, yeah! When you’re in government, you can just . . . do things! The legislative agenda will no longer be plotted around “what will make Suella Braverman and the other Telegraph columnists leave us alone for a bit”. We don’t have a prime minister who would need to be put behind a puppy gate if he caught an infectious disease. Never again will I hear breathless whispers about “how many letters Graham Brady has”. We might even . . build some bloody houses. A new dawn has broken, has it not?

For me, one of the nicest things about this election is the sheer luxury of remembering all the people whose opinions no longer matter. Sorry, Grant Shapps, but your much vaunted “ability to count” will now be inflicted on the private sector. Farewell, Jacob Rees-Mogg, have fun on the witness-protection programme that is your GB News show. Liz Truss, I will see you at CPAC, where absolutely no one will understand why you are there…

Great stuff. Personally, I’ve always seen Rees-Mogg as an unctuous Savile Row tailor who can only do double-breasted suits. The trouble is, to be a tailor you have to have some special skills, and being unctuous is the only one that Mogg possesses.

(His old man William — or ‘Pater’, as Mogg probably called him) was more interesting than most people realise — and not just because he was Editor of The Times from 1967 to 1981. With James Dale Davidson he wrote The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age about “the fourth stage of human society,” which will apparently liberate individuals as never before, irrevocably altering the power of government. It became required reading for Peter Thiel and the wilder fringes of the Silicon Valley libertarian crowd.)

Microsoft’s Recall feature wasn’t that intelligentYesterday’s Observer column:

On 20 May, Yusuf Mehdi, a cove who rejoices in the magnificent title of executive vice-president, consumer chief marketing officer of Microsoft, launched its Copilot+ PCs, a “new category” of Windows machines that are “designed for AI”. They are, needless to say, “the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built” and they will “enable you to do things you can’t on any other PC”.

What kinds of things? Well, how about generating and refining AI images in near real-time directly on the computer? Bridging language barriers by translating audio from 40-plus languages into English? Or enabling you to “easily find and remember what you have seen in your PC”.

Eh? This remarkable memory prosthesis is called Recall. It takes constant screenshots in the background while you go about your daily computer business. Microsoft’s Copilot+ machine-learning tech then scans (and “reads”) each of these screenshots in order to make a searchable database of every action performed on your computer and then stores it on the machine’s disk. So not only will you be able to search for a website you had previously visited, but you can also search for a very specific thing that you read or saw on that site. That jacket you saw on a tab a few weeks ago but you simply cannot remember who was selling it. The AI, though, knows about jackets and can find it…

Read on

UK politicsTheyWorkForYou – now with (almost) all new MPs

mySociety is a terrific example of public-interest technology. It provides digital tools that make it easy for British residents to communicate with, and monitor, their public representatives. One of these is their “They Work for You” service, which makes it easy to find your MP and send an email to her or him. What amazed me on Friday morning was to find that they had already updated the site as new MPs were confirmed as election results were coming in.

It was an impressively agile response. Shows how this tech can revitalise democratic institutions.

My commonplace bookletHave you been Kodaked?

An interesting Smithsonian essay on “How the Rise of the Camera Launched a Fight to Protect Gilded Age Americans’ Privacy”. The Box Brownie was the Instagram of its age.

FeedbackOn quotations about old age, Gally Maxwell reminded me that Lewis Wolpert included many quotable comments in his book, You’re Looking Very Well: The Surprising Nature of Getting Old.

For example:

”One understands the viewpoint of Agatha Christie: ‘I married an archaeologist because the older I grow, the more he appreciates me.'” (p197)

And

”Edward Grey put it: ‘I am getting to an age when I can only enjoy the last sport left. It is called hunting for your spectacles.’” (p37)

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State

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Custodian of the SquareEvery morning, when we come down to the village, we find this black cat in his observation post, keeping an eye on things.

Quote of the Day

“An elderly friend once told me there were four ages to life: youth, middle age, old age, and ‘You look great’.”

Robert Reich, who turned 78 the other day (and seems in good shape!)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsD:Ream | Things Can Only Get Better

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Here’s hoping!

Long Read of the DayIsrael’s Two Front War

If the British Academy had a category for academia’s national treasures then Lawrence Freedman would be my nominee. He’s the most knowledgeable and astute commentator on contemporary warfare. In his Substack blog (cheekily entitled Comment is Freed, a poke at the Guardian, I guess), he now turns his attention to what’s happening in the Middle East.

What makes the situation now even more dangerous is the role of the Iranian regime with its slogan of ‘Death to Israel.’ It is the Iran factor which turns a conflict which was already difficult enough, but might have been contained, into something that has already gone much wider. It has done its utmost to ensure that Hamas can sustain and develop its military capabilities, works with the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and promotes radical Shia groups throughout the region. The Arab monarchies have always been fearful of Iranian-inspired radicalism. This is one reason why they have got closer to Israel. But prior to the Gaza War they had also been trying to find some modus vivendi with Iran. The same was true with the Biden Administration, as it tried to rescue the nuclear deal with Iran which had been agreed under Obama but then abandoned by Trump. But the clerical Iranian regime has become more and not less hard-line, including supporting Russia in its aggression in Ukraine. It is pressing on with its nuclear programme. It presents itself as a key player in an anti-Western coalition. Its other slogan is ‘Death to America.’

The Gaza war began with a breakdown of deterrence. Israel had believed that Hamas to its south and Hizballah to its north understood that however much they hated Israel they could not do much about its continuing existence. But Hamas was not deterred and found a way through Israeli defences. Having concluded that Hamas cannot be either appeased or deterred, from the Israeli perspective the only option left was its elimination. But it also can’t be eliminated…

Israel is now gearing up for an incursion into Lebanon to push Hizballah back from its current positions, and to this end is redeploying forces from the south to the north. Netanyahu has dismissed the idea that an unfinished war in the south makes it unwise to take on a new one in the north: ‘We can fight on several fronts. We are prepared for this.’

There’s no good news here, which is why Freedman’s analysis is sobering.

Books, etc.I’ve read Dan Davies’s book and have been deeply impressed by it, not just because it’s the first time I’ve seen an economist write insightfully about cybernetics and the work of Stafford Beer, but also because it suggests a way of looking at corporations (and other large organisations) as artificial superintelligences (what Charlie Stross called “Slow AIs”).

I was incubating a review of the book when what should pop up but a terrific long essay by Brad DeLong, who is a great economist and a lot smarter than me. Funnily enough, he also set out to write a brief review of Dan’s book and wound up writing 5,000 words. So, rather than try inventing that wheel, I’m happy to hand over to him!

Here’s how he sets the scene:

By reviving the ideas of cybernetics pioneer Stafford Beer, Davies suggests we can build organizations that are not just efficient, but truly accountable. In an age of AI anxiety and institutional mistrust, The Unaccountability Machine offers a timely reminder: the machines we fear most are the ones we’ve already built.

We have built a world of vast, interlocking systems that no one can fully understand. From corporate behemoths to government bureaucracies, these leviathan-like societal machines with human beings as their parts make decisions that shape our lives—often with disastrous consequences. Can there be a way to tame these monsters of our own creation, to give them human faces? Dan Davies thinks the forgotten discipline of “management cybernetics” might provide a way. That is the crux of his brand-new The Unaccountability Machine. Our societal woes stem not from individual failings, but from the opaque workings of large-scale decision-making structures—hence the need for better system design, better feedback loops, and more and better chosen variety of information, state, and action in these machines’ control mechanisms. Cybernetics was the discipline to help us understand communication and control in complex systems. The steersmen all ran aground, But we can try again…

It’s worth your time because, as Brad puts it, “it sheds light on one of the most pressing issues of our time: why big systems make terrible decisions”.

My commonplace bookletOpenAI Co-founder Andrej Karpathy explains the new computing paradigm: LMOS

“We’re entering a new computing paradigm with large language models acting like CPUs, using tokens instead of bytes, and having a context window instead of RAM.

This is the Large Language Model OS (LMOS)”

Link

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

The ‘poetic AI camera. Intriguing idea (and story) from Om Malik’s blog.

It is essentially a 3D-printed camera body that houses a Raspberry Pi and a small printer typically used for printing receipts. It uses a Raspberry Pi’s visual module to capture a “photo,” then sends it to the internet, uses “AI” to analyze the image, and returns with a poem based on what it sees.

In other words, it’s an AI camera. It consistently generates short, cute poems that you can print out to share with others or paste into your journal. It is quite fun. This device perfectly encapsulates what I believe is inspired tinkering that will lead to new products and breakthroughs.

The Raspberry Pi is one of the wonders of the digital world.

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Electioneering circa 1755‘Chairing the Member’ (from Hogarth’s The Humours of an Election series of 1754-55).

Quote of the Day

“So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsCrosby, Stills, Nash and Young | Ohio

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A song written after the Kent State Shootings

Long Read of the DayWho is Britain’s next Prime Minister?

Judicious essay by Tim Garton Ash on Keir Starmer, the Labour leader and putative Prime Minister if the election goes as predicted by opinion polls.

Sample:

The conservative columnist Daniel Finkelstein knew him when he was young, through a friend who was a member of the East Surrey Young Socialists – a groupuscule title that, for anyone who knows Surrey, feels almost like a contradiction in terms. (Finkelstein’s article behind paywall, I’m afraid begins with the arresting line ‘I was sitting in a kitchen above a brothel on the Archway Road when I first heard the name Keir Starmer.’) He recalls a young Starmer who was very much on the left, supporting the miners’ and other unions in strikes, helping to produce ‘a Marxist magazine’ and calling for a united Ireland.

So how come this lifelong ‘left liberal’ (Finkelstein’s term) is now advocating policies so much to the centre, and even with touches of centre-right on issues like migration and tax? After going through a number of hypotheses, Finkelstein reaches a verdict that is extremely creditable to the Labour leader. Starmer is ‘someone with a left-wing instinct,’ but also pragmatic and deeply realistic, which ‘leads him again and again to temper his initial view’. He is, the conservative columnist concludes, ‘open-minded and careful and deliberative. He is someone I will disagree with, I’m sure. But also respect.’ A cynic might say that the journalist has assured himself good access to the next occupant of No. 10 Downing Street. But knowing Finkelstein, I think this qualified tribute is worth a lot more than that…

Over the last few years I’ve been irritated by the view that younger, liberal- or left-leaning friends and colleagues have of Starmer — that he’s “dull”, “boring” or “uninspiring”. Even Tim Garton Ash briefly lurches into that territory when he writes that Starmer has “all the charisma of a bank manager”. (Remember bank managers? Me neither.) But he also notes his “achievement in bringing the Labour party back from the unelectable hard left of Jeremy Corbyn to the verge of what looks like a big, possibly even a landslide victory”.

For me, the historical figure that Starmer brings to mind is Clement Attlee, the Labour leader who won a landslide victory in 1945 and led a government that really transformed Britain. People also regarded Attlee as dull and lacking charisma. Winston Churchill described him as “a modest man who had much to be modest about”, a wisecrack that conveniently distracted attention from the fact that Attlee had run the country during the way, thereby freeing Churchill to do his stuff. And he got stuff done, which is what the benighted Disunited Kingdom needs just now.

I also like his riposte in verse to those who had underestimated him:

There were few who thought him a starter,
Many who thought themselves smarter.
But he ended up PM, CH and OM,
an Earl and a Knight of the Garter.

What the election is really aboutThis chart from the Financial Times puts it in a nutshell.

As Andrew Curry (Whom God Preserve) observes on his Substack,

What it shows is that after 2008, or so, the British economy fell off the track of the rate of growth that it had been on for the previous 50 years, and jumped to another track.

That trend line from 1960-2010 had not been particularly compelling—it was still slower than other comparable economies—but it did trend upwards.

The best single explanation of this is the austerity policies that the Cameron-Osborne led Coalition government chose to follow, ostensibly to deal with the level of government debt incurred in dealing with the financial crisis.

There are different versions of why they opted for this…

There are. One (not mentioned by Andrew) is the ludicrous narrative foisted on a credulous British public by George Osborne (the Chancellor and the brains behind the Cameron government) that the huge sovereign debt run up the the Brown administration to bail out the banks was in fact just a typical example of Labour profligacy — so that, just as households who run up too much debt must eventually tighten their belts, so too must the UK.

The ‘explanation’ highlighted by Andrew is more bizarre; it is that

Osborne saw a presentation by Reinhart and Rogoff [two distinguished American economists] of their 2010 research paper that said that when debt climbed above 90% of annual GDP it choked off growth. This is, of course, the research paper that has the most famous spreadsheet error in economics history.

The error was that in their Excel spreadsheet,

Reinhart and Rogoff had not selected the entire row when averaging growth figures: they omitted data from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada and Denmark. In other words, they had accidentally only included 15 of the 20 countries under analysis in their key calculation. When that error was corrected, the “0.1% decline” data became a 2.2% average increase in economic growth.

So the key conclusion of a seminal paper, which had been widely quoted in political debates in North America, Europe Australia and elsewhere, was invalid.

Andrew points out that although the error was exposed in 2013, that Osborne did not change policy as a result. Which suggests that his rational for austerity was always purely ideological — the product of an obsession with shrinking the state.

In doing that he also shrank the economy. And the impact of his austerity programme — which, among other things, has brought many UK local authorities to the brink of bankruptcy (and every road in the UK pitted with pot-holes) — probably influenced the Brexit vote, with all the resulting economic havoc that has caused.

All of which implies that the damage the Conservative government has done to the UK goes back almost to the beginning of its reign, and predates even the chaos of the May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak era.

The trouble is that it’s not clear that the incoming Labour crowd understand this. They are still mentally trapped in the Osborne household-budget analogy. Which is what leads Andrew Curry to observe, at the end of his blog post, that “People keep telling me that neoliberalism is dead, but its cold bony hand is still gripped tight around the imaginations of our political class.”

It is.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

How Election Night will play out. Useful timeline from the Guardian. Personally, I’ll just wait for the Exit Poll — shortly after polls close at 10pm — and then try to get a night’s sleep.

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PatienceA phlegmatic mutt, after a visit to the vet.

Quote of the Day

“The English way is a committee — we are born with a belief in green cloth, clean pens, and twelve men with grey hair.”

Walter Bagehot

(A quotation I found in my friend Bill Lubenow’s new book, Secular Foundations of the Liberal State in Victorian Britain, which I’ve brought with me to France and am currently enjoying.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsVan Morrison | Connswater

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Long Read of the Day How to Fix “AI’s Original Sin”

Regular readers will know that one of the topics that really occupies what might loosely be called my mind is Generative AI, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Llama, Claude, etc. I read an awful lot of commentary and argument about the technology, much of which is unhelpful or tangential in one way or another. But every so often I come across an essay that is informed, insightful and wise.

This essay on “How to Fix AI’s ‘original sin’” by Tim O’Reilly is a shining exception to the above rule. So I commend it to anyone who is interested in finding ways of managing and harnessing a powerful and important technology. Tim does it by focussing on the way the tech depends on appropriating the intellectual property of others without recompensing the owners (its ‘original sin’). And he proposes a way of overcoming that problem in a way that might be good both for society and for those who build the technology. What I particularly like about it is that in his business he actually implements the ideas proposed in the essay.

The essay is long, and clearly written but I recognise that it’s not for everyone. But I felt an obligation to draw it to your attention.

Closing the Stanford Internet Observatory will edge the US towards the end of democracyYesterday’s Observer column:

The arrival of the internet, and particularly the web in the 1990s, started the process of radical fragmentation that has brought us to where we are now: instead of public opinion in the Gallup sense, we have innumerable publics, each with different opinions and incompatible ideas of what’s true, false and undecidable.

To make things worse, we also invented a technology that enables every Tom, Dick and mad Harry to publish whatever they like on opaque global platforms, which are incentivised to propagate the wildest nonsense. And to this we have now added powerful tools (called AI) that automate the manufacture of misinformation on an epic scale. If you were a malign superpower that wanted to screw up the democratic world, you’d be hard put to do better than this.

Fortunately, scattered through the world (and mostly in academia) there have been organisations whose mission is to conduct informed analyses of the nature and implications of the misinformation that pollutes the online world. Until recently, the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) in California was one such outfit. Among other things (it was the first to out Russian support for Donald Trump online in 2016), it raised China spying concerns around the Clubhouse app in 2021, partnered with the Wall Street Journal in a 2023 report on Instagram and online child sexual abuse materials, and developed a curriculum for teaching college students how to handle trust and safety problems on social media platforms.

But guess what? After five years of pioneering research, it has been reported that the SIO is being wound down…

Do read the whole thing, if only to find the sting in the tail.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

AI imagines the Roman Empire Link

Cod video, but might be of interest to the ghost of Cecil B. De Mille.

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En féteI came on this the other evening in the village where we stay. No idea what the event was celebrating

(Footnote for shutterbugs I would have liked to get in closer without being obtrusive, so what really bothered me was that I had come out with a 35mm (wide-angle) lens fitted to the Leica when I really should have had a 50mm one. Not for nothing was the latter Henri Cartier-Bresson’s usual lens. Growl.)

Quote of the Day

“All rising to great place is by a winding stair.”

Francis Bacon

(Wise old bird. I love his categorisation of reading material: “Some books are to be tasted; others swallowed; and some few to be chewed and digested.” The last is what I’m doing at the moment with Tony Judt’s magisterial Postwar).

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsNorah Jones | The Long Way Home

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Long Read of the DayIreland rejected James Joyce. Did he reject it back?

Very nice, thoughtful essay by Henry Oliver on Joyce, Ulysses and his complicated relationship with his native land.

Strange as it might be, there was sympathy between Joyce’s fellow writers and the censors who banned his work. Ireland—the country that now celebrates Bloomsday every year, hosts statues of Joyce, and runs tours of the routes taken by the main characters in Ulysses—was the most stringent country when it came to banning Ulysses. Richard Ellmann wrote, in his celebrated biography of Joyce, “To his Irish countrymen he is still obscure and very likely mad; they, alone among nations, continue to ban Ulysses.” That was in 1959, more than thirty years after Ulysses was published, and some eighteen years after Joyce’s death. Ireland never printed or imported the book. It was only available as contraband until the 1960s. The 1967 film was also banned, only released in 2001.

The feeling was perhaps mutual. Joyce left Ireland first in 1902 to study in Paris. He returned in 1903, when his mother was dying. He met Nora on 10 June 1904: they left Ireland that October. From then on, Joyce lived in Europe. In 1906, he tried to get his short story collection Dubliners published, but controversial passages caused anxiety. These sections would hardly be noticed today—implied sexuality, mild swearing, petty violence—but the publishers demurred. In 1909 Joyce visited Dublin, hopeful that a publisher would take Dubliners. It took them three years, until 1912, to finally reject the book, which was deemed so unsuitable the galleys were burned.

So it was that James Joyce left Ireland and never went back…

Do read on…

My commonplace bookletInternal Combustion Engine by Bartosz Ciechanowski

My comment in Monday’s edition — about how remarkable it was that humans figured out how to propel themselves around by a series of controlled explosions — prompted Johannes Björkman to point me to this wonderful animated explanation of how it works. For which enlightenment, many thanks.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Fascinating video of Seamus Heaney talking to Richard Ellman (the acclaimed biographer of Joyce, Yeats and Wilde) about the trio.

It’s quite long (40 minutes) but worth it IMO.

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Brief encounter

Quote of the Day

“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBach | Wachet auf from Cantata No 140 | Sonny Landreth

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I love this Cantata (who doesn’t?), but I’ve never heard it played like this before.

Long Read of the DayAI as Self-Erasure

A really thoughtful (and thought-provoking) essay by Matthew Crawford in The Hedgehog Review.

I was at a small dinner a few weeks ago in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Seated next to me was a man who related that his daughter had just gotten married. As the day approached, he had wanted to say some words at the reception, as is fitting for the father of the bride. It can be hard to come up with the right words for such an occasion, and he wanted to make a good showing. He said he gave a few prompts to ChatGPT, facts about her life, and sure enough it came back with a pretty good wedding toast. Maybe better than what he would have written. But in the end, he didn’t use it, and composed his own. This strikes me as telling, and the intuition that stopped him from deferring to AI is worth bringing to the surface.

To use the machine-generated speech would have been to absent himself from this significant moment in the life of his daughter, and in his own life. It would have been to not show up for her wedding, in some sense. I am reminded of a passage in Tocqueville where he noticed that America seemed to be on a trajectory that would have it erecting “an immense tutelary power” that wants only what is best for us, and is keen to “save us the trouble of living.”

LLMs, Crawford argues (perceptively, IMHO), won’t return us to a pre-linguistic state, but they do point to a post-human one. This is because words have significance for us, but they don’t have for a machine (or a parrot for that matter).

Do read on. I was often reminded as I read it of my feeling that the subliminal thrust of this technology is what Brett Frischman and Evan Selinger described in their perceptive book as the re-engineering of humanity in order to make it more amenable to the needs of machines.

I was also reminded of an observation what I used to attribute — wrongly — to Martin Heidegger, but which in fact came from Max Frisch in his book Homo Faber:

“Technology is the art of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.”

Thanks to Kevin Cryan for alerting me to Crawford’s essay.

Chart of the DayFrom Azeem Azhar’s newsletter.

Traffic to traditional news outlets in the US is collapsing and it’s not just them – only 22% of people globally now rely on publisher websites as their main source of news, down 10 percentage points since 2018. The long-awaited platform shift is happening, but to what? The picture isn’t clear. Social and video platforms are on the rise, but the landscape is fragmented. The gatekeepers of control have also changed. Where media moguls like Rupert Murdoch once controlled content, now it’s a mishmash of tech platforms, in a more dislocated ecosystem than we’ve seen in the past decade.

These platforms, which prioritise engaging content, have led to the rise of news influencers. 66% of people worldwide watch short news videos on a weekly basis. At the same time, news avoidance is at an all-time high.

The focus on the individual has mixed effects. The journalistic model isn’t necessarily dead, it’s changing.

Yep. But to what?

My commonplace bookletEvery year the highlight of our Summer is a slow drive down through La France Profonde until we reach Provence: small roads, rural villages, small hotels. This year we noticed something unusual: at the entrance to many rural villages the village sign had been neatly turned upside down. The care with which the operation had been carried out meant that vandalism could be ruled out as an explanation. So eventually I resorted to search engines, and found this useful BBC report, which explained all.

The name-bearing roadside plaques have been unscrewed, flipped, then meticulously screwed back on.

It’s a campaign by farmers to draw attention to what they say is their increasingly precarious way of life.

Starting with a protest in the southern Tarn department in November, it has now spread all over the country.

”We were trying to think of a way of denouncing all the contradictory instructions we keep getting,” said Philippe Bardy, head of the FNSEA farmers’ union in the Tarn.

”Where we come from, if someone tells us to do one thing one day and then the opposite the next, we say we’re walking on our heads. That’s where the idea came from.”

Farmers cite specific grievances such as the increasing cost of farm diesel, late payment of EU subsidies, burgeoning bureaucracy and competition from imports.

But Philippe Bardy adds: “There is no other profession that suffers such a mental load.

”On one side, the minister asks us to change our practices, to make them more ecological. On the other, he tells us to produce as much as possible so France can achieve food sovereignty…

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From Quartz Daily Brief

”People who live in the U.S. are just too swamped to take a holiday — or so they say.

Despite only receiving an average of 12 vacation days a year, more than half of Americans said they didn’t use all of their vacation time last year. The top reason? “Life is too busy to plan or go on vacation.”

Twelve paid holiday days a year! I had a friend who was a talented but underpaid researcher in Cambridge. He had a growing family (4 energetic boys) and needed to earn more, so he went to work for a big pharmaceutical company in the U.S. where he rose quickly to become a VP for R&D. Despite that seniority, he had only 14 days holiday allowance, and told me that on the first of these fortnight-long breaks his American colleagues were pissed off that he never once opened his laptop.

(In the end he decided he’d be better working for a big pharma outfit in Switzerland, where they take proper holidays.)

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Unplanned obsolescenceA lovingly cared-for Harley seen in a French village the other day. En passant, isn’t it amazing how humans tamed the internal combustion engine so that we could ride around comfortably while being propelled by a controlled series of explosions?

Quote of the Day

“I may have my faults, but being wrong ain’t one of them”

Jimmy Hoffa

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsLouis Armstrong with Dave Brubeck | Summer Song

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Long Read of the Day “Bits of the Mind’s String”

Lovely essay by Julian Simpson on what you can learn about yourself from keeping a notebook.

I know where I was when I wrote that note because the time and place is scrawled at the top of the page. But the note itself evokes context. I remember writing it, and what else was happening at the time, in a way that I rarely do when I type something. Physical media drops anchors in time. The act of writing with pen on paper snapshots the moment itself.

In her essay “On Keeping A Notebook”, Joan Didion refers to “bits of the mind’s string”. These are pieces of who we are set down on a page and back-linked, to borrow terminology from the notebook’s digital cousin, to a vivid snatch of life experience.

I have been actively keeping notebooks for many years now…

If you’re a notebook-keeper (as I am) this will resonate with you.

Books, etc.What are laughingly called my working days are currently occupied by a project to which I’ve assigned the shorthand label HWGH (‘How We Got Here’). It’s about how liberal democracies got into the mess they are now in, and it’s a long story. It begins with the shock of the Second World War, and so I took Tony Judt’s magisterial tome away to read while we’re in France, because he starts with an extraordinarily vivid account of the devastation wrought by the war.

It was devastation on a scale I had never really understood. Over 36 million Europeans died in the war, numbers that dwarf the casualties of WW1, mostly because WW2 was primarily a civilian experience. It was, writes Judt, “a war of occupation, of repression, of exploitation and of extermination, in which soldiers, storm-troopers and policemen disposed of the daily lives and very existence of tens of millions of imprisoned peoples”.

It was a war in which. “the full force of the modern European state was mobilised for the first time, for the prime purpose of conquering other Europeans”. Nazi Germany fought it

“with significant help from the ransacked economies of its victims. … Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Bohemia-Moravia and, especially, France made significant involuntary contributions to the German war effort. Their mines, factories, farms and railways were directed to serving German requirements and their populations were obliged to work at German war production: at first in their own countries, later on in Germany itself. In September 1944 there were 7,487,000 foreigners in Germany, most of them there against their will, and they constituted 21 per cent of the country’s labour force”.

There was savagery everywhere. The Germans captured 5.5 million Soviet soldiers in the course of the war, most of them in the first seven months of Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Of these, 3.3 million died “from starvation, exposure and mistreatment in German camps”. And when the Soviet armies began to arrive in the West, retaliation began. For example, 87,000 women were raped by Soviet soldiers in the three weeks following the Red army’s arrival in Vienna.

On its way to Germany, Judt writes,

“the Red Army raped and pillaged (the phrase, for once, is brutally apt) in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Yugoslavia; but German women suffered by far the worst. Between 150,000 and 200,000 ‘Russian babies’ were born in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany in 1945-46, and these figures make no allowance for untold numbers of abortions, as a result of which many women died along with their unwanted foetuses”. The Germans, Judt writes, “had done terrible things to Russia; now it was their turn to suffer”.

And that’s just for starters. Reading Judt reinforces the conviction that “European civilisation” is an oxymoron. (Not to mention a proposition that is not shared by the former colonies of European states.) But at least it supports my conjecture that the post-war explosion in liberal democracies can be seen as a response to the traumatic shock of the conflict.

My commonplace bookletWho’s having to pay the ‘NVIDIA Tax’? And who isn’t?

Not sure how to reference this, which came from Brad DeLong’s blog, but it’s insightful…

So far, “AI” is huge profits for NVIDIA, as only Google and Apple have escaped the trap of paying NVIDI, exactly as much as it wants because they do not dare delay things for six months needed to build an alternative, cheaper, hardware-software stack—and quite possibly fail to do so. So far, “AI” is software companies finding that they have to provide services expenses in training and then in data center and electricity inference costs simply to protect their existing oligopoly, profit centers, without gaining significant additional revenue in return. And, so far, “AI “is a bunch of startups with no business models saved to pull the plug into years when Open AI, Microsoft, or Google Sherlock, you—unless you can get acquired by one of them as part of the Sherlock process first. IMHO, Google is highly likely to make money off of this because it does not have to pay the NVIDIA tax. IMHO, Apple is highly likely to make money off of this because it will sell devices for which it does not pay the NVIDIA tax, plus users pay the electricity costs. And Microsoft and OpenAI may make serious money. That is what the finances look like to me right now. But what does all this mean for technology and humanity’s collective wealth? I do not even have a guess yet: Brody Ford: AI Isn’t Making Much Money for Software Companies — Yet.

So it probably came from Ford’s Bloomberg column, but as I don’t have a subscription I can’t be sure.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

The IEA says that the tech industry’s insatiable appetite for energy is ballooning.

Electricity consumption from data centres, artificial intelligence (AI) and the cryptocurrency sector could double by 2026. Data centres are significant drivers of growth in electricity demand in many regions. After globally consuming an estimated 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2022, data centres’ total electricity consumption could reach more than 1000 TWh in 2026. This demand is roughly equivalent to the electricity consumption of Japan.

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Interesting, ne c’est pas? This is the industry that tells us that AI will help us fix climate change.

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Helter-skelterThe helical chutes inside Frank Gehry’s Tower in the Luma Arles arts centre, photographed yesterday. Believe it or not, perfectly sensible adults come hurtling down these.

The view from the top of the tower is terrific, though. First time I’ve ever had an aerial view of Arles, a city I love.

Quote of the Day

”Sometimes it is the body which is the first to surrender to old age, sometimes the soul.”

Michel de Montaigne

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsKeith Richards and Norah Jones | Love Hurts

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Long Read of the DayWatergate: a reprise

Lovely post by Heather Cox Richardson on the last time the US had a president who was totally unfit for office.

Early in the morning on June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard at the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C., noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but when he went on the next round, he found the door taped open again. He called the police, who found five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the building.

And so it began…

She’s one of the best historians writing in the US at the moment. And has been a Substack star since, well, forever.

My commonplace bookletLLMs as judges

Now this is really weird. Its author, Adam Unikowsky, is a partner in a fancy American law firm where he specialises in Appellate and Supreme Court cases. He previously served as a Judicial Law Clerk to former Justice Antonin Scalia and before that clerked for Judge Douglas Ginsberg at the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. So he’s not your average AI booster.

He recently tried an experiment:

I downloaded the briefs in every Supreme Court merits case that has been decided so far this Term, inputted them into Claude 3 Opus (the best version of Claude), and then asked a few follow-up questions. (Although I used Claude for this exercise, one would likely get similar results with GPT-4.)

The results were otherworldly. Claude is fully capable of acting as a Supreme Court Justice right now. When used as a law clerk, Claude is easily as insightful and accurate as human clerks, while towering over humans in efficiency.

Let’s start with the easiest thing I asked Claude to do: adjudicate Supreme Court cases. Claude consistently decides cases correctly. When it gets the case “wrong”—meaning, decides it differently from how the Supreme Court decided it—its disposition is invariably reasonable.

For example, Thursday and Friday last week, the Supreme Court decided six cases: United States Trustee v. John Q. Hammons Fall 2006, LLC; Campus-Chaves v. Garland; Garland v. Cargill; FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine; Starbucks v. McKinney; and Vidal v. Elster. Claude nailed five out of six, missing only Campos-Chaves, in which it took the dissenters’ side of a 5-4 opinion, which is hardly “wrong.”

I’m not a lawyer, so can’t really judge. But the summary judgments produced by Claude looked plausible.

Not sure what this means. Maybe it’s just that legal reasoning is particularly amenable to the ways LLMs work. But this seems a bigger deal than the stories about his the models can ace the tests set for entrants to some professions.

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Eagle eyeBath Abbey

Quote of the Day

”Life breaks all of us but some of us get stronger in the broken places.”

Ernest Hemingway

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBruce Springsteen | The Rising

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Rise and shine.

Long Read of the DayWhy I write the Common Reader

Lovely essay by Henry Oliver which explains why he produces his remarkable blog.

Why do I write The Common Reader?

I was asked this question in an interview the other day, and gave rather a weak answer. Let me expand.

tl;dr. Most of us die without writing a great novel, but we can all read Anna Karenina.

The aim is simple: I want to understand great literature, how it works, whence it derives. The same is true of the other topics I write about (talent, genius, education, wisdom, and so on). Literature is the focus, but the principles are general.

I am bored by mediocrity, including my own. I believe philistinism is a moral failure at the social level…

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

My commonplace bookletAkiro Endo RIP

We’re all in his debt. His research into the relationship between fungi and cholesterol biosynthesis led to the development of statin drugs, which are some of the best-selling pharmaceuticals in history. The number of deaths from heart disease and strokes prevented by his invention must be countless. If anyone deserved a Nobel prize, he did. May he rest in peace. The BBC had a nice obit of him. As did [the New York Times, though behind its paywall.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Trump’s view of AI Yeah, you guessed it, it’s alarming and incredible and he’s gonna fix it. Link

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Excitement begins here?Somehow, I doubt it.

Quote of the Day

“Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about.”

Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBrahms | German Requiem | Valery Gergiev & London Symphony Orchestra

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Awe-inspiring.

Long Read of the DayHow AI Will Change Democracy

Transcript of a terrific talk on AI by Bruce Schneier Schneier. Great overview, wise and informed.

To start, I want to list some of AI’s core competences. First, it is really good as a summarizer. Second, AI is good at explaining things, teaching with infinite patience. Third, and related, AI can persuade. Propaganda is an offshoot of this. Fourth, AI is fundamentally a prediction technology. Predictions about whether turning left or right will get you to your destination faster. Predictions about whether a tumor is cancerous might improve medical diagnoses. Predictions about which word is likely to come next can help compose an email. Fifth, AI can assess. Assessing requires outside context and criteria. AI is less good at assessing, but it’s getting better. Sixth, AI can decide. A decision is a prediction plus an assessment. We are already using AI to make all sorts of decisions.

How these competences translate to actual useful AI systems depends a lot on the details. We don’t know how far AI will go in replicating or replacing human cognitive functions. Or how soon that will happen. In constrained environments it can be easy. AIs already play chess and Go better than humans. Unconstrained environments are harder. There are still significant challenges to fully AI-piloted automobiles. The technologist Jaron Lanier has a nice quote, that AI does best when “human activities have been done many times before, but not in exactly the same way.”

In this talk, I am going to be largely optimistic about the technology. I’m not going to dwell on the details of how the AI systems might work. Much of what I am talking about is still in the future. Science fiction, but not unrealistic science fiction.

Where I am going to be less optimistic—and more realistic— is about the social implications of the technology…

Worth your time. Schneier (who is a security guru) describes himself as a ‘public-interest technologist’. We need more people like him.

AI as the next next Manhattan Project?Yesterday’s Observer column:

en years ago, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom published Superintelligence, a book exploring how superintelligent machines could be created and what the implications of such technology might be. One was that such a machine, if it were created, would be difficult to control and might even take over the world in order to achieve its goals (which in Bostrom’s celebrated thought experiment was to make paperclips).

The book was a big seller, triggering lively debates but also attracting a good deal of disagreement. Critics complained that it was based on a simplistic view of “intelligence”, that it overestimated the likelihood of superintelligent machines emerging any time soon and that it failed to suggest credible solutions for the problems that it had raised. But it had the great merit of making people think about a possibility that had hitherto been confined to the remoter fringes of academia and sci-fi.

Now, 10 years later, comes another shot at the same target…

Do read the whole thing

My commonplace bookletIf you wanted an illustration of the seismic shifts that are going on in liberal democracies, then the response to Israel’s war in Gaza would be hard to beat. The standard post-war Western reflex of unquestioning support for Israel failed to materialise, and instead we saw people taking to the streets all over the place in vocal support of the Palestinians. I don’t think that Western ruling elites have grokked the significance of this yet. And it’s difficult to understand seismic changes as you live through them. So I’m looking for signs.

Which is why I was struck by this excerpt from a blog post by Damon Linker — “On living through the end of something”:

It’s not just election results and polling data. Something has shifted. The political world in which we live is not the same political world in which I grew up (in the late-Cold War 1970s and ’80s) or the one in which I learned how to orient myself intellectually and professionally (in the post-Cold War ’90s and ’00s). Those were decades close enough in time to the centrist-liberal consensus of the mid-20th-century postwar decades that its assumptions shaped the boundaries of the possible by default.

That is no longer the case. Having observed the rapid fading of the postwar consensus as a pundit over the past decade, I’m reminded of Matthew Arnold’s well-known line about the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of retreating religious faith in the mid-19th century. Like a receding wave yanking at my feet and ankles, forcing me to recalibrate my balance to avoid falling backward onto the wet sand, I’ve felt the pulling away of a presence that once surrounded me, something taken for granted that is no longer there as it once was, with the absence growing more obtrusive with every passing year.

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Street furnitureLondon, near King’s Cross

Quote of the Day

”Always tell the truth and no one will believe you.”

Ronald Knox

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsHändel | Suite in G minor, HWV 452 | Keith Jarrett

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A real discovery for me. I’ve always loved Jarrett’s improvisations (as in the Köln Concert), but had no idea he also played Bach and Handel.

Long Read of the DayThe Harvey Weinstein of Antitrust

If you’re interested in the way political lobbying (and the Chicago Law School) enfeebled antitrust action in the US for several decades from the 1980s onwards, then you’ll enjoy this essay by Matt Stoller on Josh White.

So who is Josh Wright? Well he wasn’t just a professor, though he published over 150 papers on law and economics, some with powerful people like D.C. Circuit Court Judge Douglas Ginsburg and influential legal scholars like Daniel Crane. He ran George Mason’s Global Antitrust Institute, the heir to the Henry Manne training centers of the 1970s, which helped teach Bork’s thinking about political economy to endless numbers of professors and judges. Under Wright, the GAI funneled millions of dollars from Google, Meta, Amazon, and Qualcomm into fancy events in Napa Valley and Hawaii with judges and foreign officials, so much so that it led to an FBI investigation over potential violations of anti-corruption laws.

Wright posed as a scholar in law and economics, but he was a paid advocate. And it was effective advocacy. His hundreds of papers, blog posts, tweets, and comments were devastating to antitrust enforcement. For instance, the Ninth Circuit cited Wright’s papers in its 2019 decision overturning an antitrust verdict against communications chip maker Qualcomm, which had donated $2.7 million to Wright’s antitrust center in 2017. As another example, Wright’s work, whose funding by Google often went undisclosed, helped persuade Democratic FTC Commissioner Edith Ramirez to kill a potential antitrust suit against Google in 2012…

The piece was triggered by revelations in the Wall Street Journal that many women had come forward publicly alleging Wright had used his various positions of power to induce sexual relations with them. According to the accusations, Wright was able to advance the careers of students at law firms and in government, and did so, based on whether they were sleeping with him.

The story of how antitrust was was enfeebled in the US after Robert Bork’s book, The Antitrust Paradox came out in 1978, is a fascinating case study in the way that ideas can influence politics and policy. But these revelations about White add a different angle to the story.

Books, etc. I’ve been dipping in and out of Seamus Heaney’s letters when an email from a friend mentioned his poem Field of Vision. So I dug it out. Here it is:

I remember this woman who sat for years
In a wheelchair, looking straight ahead
Out the window at sycamore trees unleafing
And leafing at the far end of the lane.

Straight out past the TV in the corner,
The stunted, agitated hawthorn bush,
The same small calves with their backs to wind and rain,
The same acre of ragwort, the same mountain.

She was steadfast as the big window itself.
Her brow was clear as the chrome bits of the chair.
She never lamented once and she never
Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.

Face to face with her was an education
Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate—
One of those lean, clean, iron, roadside ones
Between two whitewashed pillars, where you could see

Deeper into the country than you expected
And discovered that the field behind the hedge
Grew more distinctly strange as you kept standing
Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.

The woman is Heaney’s aunt Mary. He explained later:

There was something in our relationship, whatever it was, that stood still … For years she was crippled with arthritis and eventually had to have her bed brought downstairs into what had been our sitting room … My memories of those years in the 1970s, before she had to go into special care in the Mid-Ulster Hospital, are of arriving with Marie and the kids from Wicklow and greeting first of all my mother and father and sister Ann in the living room, then going in to sit with Mary. Not a lot getting said or needing to be said. Just a deep, unpathetic stillness and wordlessness. A mixture of lacrimae rerum (tears for the situation) and Deo gratias (praise be to God). Something in me reverted to the child I’d been in Mossbawn. Something in her just remained constant, like the past gazing at you calmly, without blame. She was a tower of emotional strength, unreflective in a way but undeceived about people or things. I suppose all I’m saying is that I loved her dearly.

My commonplace booklet What Is the Best Way to Cut an Onion?

Believe it or not, the New York Times recently devoted an entire article to this obviously vital question.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Luxury penthouse in Manchester named after Friedrich Engels

From The Guardian:

The 290 sq metre (3,126 sq ft) flat is listed on the developer’s website as a showhome, but in promotional material it was advertised with a price tag of £2.5m.

A second penthouse apartment, “The Turing” – presumably named after the University of Manchester computer scientist Alan Turing – is also on the market for £2.5m.

“The Engels” features three en suite bedrooms, as well as a home office and a sweeping open-plan living area.

Those whirring noises you hear are of Karl Marx and Alan Turing whirring in their respective graves.

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Through a window, brightly

Quote of the Day

“The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.”

Evelyn Waugh

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsHaydn | Abschiedssymphonie, final movement | New Year’s Day concert, Vienna 2009 | Barenboim conducting the Wiener Phil

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Long Read of the DayDeep Reading Will Save Your Soul

Really interesting (and optimistic) essay by William Deresiewicz.

Higher ed is at an impasse. So much about it sucks, and nothing about it is likely to change. Colleges and universities do not seem inclined to reform themselves, and if they were, they wouldn’t know how, and if they did, they couldn’t. Between bureaucratic inertia, faculty resistance, and the conflicting agendas of a heterogenous array of stakeholders, concerted change appears to be impossible. Besides, business is good, at least at selective schools. The notion, floated now in certain quarters, that students and parents will turn from the Harvards and Yales in disgust is a fantasy. As long as elite institutions remain the principal pipeline to elite employers (and they will), the havers and strivers will crowd toward their gates. Everything else—the classes, the politics, the arts and sciences—is incidental.

Which is not to say that interesting things aren’t happening in post-secondary (and post-tertiary) education. They just aren’t happening, for the most part, on campus…

I think this largely applies mostly to the US, but I found it intriguing, not least because I worked for many years for the Open University, and in the process saw at first hand how exposure to great literature could liberate and revitalise people who had missed out university the first time around.

Books, etc.The life of Maynard K

This picture heads Branko Milanovic’s slightly puzzling blog post about Zachary Carter’s fine biography of John Maynard Keynes. The photograph was probably taken at Garsington, the country home of Lady Ottoline Morrell (and was probably taken by her because she was at one time a keen snapper). From right to left it shows Lytton Strachey, Keynes and Bertrand Russell, sucking quizzically on his pipe, and possibly thinking about Ottoline, with whom he had a famous affair.

The photograph is interesting for many reasons, but it’s the sartorial dimension of it that intrigued me. Here are three celebrated intellectuals of the day on a summer afternoon in the garden of a stately pile. Yet they are all dressed formally, though Keynes, in a touch of flamboyance, has white leather shoes which look odd alongside his immaculately-cut tweed suit. It seems a strange way to relax on a country house weekend.

The puzzling thing about Milanovic’s essay is that he seems to have got the relationship between Keynes and FDR wrong.

Despite his many political connections, he was not much of a policy prophet in his own land. But with the New Deal and Roosevelt’s policies his glory was assured. In fact, FDR played for Keynes the same role that Lenin played for Marx. Without the politicians, both Marx and Keynes would have been moderately well-known political economists, agitators and pamphleteers. But once adopted by the powers-to-be (in the case of Keynes extending all the way to Reagan), their fate justified Keynes own view on the value of ideas, expressed towards the end of The General Theory: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

I haven’t got Carter’s book to hand as I write, but my memory of that part of it is that FDR couldn’t abide Keynes when they two met (and nor could FDR’s economic advisers), and one of the reasons Keynes embarked on his General Theory is that he felt he needed a theoretical argument to impress those who were giving the President economic advice. Also, it seems odd to say that Keynes’s ideas influenced Reagan. That seems implausible to me.

But then I’m no economist. And no historian either.

My commonplace bookletFrom The Register:

In 2013 The New York Times and other media outlets saw their operations come under attack by a bunch of miscreants calling themselves the Syrian Electronic Army. During these incidents, which occurred over a period of months, readers were unable to visit some publications’ websites at times; at other times, pages were defaced by intruders. _ > The Register was targeted, too, by the gang in a failed spear-phishing attack. At least one of our vultures was sent an email claiming to be from a senior editor, with a link to a fake copy of our publishing system to phish their credentials; the giveaway was that the message was far too cheery for that editor to be real. It also prompted us to introduce mandatory multi-factor authentication at work.

Don’t you just love the reasoning that alerted the Register’s hacks! That would have been familiar in any print newspaper in the old days too.

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

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Rooms with a viewAlbufeira marina, Portugal, in evening sunshine.

Quote of the Day

“Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”

Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBach | Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (BWV 645)

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First time I’ve heard it played by a brass ensemble.

Long Read of the DayIn the Former Eastern Bloc, they’re terrified of a Trump Presidency

Interesting piece in The New Republic reminds us that people in the former Soviet empire know a thing or two about living under tyranny.

The view the Bulgarian minister and others expressed to me was that a Trump win would result in a redrawing of the map of Europe in ways that would enable and embolden Vladimir Putin while simultaneously weakening the NATO alliance. Indeed, a Trump win would amount to nothing less than an undoing of many of the gains that came to the West through winning the Cold War and of many of the most important achievements forged in the wake of World War II.

This view is based not only on Trump’s public statements and actions while in office and since but also on a European perception of the Russian threat that is much more sweeping and menacing than most Americans and many of our leaders in Washington seem to grasp.

Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author who has written extensively on the former Soviet Union and emerging authoritarian threats, told me, “Many Europeans are afraid that a second Trump administration would work together with the Russians and their far-right allies in Europe—both those in power in Hungary and Serbia, as well as those who lead opposition parties in France and Germany—to transform European politics, destroy the European Union, and eventually dismantle NATO as well. That would make it easier for Russia and China to divide and dominate the continent for both economic and political advantage.

“Of course this is not in America’s interest,” she went on, “but Trump does not act in America’s interest.”

Yep. I can’t understand why Europeans are apparently so relaxed (or indifferent) about the risks that lie ahead.

Look before you scanYesterday’s Observer column:

Here’s a familiar scenario. You’re going to a meeting in an unfamiliar part of town. You’re running late and it’s raining. And there isn’t a car park in sight. Ah, but here’s some on-street parking and you gratefully pull into the empty bay. Now all you have to do is pay for a couple of hours and then scuttle along to your meeting. But the parking meter (of course) no longer takes coins. This is the 21st century, after all.

No worries – you can pay by phone. There are notices plastered all over the meter on how to pay using an app that – of course – you have not yet downloaded. The rain is getting heavier and there’s no mobile signal. You’re getting increasingly flustered. And then you spot that there’s a Quick Response (QR) code – a nice (if incomprehensible) square with lots of funny squares and spaces – on one side of the meter. Phew! All you have to do is scan it and you’ll be through to a website in no time. So you do and you are. Job done. Relax.

Er, possibly. Or possibly not…

Read on

Books, etc.Neil Lawrence in the middle of a mammoth book-signing after the launch of his book on Thursday evening in Cambridge.

It’s a terrific book, the best on ‘AI’ that I’ve read since Stuart Russell’s book — Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control — way back in 2020. Judging from the reaction on Thursday evening, it’ll be the big seller that it deserves to be.

My commonplace bookletI’m a pragmatist about tech tools. From the beginning, I saw chatbots as akin to spreadsheets. I’m old enough to remember the impact of VisiCalc in 1978. (Indeed, I still have a copy of the original disks in my office, and when ChatGPT broke cover I was immediately reminded of it, because, well…, after VisiCalc nothing was ever the same.) And so I’ve been constantly playing with/using tools like Perplexity, Claude and GPT-4 for the last six months.

Not surprisingly, then, I was intrigued by Google’s new toy NotebookLM — billed as “your personalized AI research assistant powered by Google’s most capable model, Gemini 1.5 Pro”. I had been alerted to it by Steven Johnson, who’s been involved in some way in its development, and whom I take seriously. I’ve uploaded some foundational texts relevant to something I’m writing at the moment, and — to be honest — have been a bit surprised by how immediately helpful it has been.

Of course, that just a first impression. But still…

LinkblogThis Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control

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No parking

Quote of the Day

”An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”

Albert Camus

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSweet Home Chicago | Blues Harmonica

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It’s clear that I’ve been underestimating the harmonica for a long, long time.

Long Read of the DayD-Day 80 years on – World War II and the “great acceleration”

Adam Tooze’s reflections on yesterday’s anniversary.

The rest of the world may be somewhat puzzled by this trip back in time, but for “the West” the 80th anniversary of “D-Day” is the perfect occasion for a rally. For the United States, France and the Commonwealth (the former members of the British Empire), D-Day is the decisive turning point in “our” World War II.

In June 1944 the landings had been a long time coming. After a series of crushing defeats between 1939 and 1942, the comeback of the British Empire and the USA in World War II began in North Africa in 1942 and continued in Italy 1943. But, it was the landing in Normandy in June 1944 that were the decisive breakthrough. The destruction of the German forces in Northern France opened the door to the liberation of Paris and to the eventual meeting with the Red Army in Central Germany in May 1945.

Many evenings, growing up in West Germany in the 1970s, my parents, who were children of wartime Britain, would tune in to the BBC World Service. The broadcast began then with a radio call sign that the BBC had used in World War II: “This is London” followed by an orchestral rendition of the 17th century tune Lillibullero (or Lilliburlero). Translated into morse code the opening bars sound out the “Victory V” – dit-dit-dit-dah. As a child, I imagined people across occupied Europe huddled around their radio sets listening for that tune, waiting for the moment of D-day to come. …

What troubles me now is how this “legendary” history of World War II continues to operate at the heart of Western political ideology. How it is used, 80 years later to frame and shape our understanding of a radically different world. What I struggle with is how to frame a historical understanding of the war that wrenches it out of this framing, that is not saccharine, that is not nostalgic that is not atavistic, but speaks in more challenging and eye-opening ways to the present…

Characteristically thoughtful. Worth a read.

Books, etc.Six non-fiction books you can read in a day (according to the Economist anyway.)

Poolside reading for busy executives?

Six Records of a Floating Life. By Shen Fu. Translated by Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-Hui. Penguin Classics; 144 pages; $16 and £9.99
Oranges. By John McPhee. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 149 pages; $16. Daunt; £9.99
A Room of One’s Own. By Virginia Woolf. Mariner; 128 pages; $16.99. Penguin Modern Classics; £5.99
Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial. By Janet Malcolm. Yale University Press; 155 pages; $13.95 and £9.99
Ways of Seeing. By John Berger. Penguin Modern Classics; 155 pages; $11 and £9.99
A Man’s Place. By Annie Ernaux. Translated by Tanya Leslie. Seven Stories Press; 96 pages; $13.95. Fitzcarraldo Editions; £7.99

I’ve only read #3 and #5 but can recommend both.

My commonplace bookletLLMs are weird

Well, we knew that. But we didn’t how weird. Some Harvard evolutionary biologists have been finding out. Here’s the Abstract for their paper.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently made vast advances in both generating and analyzing textual data. Technical reports often compare LLMs’ outputs with “human” performance on various tests. Here, we ask, “Which humans?” Much of the existing literature largely ignores the fact that humans are a cultural species with substantial psychological diversity around the globe that is not fully captured by the textual data on which current LLMs have been trained. We show that LLMs’ responses to psychological measures are an outlier compared with large-scale cross-cultural data, and that their performance on cognitive psychological tasks most resembles that of people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies but declines rapidly as we move away from these populations (r=-.70). Ignoring cross-cultural diversity in both human and machine psychology raises numerous scientific and ethical issues. We close by discussing ways to mitigate the WEIRD bias in future generations of generative language models.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

What happens when you ban cars from city centres? Ask Paris. Changes designed to encourage people to take other forms of transportation have contributed to a 40% decline in air pollution, according to city officials.

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First rose of Summer?

Quote of the Day

”The New York Times now generates more time on-site and profit from word games than they do from news. You wouldn’t know that from their staffing or the conversations they have.”

Seth Godin

He’s right. Times have changed. And not just the NYT.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsGluck | Dance of the Blessed Spirits for Flute and Orchestra | Patrick Gallois (Flute) | Orchestre Du Festival De Musique De Chambre De Paris | Versailles concert 1986

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I think the arrangement is by Christoph Willibald. I first heard this on a wet November afternoon when I was living on my own in the Netherlands. The Dutch Broadcasting Company had discovered — and was broadcasting — a long-lost recording of the opera in which Kathleen Ferrier sang Orpheo, and I stopped work and listened, entranced. The audio quality was terrible but there was something about the recording that was compelling. Here is a clip of Ferrier singing Che faro senza Euridice.

Long Read of the DayIf You’re Z, Here’s What You See

A remarkably perceptive essay by Timothy Burke.

My college’s commencement this year was different, to say the least. We moved to a location far from campus to avoid having to break up a Gaza-related encampment, and then a very large proportion of the graduating seniors strenuously protested against the college’s administration, with some faculty on stage endorsing their protest.

I don’t want to focus on the immediate issue behind this protest, or even the protest as such. I’ve talked a lot about Gaza, Palestine and Israel in the past few months. Instead, I’m thinking about why this generation of young people in general seem to be weighing whether they will vote in large numbers this November despite the fact that many of them seem committed to social and political views that ought to lead them to strongly oppose Donald Trump and the GOP. (As indeed they did in 2022, 2020 and 2018.) Some observers believe that this generation’s sympathies for Palestinian statehood are leading them into a completely irrational opposition to Biden’s re-election or a fallacious view that both parties are the same, that at the very least, the issue of Israel-Palestine is only one “special interest” that a rational voter should be able to put into perspective.

I quite agree that they should do so. I actually think many people in their early 20s and late teens already have done so. I think disquiet with American policy on Israel is only a kind of visible indicator of a much vaster, more diffuse sort of generational disaffection with formal politics that the older leadership of the Democratic Party and their older generational supporters are fundamentally incapable of speaking to or grasping…

Do read the whole thing. And see below for why I chose it.

Books, etc.Daniel Rodgers’s The Age of Fracture is one of the most perceptive books I’ve ever read. It’s an intellectual history of late 20th-century America and of how the public sphere changed from an emphasis on institutions and social relations to a focus on the rise of individualism. (For a good summary see Diane Coyle’s short review.) Essentially, it’s an account of the transition from the post-war Keynesian ‘political order’ (as Gary Gerstle would call it) to the neoliberal one embodied by the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to power.

The book came out in 2011 and is a good illustration of the adage that we “live life forwards but understand it backwards”. With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, Rodgers makes sense of a period — the 1970s — through which I lived but hadn’t really understood. All I had was a vague unease that seismic societal shifts were under way, but I had no informed sense of where they were heading. Now — partly as a result of reading Rodgers, but also from reading up on the transition of neoliberalism from a fringe idea to a dominant ideology (thanks to Gary Gerstle for that) — I came to view that decade as a key inflection point in the evolution of liberal democracies. Which has been helpful in my current project — a book with the working title HWGH (for How We Got Here).

I have an eerie sense of deja vu about the moment we’re living in now. Something’s up. One sees it everywhere: in the way old reflexive support for Israel hasn’t materialised, for example, and been replaced by concern for Palestinians — much to the astonishment of political establishments everywhere in the West. So perhaps you can see why I was so impressed by Timothy Burke’s Long Read (see above). He seems to have an intuitive sense of the evolving Zeitgeist and accordingly is worth tuning into.

My commonplace bookletGeorgia: the Putin playbook in full view

A sobering Economist podcast about what’s happening in Georgia right now. The same playbook is being rolled out in Hungary, and perhaps also in Slovakia. Anyone who thinks that Putin would stop after Ukraine has been defeated is engaged in magical thinking. Europe’s holiday from history is over.

(Disclosure: my son Pete was the producer on this particular podcast)

LinkblogSome things I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone. 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. Source
Summing up the UN’s ‘AI for Good’ summit

But honestly, I didn’t leave the conference feeling confident AI was going to play a meaningful role in advancing any of the UN goals. In fact, the most interesting speeches were about how AI is doing the opposite. Sage Lenier, a climate activist, talked about how we must not let AI accelerate environmental destruction. Tristan Harris, the cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology, gave a compelling talk connecting the dots between our addiction to social media, the tech sector’s financial incentives, and our failure to learn from previous tech booms. And there are still deeply ingrained gender biases in tech, Mia Shah-Dand, the founder of Women in AI Ethics, reminded us.

Melissa Heikkilä in MIT Technology Review

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Airport, interiorFaro, Thursday afternoon.

Quote of the Day

“We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.”

Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsAmanda Ventura | The Way (Harmonica Blues Solo)

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Wonderful.

Long Read of the DayPoland’s Zone of Interest

I’d been meaning to see Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning movie, but before booking a ticket started hunting for reviews and came on this striking essay by Daniel Kipnis, which provides a different perspective on the film — and some interesting contemporary context.

In The Zone of Interest, the Hösses employ Polish housekeepers. They are barely seen and mostly silent: scurrying about, nervously balancing drinks on trays, covetously eyeing Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) as she tries on a luxurious fur coat looted from the possessions of a Jewish woman. In one scene, upset with her maid Aniela for putting out two place settings for breakfast after Rudolf has been sent away from Auschwitz, Höss calmly tells her: “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.” The Poles of Babice, a small village near Auschwitz, were expelled in 1941 to make room for the camps.

The film ends with depictions of Polish women. Only here, we see them as the present-day employees of Auschwitz-Birkenau, no longer a camp but now a state museum. They tend to displays of shoes, bags, hair: the remaining effects of the slaughtered Jews. The Poles, then, are first depicted as victims, then as guardians of memory. But in the middle, they are also depicted as something more. In a particularly striking scene, shown for the first time about one-third of the way through the film and then repeated after an equivalent interval, the Poles become heroes.

On the scene’s first appearance, the viewer is stunned by the camera’s sudden shift to monochrome thermal imaging. It follows one of the Polish maids, gathering apples in the dark of night to smuggle across a ditch for the Jews in Auschwitz. The apparently inconsistent subplot, appearing nowhere in the 2014 Martin Amis novel upon which the film is based, arrives like a rift in its moral valence. What place does this all-too-not-banal display of bravery and righteousness have in the chronicle of amorality through which Glazer seeks to “demystify” the Nazis? His inversion of color is a cinematographic exception, in the same way that this righteous woman, traveling between her camps, subverts the normalized exception she inhabits…

Interesting, ne c’est pas?. Yep.

Video of the DayKen Burns’s Commencement Address at Brandeis.

Listen, I know you’re busy — that you don’t have the time to listen to anyone — even a great film-maker — making a speech to the graduating class of 2024 at a significant American university. But if you’re interested in democracy and concerned about what might happen on November 4, can I respectfully suggest that you find time (21 minutes to be precise) for this unforgettable speech?

Sure, Google’s AI overviews could be useful – if you like eating rocksYesterday’s Observer column:

Once upon a time, Google was great. For those who were online in 1998, history’s timeline bifurcated into two eras: BG (Before Google), and AG. It was elegant and clean: elegant because it was driven by a semi-objective algorithm called PageRank, which ranked websites according to how many other websites linked to them; and clean because it had no advertising, which of course also meant that it had no business model and accordingly was burning its way through its investors’ money.

It was too good to last, and of course it didn’t. Two of its biggest investors showed up one day, demanding a return on their investments…

Read on

My commonplace bookletThe London Evening Standard is no more — at least as a printed newspaper. Simon Jenkins was once its Editor, and he’s written a striking piece about it — and about the way the withering of local journalism is one of the reasons our democracies are failing, because local power is not being held to account, or even being monitored.

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Up the garden path

Quote of the Day

”Being short never bothered me for three seconds. The rest of the time I wanted to commit suicide.

Mel Brooks

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMichel Legrand | “The Windmills of Your Mind” (from The Thomas Crown Affair) | Renaud Capuçon

Link

Long Read of the DayThe Bubble This Time

Scott Galloway writing about the here and now.

Sample:

Airplanes follow flight patterns, calculated to maximize safety and passenger comfort while minimizing fuel use. Atmosphere is not a static medium, however, and sometimes planes encounter localized areas of rapid air movement, aka turbulence. A sudden downdraft can cause a plane to drop hundreds or thousands of feet in seconds, an event known as hitting an air pocket. Most are harmless, but strong downdrafts can be terrifying and dangerous. Just this week, a Singapore Air 777 dropped so sharply that one passenger was killed and six more sent to the hospital.

Modern airplanes recover from hitting an air pocket in seconds, but frothy markets take longer to find their footing. Here’s one scenario: A major non-tech company (e.g., Walmart, JPM, Procter & Gamble) will announce it is paring back on its AI initiatives. Shuttering its AI team, calling off a joint venture, etc. “We remain optimistic about the long-term impact of AI on our business, but we are not seeing the ROI initially projected and are scaling back our level of capital investment in this technology.” The same cycle that drove prices up will pare them, only faster: Analysts will identify which AI players were selling to the company, and every CEO on every earnings call that week will be asked if they’re cutting back their AI spend. Trend reversals travel through earnings calls like cold viruses through kindergartens, and by the end of the month, no CEO will want to be on the last helicopter out of AI Saigon. AI stocks will decline, and once they do, speculators will begin selling, creating a stampede for the exits. Trillions of dollars in market cap erased in weeks. Someone will time it perfectly. Most won’t.

A cautionary read. I particularly liked this: “Trend reversals travel through earnings calls like cold viruses through kindergartens.”

Books, etc.Hari Kunzru: The Books of my Life

A terrific novelist on rereading the classics, his teenage love of outsiders, and discovering the brilliance of Anita Brookner.

Link

My commonplace bookletWhy did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity?

Lovely essay about him by playwright Francis Beckett, whose play, “Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You” is on at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate Village, London, from 28 May to 9 June.

What I loved most about Lehrer (apart from his songs) was that he didn’t seem to care about money.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

The trailer for Idea Man, Ron Howard’s biography of Jim Henson. A must-watch.

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Horse bolted, door still openJesus College, Cambridge

Quote of the Day

”Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.”

Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsLiam O’Flynn, Seán Keane, Paddy Glackin, Arty McGlynn, Rod McVeigh & Paul Brady | Gradam Ceoil TG4 2007

Link

Loveliest set or reels I can think of: The Humours of Carrigaholt (0:00), Mayor Harrison’s Fedora (1:13) & Tommy Peoples’ (2:26).

Long Read of the DayUkraine on the ropes

A characteristically insightful recent report from Kiev by Timothy Garton Ash (whose book Homelands I’ve been re-reading and heartily recommend).

As I contemplate a forest of small Ukrainian flags on the Maidan in central Kyiv, placed there by bereaved relatives as a memorial to the war dead, I’m accosted by a burly Ukrainian soldier in combat uniform. He’s with the elite 95th Air Assault Brigade and he has been fighting Russian aggression for more than a decade. “At the moment of victory,” he tells me, “please pour the first glass on to the ground for those who have fallen.”

Gesturing to the seemingly normal life around us in the Ukrainian capital, with young people drinking at nice cafes, almost as though this were Paris or Vienna, he says, “Every peaceful day here costs a lot of lives at the front.” But he chokes up on the last words and his eyes fill with tears. “Sorry, sorry!” he exclaims, embarrassed by this moment of weakness. Then he grips my hand one more time, grasps the straps of his khaki rucksack, and marches off through the civilian crowd like a ghost from the trenches of the first world war…

Europe’s been on a holiday from history since 1945. When Putin invaded Ukraine the video reports looked eerily similar to WW2 footage, except they were now in colour, and I assumed that most Europeans would get the message. They still haven’t, which is why Tim’s perspective is so salutary.

Books, etc.Martin Rees’s new book.

Blurb:

There has never been a time when ‘following the science’ has been more important for humanity. At no other point in history have we had such advanced knowledge and technology at our fingertips, nor had such astonishing capacity to determine the future of our planet.

But the decisions we must make on how science is applied belong outside the lab and should be the outcome of wide public debate. For that to happen, science needs to become part of our common culture. Science is not just for scientists: if it were, it could never save us from the multiple crises we face. For science can save us, if its innovations mesh carefully into society and its applications are channelled for the common good.

Hmmm… Martin is one of the nicest and smartest people I know, but I can’t see science (or an understanding of it) becoming ‘part of our common culture’ any time soon, especially given our current media ecosystem. I wish it were otherwise.

My commonplace bookletHow news coverage, often uncritical, helps build up the AI hype

Useful piece by Rasmus Nielsen on how journalism is still doing a poor job in covering ‘AI’ (aka machine-learning).

So, perhaps, as Timit Gebru, founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), has written on X: “The same news orgs hype stuff up during ‘AI summers’ without even looking into their archives to see what they wrote decades ago?”

There are some really good reporters doing important work to help people understand AI—as well as plenty of sensationalist coverage focused on killer robots and wild claims about possible future existential risks.

But, more than anything, research on how news media cover AI overall suggests that Gebru is largely right – the coverage tends to be led by industry sources, and often takes claims about what the technology can and can’t do, and might be able to do in the future, at face value in ways that contributes to the hype cycle.

Growl. In one sense it’s comforting to have one’s own view confirmed, but it’s depressing because it means that journalism isn’t doing its job properly.

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Punting, anyone?

Quote of the Day

” I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

Evelyn Waugh

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsKeith Richards | “Cocaine Blues”

Link

So effortless.

Long Read of the DayThere’s an article I shouldn’t tell you about – is contempt law in a losing battle with reality?

Really thoughtful piece by Archie Bland, Editor of the paper’s First Edition newsletter.

Background: Coming back on the train from London last Thursday afternoon I read a long, long article by Rachel Aviv in the New Yorker about Lucy Letby, “the most notorious nurse in Britain, who was found guilty of killing seven babies”, and asking whether she was really guilty of those crimes. It’s a classic New Yorker investigative piece — 15 pages long. It makes a pretty good argument for the view that Letby’s conviction was unsound.

Since my current Press Fellows were due to have a talk by Richard Danbury on the implications for journalism of the UK contempt-of-court law the following day, I thought I would send them the New Yorker link. And then discovered that I couldn’t — the article had been ‘geoblocked. But I could have photocopied the pages in the magazine and handed them out — which I did.

Now, over to Archie:

An article has been published in the New Yorker about the trial of Lucy Letby. It has been geoblocked in the UK, but it can still be accessed by some, or read in print copies of the US magazine. It has been raised in parliament, written up by news providers and discussed on social media. I shouldn’t link to it, describe its contents or tell you anything else about it.

By the letter of the law, I also shouldn’t give you more specific detail about why I shouldn’t give you more specific detail, except to say that Letby has a retrial on one charge of attempted murder scheduled for June. But I can at least tell you about the law in England and Wales that has created this surreal situation: the Contempt of Court Act 1981.

You will be familiar with the laudable concept behind this law, which exists to stop anything that will prejudice a court case and prevent a fair trial…

Later. The Court of Appeal on Thursday rejected Letby’s application for permission to appeal against her convictions in September. She will face a retrial at the same court in June on a single count that she attempted to murder a baby girl, known as Child K, in February 2016.

My commonplace bookletAre LLMs moral hypocrites?

Yes, according to the most abstruse paper I’ve read in a while.

As a case study, we submitted the Moral Foundation Questionnaire and the Moral Foundation Vignettes to four state-of-the-art LLMs: GPT-4, Claude 2.1, Gemini Pro, and LLAMA-2-Chat-70b. Of those, only GPT-4 and Claude 2.1 generated valid outputs for our stimuli.

We found that, within each instrument, both models were capable of presenting moral values with consistency com- parable to human respondents. However, our results utterly lacked any coherence in the values between abstraction levels. We characterise these models as moral hypocrites, failing to apply declared abstract values to concrete situations.

If LLMs are to play a role in morally relevant situations (as they are already being used), we ought to require them not to be hypocrites, and this should be an important aspect of alignment evaluation for future models. This is also relevant for anyone considering replacing human participants with LLMs. Finally, our results are compatible with mimicry instead of conceptual mastery.

Note last sentence and remember that these machines are all trained on everything humans have written that is machine readable. And humans are, well, masterful at hypocrisy.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Crows’ feat. From Nature…

Carrion crows (Corvus corone) can reliably caw a number of times from one to four on command — a skill that had only been seen in people. Over several months, birds were trained with treats to associate a screen showing the digits, or a related sound, with the right number of calls. The crows were not displaying a ‘true’ counting ability, which requires a symbolic understanding of numbers, say researchers. But they are nevertheless able to produce a deliberate number of vocalizations on cue, which is “a very impressive achievement”, says neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara.

(Apologies for the terrible pun)

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Travelling lightKing’s Cross the other day.

Quote of the Day

”It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.”

Oscar Wilde*

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBruce Springsteen | You Never Can Tell (Leipzig 7/7/13)

Link

A good illustration of what the Springseen experience is like. And what a great backing band.

Long Read of the DayAcademia: The Heroic Prompt Engineers of Tomorrow

Nice sharp essay by Timothy Burke on the latest hype-cycle in ed-tech.

I’m of the same mind as people who think generative AI is grossly over-hyped by people who see it as their meal ticket. It is in many respects a big con, a solution desperately in search of problems, a product that was made and sold without a use case for it. Unfortunately, as many people have observed, the money being made off the hype is going to be used to destroy institutions, jobs and practices before the whole thing ebbs back to being whatever modestly or possibly useful thing it might turn out to be.

I hope that higher education withstands AI hype as much it (mostly) successfully held off the worst of the previous assaults by ed-tech speculators who insisted that massively-online courses were inevitably going to replace all brick-and-mortar education and usher in an era of cheap, plentiful, high-quality education available to everyone.

One thing that briefly produced a respite in the ed-tech assault was that for two years, we experienced a live demo of their best products and the results were bad for the most part…

Do read on. It’s good.

I worked happily at the Open University for many years, which was a real centre of excellence in this stuff, and so we had a ringside view of successive waves of hype, inflated expectations, undelivered promises and poor critical evaluation by an industry that knew nothing about education, or indeed about how people learn. One of my colleagues, Tim O’Shea, who was a leading expert on Ed-tech — and a frequent keynote speaker at conferences on the subject — had a wicked way of annoying his audience by saying that “the only piece of educational technology that is known for sure to work is the school bus”!

My commonplace bookletThere’s a really interesting NBER paper on how the market for ‘AI’ technology might evolve.

Here’s the Abstract:

Drawing insights from the field of innovation economics, we discuss the likely competitive environment shaping generative AI advances. Central to our analysis are the concepts of appropriability—whether firms in the industry are able to control the knowledge generated by their innovations—and complementary assets—whether effective entry requires access to specialized infrastructure and capabilities to which incumbent firms can ration access. While the rapid improvements in AI foundation models promise transformative impacts across broad sectors of the economy, we argue that tight control over complementary assets will likely result in a concentrated market structure, as in past episodes of technological upheaval. We suggest the likely paths through which incumbent firms may restrict entry, confining newcomers to subordinate roles and stifling broad sectoral innovation. We conclude with speculations regarding how this oligopolistic future might be averted. Policy interventions aimed at fractionalizing or facilitating shared access to complementary assets might help preserve competition and incentives for extending the generative AI frontier. Ironically, the best hopes for a vibrant open source AI ecosystem might rest on the presence of a “rogue” technology giant, who might choose openness and engagement with smaller firms as a strategic weapon wielded against other incumbents.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Why Tesla FSD is not safe

From Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve):

Here’s what I’ve learned from owing a Tesla Model Y with Full Self Driving. I don’t believe it’s safe. It absolutely does require your full attention at all times. You are still driving the car. I’ve seen it do crazy stuff in simple situations. I’ve seen it panic, basically throw its hands in the air and say Dave this is your problem. That’s why you always have to be ready, as if you were driving the car yourself because at any moment you could be. You never know when it’s going to happen. Now focus on that moment. Your car has given up and turned the driving over to you. How much experience do you have with that? Do you know where to look? Do you hit the brakes or veer to the left or right? If you’re an experienced driver, a lot of these reactions are completely programmed into the lower levels of the brain. You don’t have to think at all. When the car panics, I tend to panic. If I had 10 or 20 years experience with this connection, then I guess it’s probably safe. But not the way it is. #

I’m amazed there aren’t more terrible accidents with FSD, and that Tesla still promotes this as “self-driving,” which it is not.

Yep. It’s the aircraft industry’s “auto-pilot problem” on steroids.

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The edge of EuropeThe Cliffs of Moher in County Clare last Sunday.

Quote of the Day

”Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.”

Ernest Hemingway

Guilty as charged, m’lud.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMozart | Violin Concerto No. 3 in G Major, K. 216 – II. Adagio | Anne-Sophie Mutter

Link

The whole concerto is gorgeous, but this movement is sublime — and breakfast-length.

Long Read of the Day Roy Jenkins’ unfinished revolution

Lovely New Statesman profile by Simon Jenkins of the claret-drinker’s friend (and formidable political reformer).

When Keir Starmer looks back over past Labour prime ministers, the one said to catch his eye is Harold Wilson. We can only reply, each to his own. But we might ask which Wilson was it? In 1965, a year into Wilson’s first term of office, the Liberal leader Jo Grimond savaged him in a Guardian article as a failed reformer. He called him competent but not radical, and certainly no liberal.

The ever-sensitive Wilson was deeply wounded. He duly summoned his 44-year-old junior minister at aviation, Roy Jenkins, and promoted him to be home secretary. Jenkins was a writer and member of Labour’s sociable Frognal (or Hampstead) set and not altogether to Wilson’s liking. But as a backbencher in 1959 he had sponsored a private members’ bill liberalising “obscene publications”. He seemed the right man to see off Grimond and the Guardian.

At the time, Britain’s attitude to social and sexual behaviour, crime and punishment, had barely changed since the 19th century. Homosexuals were in jail, abortion was illegal and the last hanging had taken place as recently as 1964. Labour’s manifesto had made no commitment to reform any of these areas. With other things on his mind, Wilson was disinclined to engage in controversy.

When Jenkins arrived at his new post he found his office grimly decorated with a picture of Charles I and the names of prisoners previously awaiting execution. As he outlined his reform agenda, his austere permanent secretary, Charles Cunningham, flatly objected and did everything to obstruct him. At one point he even broke down in tears. Jenkins pushed him into retirement and brought in a new permanent secretary, Philip Allen, from the Treasury. He restaffed his private office from outside the department under his personal aide, John Harris. Allen recalled his own first instruction, “There was work to be done, and to be done at once.”

Do read on. It’s an interesting reminder of what an imaginative politician used to be able to achieve in a functioning democracy.

Books, etc.Neil Lawrence’s book is (nearly) out. I’ve read it in proof, and my guess is that it’ll be big. It’s a refreshing change from most of the stuff currently being published about ‘AI’. This is partly because it’s been a decade in gestation, but largely because its author embodies a rare combination of academic distinction (he’s the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning in Cambridge) and industrial experience (he was Amazon’s Head of machine-learning for three years).

The title comes from a celebrated thought-experiment by the Greek philosopher Democritus.

He imagined cutting physical matter into pieces in a repeated process: cutting a piece, then taking one of the cut pieces and cutting it again so that each time it becomes smaller and smaller. Democritus believed this process had to stop somewhere, that we would be left with an indivisible piece. The Greek word for indivisible is atom, and so this series was called atomism. This book considers this question but in a different domain, asking: As the machine slices away portions of human capabilities, are we left with a kernel of humanity, and indivisible piece that can no longer be divided into parts? Or does the human disappear altogether? If we are left with something, then that uncuttable piece, a form of atomic human, would tell us something about our human spirit.

What does Neil think will be left after the machines have done their worst? That would be telling! This is a journey where the destination matters.

My commonplace bookletWhile we were driving along the westernmost edge of Europe last weekend, Bruce Springsteen was wowing 80,000 of his most devoted fans in Croke Park, Dublin. And of course they were singing No Surrender along with him — as one does.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Apple’s muddled thinking about its iPad. Steven Sinofsky has a shrewd piece about this on (of all places) Twitter/X.

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On Heaney’s ‘flaggy shore’We were in Galway on Friday for lunch, and afterwards decided to drive south along the glorious coast road from Ballyvaughan to the cliffs of Moher. We stopped at this point, where the limestone pavement of the Burren enters the Atlantic before resurfacing a few miles out to sea as the three Aran Islands — rendered invisible by the sea-haze in the distance.

Not surprisingly, what came to mind was Seamus Heaney’s poem, Postscript:

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Quote of the Day

“No coffee is ever quite as good as it smells”

Ngaio Marsh

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJohn Dowland | Come Again | Morgan Manifacier, tenor & Daniel Keene, lute

Link

Who said Dowland was stuffy? Lovely performance. And h/t to The Browser for spotting it.

Long Read of the DayHenryFarrellBot: LLMs as Cultural Technologies

The other day, Henry Farrell gave a terrific talk to the Harvard Kennedy School about (among other things) Alison Gopnik’s idea that we should regard LLMs as ‘cultural technologies” — like libraries, books and maybe even language itself.

This gave Brad DeLong the wicked idea of asking an LLM — OpenAI’s ChatGPT4o — about Henry’s talk. He fed the machine the transcript with the prompt “Please summarize and rewrite the transcript text below into five coherent three-paragraph chunks”.

The result is interesting — and rather good. Definitely worth a read.

And — in a nice academic twist, the machine reformatted Henry’s references into Chicago bibliography format!

What would Steve Jobs think of Apple’s culture-crushing advert?Yesterday’s Observer column:

I’s a tale of two advertisements. And about the company that made them – Apple Inc.

Read on to see what the ads signified.

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The late arrivalDingle peninsula, Ireland.

Quote of the Day

“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”

Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSamuel Barber | Agnus Dei | Voces8

Link

A hauntingly beautiful adaptation of Barber’s Adagio. Thanks to Joanna Mulvey for suggesting it.

Long Read of the DayBig Energy

Scott Galloway on the way that tech firms are beginning to look suspiciously like energy companies.

Big Tech isn’t just similar to the energy business, it is the new energy business. AI’s growing power requirements make this concrete. AI compute requirements are doubling every 100 days, dramatically countervailing the gains in efficiency that every AI evangelist boasts about after vomiting that it will save/destroy humanity. Training the trillion-plus-parameter models being stewed in a medium-size city (San Francisco) requires the energy consumption of a small country. One ChatGPT request requires 10 times the energy of a Google search. In five years, the incremental energy demand of AI will be equivalent to 40 million homes — more than California, Texas, Florida, and New York combined. Data centers make up 3% of total U.S. power demand, but that’s projected to triple by 2030. BTW, 2030 is the same distance into the future as the finale of Game of Thrones is in the past (2019).

To feed their data centers, tech companies are investing billions in energy production and storage. The WSJ reports Big Tech execs descended on this year’s annual oil and gas conference, hunting for energy. Bill Gates was the featured speaker. Amazon, the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy, has over 500 projects operating or in development. Announcements of new data centers are accompanied by commitments to develop new wind and solar farms to provide the power…

Not as easy a read as most of his stuff (keeps being interrupted by graphs). But I think he’s right about what’s happening — and isn’t being talked about enough.

Books, etc.Screenshot

I tuned into the launch event for this at LSE on Tuesday evening largely because I’m looking for different lenses through which to view what’s happening to democracies as they are increasingly dominated by tech companies. The lens offered by Mejias and Couldry is colonialism. Their argument is that colonialism has not disappeared; it has just taken on a new form — data colonialism.

Colonialism 1.0 was about appropriating land; data colonialism is about creating virtual territories (silos) in which the data produced by people as they go about their lives can be appropriated and exploited for profit.

In a striking turn, the authors took an analytical tool from computer games with colonial themes like ColonySim.io — the 4X (‘four exes’) model — a way of categorising the stages in the colonialisation process:

Explore
Expand
Exploit
Exterminate

The book uses this model to analyse how the tech industry has been operating since 2000.

There was a nice moment when Mejias compared Google’s Terms and Conditions with the document that Spanish Conquistadors used to read to the inhabitants of territories they had arrived to appropriate.

Anyway, it’s now on my reading list.

My commonplace bookletThe end of the sedan?

FastCompany has an interesting piece on how US automobile manufacturers are abandoning what they call ‘sedans’ and we call ‘saloon cars’ (an odd term, when you come to think of it) — in favour of SUVs.

I’m not sure that this is the case for European and Asian manufacturers. Oddly enough, Tesla currently stands out in opposition to this US trend: its Model 3 and Model S cars are both saloons. The Tesla Model X is a big SUV, and the Model Y is a hatchback. And the Cybertruck is, well, just weird.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Climbing Everest is just routine for some. From bbc.com:

Mount Everest saw two record-breaking climbs on Sunday with a Nepali sherpa making the most ever summits and a British climber setting the record for a foreigner.

Kami Rita Sherpa, 54, scaled the world’s tallest mountain for a 29th time while British man Kenton Cool marked his 18th peak.

Sherpa, already the world-record holder, beat his own landmark in setting the new standard.

A guide for over two decades, he first climbed the summit in 1994 and has made the peak almost every year since.

Good for him. For me, I like looking at moountains.

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Help?For one awful moment, it looked like a human arm.

Quote of the Day

”The mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought.”

Rebecca Solnit

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJerry Garcia & Bob Weir | “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”

Link

Long Read of the Day Traveling At The Speed Of The Soul

Lovely meditation in Noema on walking by Nick Hunt, who once walked from Hook van Holland to Istanbul, in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who completed his great walk on New Year’s Day 1935 and wrote a couple of entrancing books about it.

I slept on couches, in the ruins of castles and abandoned hunting hides. I got lost in graffitied city streets and in snowbound forests. I spent the vast majority of those months alone, talking to myself with a lack of self-consciousness that at times alarmed me. Birdsong, the roar of cars, church bells, cowbells, outraged dogs, the rush of rivers and the patter of rain kept me steady company. The sound I heard more than anything else was the crunch, crunch, crunch of my boots on the road.

By the time I got to Istanbul, those boots were full of holes…

Not for the faint-hearted, that kind of walking.

Books, etc.Nabokov, writing. Not a keyboard in sight.

My commonplace bookletAI’s Next Big Step: Detecting Human Emotion and Expression

Link

Alan Cowen, CEO of Hume AI, is a former Meta and Google researcher who’s built AI technology that can read the tune, timber, and rhythm of your voice, as well as your facial expressions, to discern your emotions.

As you speak with Hume’s bot, EVI, it processes the emotions you’re showing — like excitement, surprise, joy, anger, and awkwardness — and expresses its responses with ’emotions’ of its own. Yell at it, for instance, and it will get sheepish and try to diffuse the situation. It will display its calculations on screen, indicating what it’s reading in your voice and what it’s giving back. And it’s quite sticky. Across 100,000 unique conversations, the average interaction between humans and EVI is ten minutes long, a company spokesperson said.

Hmmm…. I tried it (via Hume.ai). I pretended to be an Apple user infuriated by its autocorrect feature. (Not difficult: I loathe that particular ‘feature’.) It figured that I was cross and tried to be emollient. Asked me if I’d tried the settings, and after that suggested that I get in contact with Apple Support, who might be able to make some helpful suggestions. “Yeah”, I replied, “and pigs might fly in close formation”. It then went quiet for a while, obviously trying to process whether this was a joke or not. Conclusion: it’s better than Siri. But then that’s not exactly a high bar.

En passant: wonder why they called it ‘Hume’.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Arlo Guthrie, riffing on Amazing Grace. Wonderful folksy mastery of an audience. Link

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Drakes!You can tell what they’re thinking: where did those dratted females go?

Quote of the Day

”There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

Ernest Hemingway

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSmetana | Vltava (The Moldau)

Link

I love the way this tone-poem creeps up on one. According to Wikipedia Smetana explained it thus:

The composition describes the course of the Vltava, starting from the two small springs, the Studená and Teplá Vltava, to the unification of both streams into a single current, the course of the Vltava through woods and meadows, through landscapes where a farmer’s wedding is celebrated, the round dance of the mermaids in the night’s moonshine: on the nearby rocks loom proud castles, palaces and ruins aloft. The Vltava swirls into the St John’s Rapids; then it widens and flows toward Prague, past the Vyšehrad, and then majestically vanishes into the distance, ending at the Elbe.

I couldn’t spot the mermaids, alas. But that’s a mere detail as the music sweeps one along.

Long Read of the DayHelen Lewis on Writing

Lovely blog post by a formidable journalist, with some great advice for the rest of us on the process of writing and reporting at length.

I particularly like her closing paragraph:

Park downhill. At the end of every day, finish your writing by stopping halfway through a thought—maybe even halfway through a sentence. That way, there is a small task to complete the next day, helping you navigate the hardest movement in a writer’s life: sitting down at your desk.

I learned that trick a long time ago, and it never fails.

Books, etc.A new book by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healey looks interesting. The blurb reads:

We now live in an “ordinal society.” Nearly every aspect of our lives is measured, ranked, and processed into discrete, standardized units of digital information. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy argue that technologies of information management, fueled by the abundance of personal data and the infrastructure of the internet, transform how we relate to ourselves and to each other through the market, the public sphere, and the state.

The personal data we give in exchange for convenient tools like Gmail and Instagram provides the raw material for predictions about everything from our purchasing power to our character. The Ordinal Society shows how these algorithmic predictions influence people’s life chances and generate new forms of capital and social expectation: nobody wants to ride with an unrated cab driver anymore or rent to a tenant without a risk score. As members of this society embrace ranking and measurement in their daily lives, new forms of social competition and moral judgment arise. Familiar structures of social advantage are recycled into measures of merit that produce insidious kinds of social inequality.

While we obsess over order and difference―and the logic of ordinality digs deeper into our behaviors, bodies, and minds―what will hold us together? Fourcade and Healy warn that, even though algorithms and systems of rationalized calculation have inspired backlash, they are also appealing in ways that make them hard to relinquish.

Henry Farrell has an interesting essay about it already.

LLMs could free up programmers to do more interesting stuffYesterday’s Observer column:

I once wrote when writing a history of this technology, “being a programmer is like being Napoleon before the retreat from Moscow. Software is the only medium in which the limits are exclusively those set by your imagination.”

This is why, when large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT emerged, many people were flabbergasted to discover that not only could these machines compose coherent English sentences, but they could also write computer programs! Instead of having to master the byzantine intricacies of C++ or Python in order to converse with the machine, you could explain what you wanted it to do and it would spit out the necessary code. You could program the machine in plain English!

How was this possible?

Read on

Apropos… Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve) pointed me to an interesting 2023 NBER article by Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li & Lindsey R. Raymond, the Abstract for which reads:

New AI tools have the potential to change the way workers perform and learn, but little is known about their impacts on the job. In this paper, we study the staggered introduction of a generative AI-based conversational assistant using data from 5,179 customer support agents. Access to the tool increases productivity, as measured by issues resolved per hour, by 14% on average, including a 34% improvement for novice and low-skilled workers but with minimal impact on experienced and highly skilled workers. We provide suggestive evidence that the AI model disseminates the best practices of more able workers and helps newer workers move down the experience curve. In addition, we find that AI assistance improves customer sentiment, increases employee retention, and may lead to worker learning. Our results suggest that access to generative AI can increase productivity, with large heterogeneity in effects across workers.

Chart of the Day h/t Brad DeLong

My commonplace bookletStudy reveals how much carbon damage would cost corporations if they paid for their emissions.

Really interesting finding. Basically, their profits would be halved — at best.

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The Sea, the SeaFrom the cafe at Inch beach, Co Kerry, one Sunday morning.

Quote of the Day

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no-one was listening, everything must be said again.”

Andre Gide

(Useful quote for those of us who write for a living. Thanks to Andrew Curry for reminding me of it.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBeethoven | Ecossaises in E-Flat Major, WoO 83

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Lovely, and hitherto unknown to me.

Long Read of the DayWhat Elon Musk’s favorite game tells us about him

Terrific critique by Dave Karpf of Musk’s biographer.

This is how it begins…

Elon Musk really likes the game Polytopia. He has skipped birthday parties and international business meetings to play the game. He has effused that it is “the best game ever.” He has posited that it is more complicated than chess.

Walter Isaacson treats Polytopia as a window into Musk’s unique, brilliant mind. He devotes nearly as many pages to the game as he does to the Boring Company. (Which is, y’know, one of his actual companies. It has a multi-billion dollar valuation.) He even prints eight “life lessons” that Musk and his hangers-on think you can distill from the game.

It’s… a bit much.

I left Polytopia out of my original review of the book. It seemed like a bit of a strange personality tick. The parallel to SBF’s mobile gaming habit was a little interesting. But I had never heard of the game. I’d never played it. And I already had more than enough material to work with.

A few months later, while visiting some family on the west coast, I noticed my brother-in-law playing Polytopia on his phone. “Y’know, Elon Musk says that’s the greatest game of all time,” I said to him. My brother-in-law gave me a quizzical look. He’s a pretty well-adjusted fellow, neither addicted to Musk nor Polytopia. He just thought the game was reasonably fun.

So I tried it out…

Read on to find out what he concluded. (Spoiler alert: Isaacson doesn’t come out of it well.)

Books, etc.Screenshot

Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy have an interesting new book out.

Here’s the blurb:

We now live in an “ordinal society.” Nearly every aspect of our lives is measured, ranked, and processed into discrete, standardized units of digital information. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy argue that technologies of information management, fueled by the abundance of personal data and the infrastructure of the internet, transform how we relate to ourselves and to each other through the market, the public sphere, and the state.

The personal data we give in exchange for convenient tools like Gmail and Instagram provides the raw material for predictions about everything from our purchasing power to our character. The Ordinal Society shows how these algorithmic predictions influence people’s life chances and generate new forms of capital and social expectation: nobody wants to ride with an unrated cab driver anymore or rent to a tenant without a risk score. As members of this society embrace ranking and measurement in their daily lives, new forms of social competition and moral judgment arise. Familiar structures of social advantage are recycled into measures of merit that produce insidious kinds of social inequality. While we obsess over order and difference—and the logic of ordinality digs deeper into our behaviors, bodies, and minds—what will hold us together? Fourcade and Healy warn that, even though algorithms and systems of rationalized calculation have inspired backlash, they are also appealing in ways that make them hard to relinquish.

Diane Coyle admired the book in her review. And Henry Farrell has a thoughtful essay about it. Which are two powerful arguments for buying and reading it.

My commonplace bookletThe Sam Altman Playbook

Gary Marcus’s insights into Sam “Babyface’ Altman’s modus operandi.

A sample:

Undergirding all is this often a sense that without AI, we are screwed. As Geoffrey Miller put it on X, “[Altman’s] implicit message is usually ‘We need AGI to solve aging & discover longevity treatments, so if you don’t support us, you’ll die.” Longevity is the carrot; death is the stick.

In order to make it all plausible, Sam uses a unique combination of charm, soft-spoken personal humility and absolute confidence in outlandish claims.

He seems like such a nice guy, yet he implies, unrealistically, that the solution to AGI is within his grasp; he presents no evidence that is so, and rarely considers the many critiques of current approaches that have been raised. (Better to pretend they don’t exist.) Because he seems so nice, pushback somehow seems like bad form.

Absurd, hubristic claims, often verging on the messianic, presented kindly, gently, and quietly — but never considered skeptically. That’s his M.O.

Good piece, worth reading. I’ve always been sceptical about Altman. A few months ago I wrote about his plan to raise $7 trillion to build AGI.

He is deeply conscious of the responsibility he carries. “Democracy only works in a growing economy,” he told Friend in 2016. “Without a return to economic growth, the democratic experiment will fail.” If it does, though, Altman will be ready. In a discussion about aggressive AI and nations fighting with nuclear weapons over scarce resources, he said: “I try not to think about it too much. But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israel Defense Forces, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

Such a nice, innocent lad.

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WisteriaSuch an amazing plant. Comes back year after year. There are some really ancient ones in Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”Comparative religion is an admirable recipe for making people comparatively religious.

Ronald Knox

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSamuel Barber | Adagio for Strings

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Long Read of the Day(Spoiler alert: it’s a really long read!)

Universities as factories

If you’re puzzled about what the so-called ‘leadership’ of Columbia University is up to, then join the club. The President of the institution is Minouche Shafik, described by Wikipedia as

a British-American academic and economist. She has been serving as the 20th president of Columbia University since July 2023. She previously served as president and vice chancellor of the London School of Economics from 2017 to 2023.

From 2014 to 2017, Shafik served as deputy governor of the Bank of England and also previously as permanent secretary of the United Kingdom Department for International Development from 2008 to 2011. She has also served as a vice president at the World Bank and as deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund. She was created a life peeress by Elizabeth II in 2020.

(Footnotes: Actually Shafik was the Director of the LSE; it’s only since her departure that the role has been rebranded as “President and Vice-Chancellor”. Also, it’s not clear how much of an ‘academic’ Shafik is. She was an Adjunct (i.e. unpaid) Professor in the Economics department of Georgetown University for five years, and an Associate Visiting Professor at the Wharton School, but the bulk of her career thus far suggests someone who is basically an administrator. This may be relevant to what follows.)

On April 30 Shafik wrote to the NYPD asking them to “help to clear all individuals from Hamilton Hall and all campus encampments.” She also also requested that they remain on campus through at least May 17, 2024 — two days after the school’s commencement ceremony is set to take place on May 15.

The cops were reportedly puzzled by this request, but they duly turned up in riot gear. Adam Tooze, who is a Professor at Columbia (and a Financial Times columnist) witnessed what followed and wrote a thoughtful piece about it on his blog. Here’s excerpt from his narrative.

There was no riot last night at Columbia any more than there has been at any other point. The violence came from the police side and it came at the invitation and request of the University administration.

My colleague at the FT Edward Luce is right. It was the adults not the students that caused the real disorder. It is the University administration not the student protestors who have seriously disrupted the end of term and examinations.

When the violence came last night, it was sudden.

When the sign came to force the passage of one of their vehicles, the police first formed up, moving close to the barrier, face to face with the protestors. The protestors formed a soft chain, many reversed, turning their backs to the police ready for what was about to come, knowing they would need to retreat under massive physical pressure.

On an order from their commander, the police pushed. They pushed hard. Very hard. They move fast, as quickly as their bulk and equipment would allow, maximizing momentum. The officers use waist-high steel barriers as plows to drive the protestors back and to pin them in side streets and against walls. Then, after the vehicle was through and the shouting and chanting of the protestors rose to an extreme crescendo, they pulled back and rearranged themselves again, across Broadway behind their barriers. The shouting and staring resumed.

The scene was static. But I would not be honest if I did not say that my stomach churned watching it. The sheer force of the movement, the relentless and sudden drive of the steel barrier against human bodies, moved the air.

Tooze’s point is that riot police are a blunt instrument. They don’t do finesse. As I read that, an episode from my own past came to mind. When the so-called ‘Troubles’ erupted in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, and the province’s sectarian police force (and their part-time auxiliaries) viciously attacked civilian demonstrations modelled on the US Civil Rights movement, we in the Republic watched in astonishment as the UK government stood by and apparently did nothing while rampant lawlessness reigned in what was — formally — as much a part of the UK as Yorkshire or Northamptonshire.

Eventually, London sent in the army and for a few weeks an uneasy stability was restored, before the army embarked on clumsy and sometimes clueless action against Catholics and republican sympathisers — repressive actions that boosted recruitment into the Provisional IRA, the ruthless and effective terrorist group that then plagued the province for the next three decades.

Many years later, I found myself sitting at a dinner next to the late Merlyn Rees, a prominent British politician who had risen to be Home Secretary (i.e. Minister for the Interior) in a Labour government. As we chatted, I put to him a question that had been on my mind since the late 1960s: “What took you so long to respond to the disorder on the streets of Northern Ireland?” Well, he said, mildly, “What you have to remember is that an army is an extremely blunt instrument.” And so indeed the British army proved to be in Northern Ireland, though it got smarter as time went on.

But back to the question that had puzzled Tooze and many of his academic colleagues: why did the university’s administration take such action to deal with what were essentially peaceful demonstrations of support for Palestinians and criticism of Israeli actions in Gaza?

To this question the economist Branko Milanovic provides a perceptive answer in a blog post entitled “Universities as Factories”. As someone who grew up in Serbia, he had seen quite a lot of the blunt instruments of state power. “The novelty, for me, in the current wave of freedom of speech demonstrations in the United States”, he writes,

was that it was the university administrators who called for the police to attack students. In at least one case, in New York, the police were puzzled why they were brought in, and thought it was counter-productive. One could understand that this attitude by the administrators might happen in authoritarian countries where the administrators may be appointed by the powers-to-be to keep order on campuses. Then, obviously, as obedient civil servants, they would support the police in its “cleansing” activity although they would rarely have the authority to call it in.

But in the US, university administrators are not appointed by Biden, nor by Congress. Why would they then attack their own students? Are they some evil individuals who love to beat up younger people?

No, he says. They’re not necessarily evil. They’re just in the wrong job.

They are not seeing their role as what traditionally was the role of universities, that is to try to impart to the younger generation values of freedom, morality, compassion, self-abnegation, empathy or whatever else is considered desirable. Their role today is to be the CEOs of factories that are called universities. These factories have a raw material which is called students and which they turn, at regular annual intervals, into graduates. Consequently, any disturbance in that production process is like a disturbance to a supply chain. It has to be eliminated as soon as possible in order for the production to resume. Graduating students have to be “outputted”, the new students brought in, moneys from them have to be pocketed, donors have to be found, more funds to be secured. Students, if they interfere with the process, need to be disciplined, if necessary by force. Police has to be brought in, order to be restored.

Which is why it matters that Shafik is really just an administrator. She has done what a CEO of Walmart or Burger King would do in the same circumstances. These people, says Milanovic, are not interested in values, but in the bottom line. That doesn’t mean of course that they won’t

use the talk about values, or “intellectually-challenging environment”, or “vibrant discussion” (or whatever!), as described in a recent article in The Atlantic, as the usual promotional, performative speech that top managers of companies nowadays produce at the drop of a hat.

Yep. One wonders how long it will take the Columbia Trustees to fire ‘Professor’ Shafik.

A more general thought is that the ‘elite’ university system — at least in the US — is in deep trouble. This, at any rate, is the conclusion I draw from a long essay by Louis Menand in the current issue of the New Yorker.

Here’s his conclusion:

The fact remains that all the emphasis on diversity and inclusion did not prevent October 7th from becoming a powder keg. The real problem is that all these issues are playing out in the public eye, and universities are not skilled at public relations. Since 1964, they have been adapting to a legal environment created largely by Democratic Congresses and a Supreme Court still marginally liberal on racial issues. Now a different political regime is in the saddle, in Congress and on the Court, and there are few places left to hide.

Academic freedom is an understanding, not a law. It can’t just be invoked. It has to be asserted and defended. That’s why it’s so disheartening that leaders of great universities appear reluctant to speak up for the rights of independent inquiry and free expression for which Americans have fought. Even after Shafik offered up faculty sacrifices on the congressional altar and called in the N.Y.P.D., Republicans responded by demanding her resignation. If capitulation isn’t working, not much is lost by trying some defiance.

Yep. The trouble is that CEOs don’t do defiance.

My commonplace bookletAnd while we’re on the subject of what’s been happening to elite American universities, there’s also the extent to which they are being ‘presidentialized’ — as this terrific post by David Pozen puts it.

It therefore came as a rude awakening for many faculty members at Columbia to learn just how little decisional authority we collectively wield at the university level. When the senate executive committee opposed Shafik’s crackdown on the student encampment, she went ahead and did it anyway — and there was nothing, under the University Charter and Statutes, that the committee or its formidable chair Jeanine D’Armiento could do about it. The full senate then considered a censure resolution. Had it passed, this act of resistance likewise would have had only symbolic effect. President Shafik was hired by, serves on, and reports to the board of trustees, whose members are largely chosen by … the board of trustees. Faculty are on the outside looking in.

To simplify somewhat, we might say that professors are granted a number of basic rights within the university, including rights to free speech and due process and quasi-property rights in the job itself. Students and staff are granted a partially overlapping, though weaker, bundle of rights. What none of us have are governance rights against the trustees who really run the place. We enjoy various individual privileges and protections, but not the franchise.

And that’s definitely enough about universities for today.

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Totem pole?On a Norfolk beach.

Quote of the Day

“You feel that its words are coming of out of your body and then you dig the words into the page. It’s a physical experience.”

The late Paul Auster on why he preferred composing in longhand.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsThe Rolling Stones | Sympathy For The Devil (Live at Tokyo Dome 1990)

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Well, the devil has always had the best tunes.

Long Read of the DayThe Tyranny of Content Algorithms

Nice essay by a fellow-photographer, Om Malik, on what seems to be an endemic feature of the online world.

No matter who you are, how skilled you may be, or how much knowledge you possess, excessive activity will inevitably lead to a return to the average. This phenomenon is observable every day on the Internet. Before Instagram became a competition for the lowest common denominator, there were a few photographers I followed. They consistently shared captivating images, always managing to evoke a sense of inspiration with each viewing of their work.

I wasn’t alone in this appreciation—over time, they gained more recognition and accumulated larger followings. Or perhaps it was the other way around. The ‘larger following’ meant they were able to monetize their audience. However, soon the tail was wagging the dog.

As the years passed, I noticed them sharing more frequently, yet the quality of their work declined. They gradually transitioned from being exceptional to merely average…

Perceptive piece.

The internet needs rewildingYesterday’s Observer column:

The internet was, as one scholar later described it, “an architecture for permissionless innovation” or, more prosaically, a global machine for springing surprises. The first such surprise was the web. And because it was decided the web would grow better without profit considerations, Berners-Lee released it as a platform that would also enable permissionless innovation.

However, the next generation of innovators to benefit from this freedom – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple et al – saw no reason to extend it to anyone else. They built fabulously profitable enterprises on the platform that Berners-Lee had created. The creative commons of the internet has been gradually and inexorably enclosed, much as agricultural land was by parliamentary acts from 1600 onwards in England.

The result, as Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon put it in a striking essay in Noema magazine, is that our online spaces are no longer open ecosystems. Instead “they’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farms that madden the creatures trapped within”…

Read on

Books, etc.This one of the most remarkable books on my shelves. Francis Spufford is a gifted polymath who can not only write great fiction (see his On Golden Hill) but also really good history of technology (see his Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin — published in 2003). Red Plenty, though is something else: tech history interwoven with imaginative fiction, it’s about a moment in the 1950s when some scientists and officials in the USSR thought that their country would eclipse the US with a non-capitalist model that would bring greater prosperity. (Adam Kotska’s review gives a pretty good idea of the book.)

I read it some time after it came out in 2010, but I’ve been re-reading it because in a strange way it has become salient again. As Kotska puts it,

it’s more interesting to read Red Plenty as a fairy tale about our own age, where we are stuck in an economic system that is clearly no longer delivering on its promises, but attempts to reengineer it are either squandered through half-measures or, more often, simply dismissed out of hand. People more or less live their lives in this system, as they did in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, yet with the melancholy, forcibly retired Khrushchev, we hear a rustling in the wind asking: “can it be otherwise?”

In May 2012, Henry Farrell and his fellow-bloggers on Crooked Timber organised a fascinating seminar on Spufford’s book with essays by (among others) Kim Stanley Robinson, Cozma Shalizi, George Scialabba, Antoaneta Dimitrova, Carl Caldwell, Felix Gilman and Rich Yeselson, plus responses by Francis Spufford.

Last month there was a discussion at the Santa Fe institute on the question of whether advances in computation might make possible the dream (memorably described by Spufford) that Soviet Planners had in the 1950s — of running a command economy without markets. In conjunction with the event, Henry Farrell and Francis Spufford had a fascinating conversation in the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Sante Fe. It’s an hour long, but worth eavesdropping on if you’re interested in this stuff.

My commonplace bookletMusk loses the plot — again

One of the smartest things Tesla did at the beginning was to start building a charging infrastructure — the ‘Supercharger’ network — so that if you bought a Tesla you could charge it on the move. It was, for many of us (me included), the clinching reason for buying a Tesla rather than one of the nicer alternatives. That network was what Warren Buffett would call a ‘moat’, something that protected the company against competitors.

And now, guess what?

After firing its entire Supercharger team, Tesla has sent out an email to suppliers which shows just how chaotic the decisionmaking leading up to the firings must have been.

Earlier this week, Tesla abruptly fired its entire Supercharging team, leading to an immediate pullback in Supercharger installation plans. Now we’ve seen the email that Tesla has sent to suppliers, and it’s not pretty.

“You may be aware that there has been a recent adjustment with the Supercharger organization which is presently undergoing a sudden and thorough restructuring. If you have already received this email, please disregard it as we are attempting to connect with our suppliers and contractors. As part of this process, we are in the midst of establishing new leadership roles, prioritizing projects, and streamlining our payment procedures. Due to the transitional nature of this phase, we are asking for your patience with our response time.

I understand that this period of change may be challenging and that patience is not easy when expecting to be paid, however, I want to express my sincere appreciation for your understanding and support as we navigate through this transition. At this time, please hold on breaking ground on any newly awarded construction projects and planned pre-construction walks. If currently working on an active Supercharging construction site, please continue. Contact (email redacted) for further questions, comments, and concerns. Additionally, hold on working on any new material orders. Contact (email redacted) for further questions, comments, and concerns. If waiting on delayed payment, please contact (email redacted) for a status update. Thank you for your cooperation and patience.”

How not to run a business.

Source

Chart of the Day AI hype has echoes of the telecoms boom and bust

Interesting chart from the FT drawing a parallel between the first Internet boom (1995 – 2000) when Cisco routers were hot property in the same way that Nvidia GPUs are nowadays.

We’re in a bubble. Funny how nobody seems to acknowledge that.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Bumblebee nests are overheating to fatal levels Link

One year recently, bumble bees took over one of the nest boxes in the garden — a box that was bathed in bright sunlight for hours during the day. We were astonished to see stationary bees flapping their wings at the entrance to the box, and then twigged that they were trying to cool the nest.

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Maybe there will be a Summer after allIn a college garden the other day.

Quote of the Day

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”

Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsFranz Schubert | Im Abendrot, D.799 | Anne Sofie von Otter

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Gosh! — this is sooo beautiful!

Long Read of the DayThe Rise of Large-Language-Model Optimization

Typically perceptive blog post by Bruce Schneier on what’s coming to supplant SEO (Search-Engine Optimisation) — LLMO. SEO was/is bad enough. LLMO will be even more damaging.

The arrival of generative-AI tools has introduced a voracious new consumer of writing. Large language models, or LLMs, are trained on massive troves of material—nearly the entire internet in some cases. They digest these data into an immeasurably complex network of probabilities, which enables them to synthesize seemingly new and intelligently created material; to write code, summarize documents, and answer direct questions in ways that can appear human.

These LLMs have begun to disrupt the traditional relationship between writer and reader. Type how to fix broken headlight into a search engine, and it returns a list of links to websites and videos that explain the process. Ask an LLM the same thing and it will just tell you how to do it. Some consumers may see this as an improvement: Why wade through the process of following multiple links to find the answer you seek, when an LLM will neatly summarize the various relevant answers to your query? Tech companies have proposed that these conversational, personalized answers are the future of information-seeking. But this supposed convenience will ultimately come at a huge cost for all of us web users…

It will.

Bruce describes himself as a “public-interest technologist”. We need more like him.

Books, etc.This looks interesting. Tyler Cohen — often a good judge of books — found it “wonderful, one of the best popular science books I’ve read in a long time”. He thought it “a very good introduction to debunking Richard Dawkins-like primacy of the gene stories, rather seeing genes as part of a broader, fairly flexible biological ecosystem”, and also good at “explaining just how much computation goes on in biological systems”.

Now on this autodidact’s reading list.

My commonplace bookletIf you think Marc Andreessen is Silicon Valley’s prime crackpot, then you ain’t seen anything yet. Don’t believe me? Well, try The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco in The New Republic for size.

It’s about Balaji Srinivasan, a flake of Cadbury proportions whom Andreessen has recently endorsed.

“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories.

He proposes to start small — with a tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco’s government.

He envisages

a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”

The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over.

And at least some of the Silicon Valley crowd reportedly regard this fruitcake as a genius. Go figure.

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Present at the CreationScreenshot

This is a pic of the world’s very first Web server — Tim Berners-Lee’s NEXT machine at CERN. Note the handwritten note on the machine.

(Source: Jeremy Reimer on ArsTechnica.)

Quote of the Day

”The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can’t be found.”

Ernest Hemingway

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsScott Joplin | Solace | Phillip Dyson

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Long Read of the DayWe Need To Rewild The Internet

This essay by Maria Farrell and Robin Berton in Noema is the best thing I’ve read in ages. It’s about how diversity was stripped out of the original Internet, and the perils of the resulting monoculture. It starts with the story of how, in the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees, and the ecological disaster that ensued.

The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future…

It’s terrific, and worth your time.

Books, etc.I’m reading Dan Davies’s new book and am blown away by it. In it he examines why markets, institutions and governments systematically generate outcomes that everyone involved claims not to want. From my point of view, the most interesting thing is the way he casts new light on the writings of Stafford Beer, a legendary thinker who argued in the 1950s that we should regard organisations as artificial intelligences, capable of taking decisions that are distinct from the intentions of their members. Since I’m working on a book about corporations as “Slow AIs” (as Charlie Stross calls them) this is right up my street.

Chart of the DayFrom Tortoise Media’s newsletter:

The campus protests have revealed shifts in US opinion on Israel that have been developing for years. A 2023 Gallup poll found net sympathy towards Israel at +46 points among those born between 1946 and 1964; that drops to -2 among those born after 1980. In a 2021 survey of Jewish voters, respondents under 40 were twice as likely to agree that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians as those over 64.

In 2011 the American historian Daniel Rodgers published The Age of Fracture, an astonishingly perceptive book about how American society was changing in during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. His argument, neatly summarised by one reviewer (Doug Rossinow in The Journal of American History), was that

the major intellectual trends of the twentieth century’s last quarter, ranging from the ascendancy of microeconomics and market fundamentalism to the explosion of postmodernism in cultural theory, were of a piece. The weakening of social structures as perceived determinants of human life and the “thinning” of conceptions of society, to use a term favored by Rodgers, crossed inherited political boundaries.

What was so remarkable about the book was the way it tried to pin down subtle shifts that we often perceive only with the benefit of hindsight. My hunch is that we’re now living through another period of major cultural change and the best we can do is to catch glimpses of things that might yield clues to what’s happening.

IMO, the response of US students (and of citizens in a raft of Western democracies like Ireland) to the Hamas atrocity — and the Israeli response to it — is one of those clues. And it has taken the ruling elites of these societies completely by surprise. After the atrocity, the prevailing expectation was that the West would fall into line behind Netanyahu’s policy (even while collectively holding its nose). That has kind-of happened. But it has not resonated with entire generations, as we’re seeing. So maybe this time is different (to coin a phrase). Something’s up.

My commonplace bookletMisha Valdman on the philosopher Derek Parfit:

I met Parfit on several occasions but I got to know him mainly through Larry Temkin – my thesis advisor and Parfit’s former student – who’d regale us with tales of Parfit’s eccentricities and brilliance. Under Parfit’s tutelage, Temkin wrote a dissertation on the nature of inequality. As Temkin tells it, Parfit had him write 50 pages on the topic, which Parfit returned without comment and a request for 50 more. This continued until Temkin had written about 300 pages, at which point Parfit systematically tore it all to shreds. It was the philosophical equivalent of a massacre. A year’s labor lay in ruins. He then told Temkin to begin anew, as he was now prepared to write in earnest.

In 2002 I attended a Festschrift in honor of his 60th birthday. Many of the world’s top ethicists were there. Most of them had worked with Parfit or had been trained by him. In one way or another, they were all his students. I was there for the philosophy but mostly for the spectacle. Parfit was being honored in the only way philosophers know how: by being publicly eviscerated. Speaker after speaker would rise, approach the podium, and launch into a withering critique, trying to do to Parfit what he had done to Temkin two decades prior. Parfit would sit in stony silence and then leap to his feet the second they were finished, well into rebuttal before even reaching the podium, as if he were a gladiator determined to show that none of his opponent’s blows had landed and that not a drop of his blood had been spilled. Occasionally the proceedings would veer into eulogy – it was, after all, a celebration of a lifetime’s worth of achievement – but Parfit would have none of it. “I’m not dead yet,” he’d remind the room. In all it was a riveting performance full of pageantry and drama and what I’m sure was some top shelf philosophy, though nothing comes to mind in particular. In the end the weary scholars shuffled out of the arena but Parfit was as spry as ever. It seemed the only way to beat him was to outlast him or to render him speechless. By that standard, there was no doubt who had won.

He was a truly extraordinary person. I never met him but, late in life, he married a friend and former colleague of mine, Janet Radcliffe Richards. From her I learned that Parfit was also a keen, nay fanatical, photographer. As a New Yorker profile puts it,

There were only about ten things in the world he wanted to photograph,… and they were all buildings: the best buildings in Venice —Palladio’s two churches, the Doge’s Palace, the buildings along the Grand Canal — and the best buildings in St. Petersburg, the Winter Palace and the General Staff Building.

When he came home, he developed his photographs and sorted them. But,

Of a thousand pictures, he might keep three. When he decided that a picture was worth saving, he took it to a professional processor in London and had the processor hand-paint out all aspects of the image that he found distasteful, which meant all evidence of the twentieth century—cars, telegraph wires, signposts—and usually all people. Then he had the colors repeatedly adjusted, although this was enormously expensive, until they were exactly what he wanted—which was a matter of fidelity not to the scene as it was but to an idea in his head.

They don’t make them like that any more.

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Many happy returns

Quote of the Day

”Anxiety is the price we pay for the ability to imagine the future.”

NYU neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsDeep River (Arr. Coleridge-Taylor, Kanneh-Mason) | Sheku Kanneh-Mason

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Long Read of the DayTechnological risks are not the end of the world

Terrific essay by Jack Stilgoe in Science on the obsession with existential risk of AI which — deliberately or inadvertently — sucks the oxygen out of the discourse we should be having about the technology, namely the harms it’s already doing, and the future harm it will do to the environment of the planet.

Worth your time.

Social media’s business model is incompatible with the elimination of online horrorYesterday’s Observer column:

Way back in the mid-1990s, when the web was young and the online world was buzzing with blogs, a worrying problem loomed. If you were an ISP that hosted blogs, and one of them contained material that was illegal ,sor defamatory, you could be held legally responsible and sued into bankruptcy. Fearing that this would dramatically slow the expansion of a vital technology, two US lawmakers, Chris Cox and Ron Wyden, inserted 26 words into the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which eventually became section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of the same year. The words in question were: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” The implications were profound: from now on you bore no liability for content published on your platform.

The result was the exponential increase in user-generated content on the internet. The problem was that some of that content was vile, defamatory or downright horrible. Even if it was, though, the hosting site bore no liability for it…

Read on

The real threat…(In a nutshell)

AI doesn’t have to be sentient to pose a threat — sentient actors are the threat. The 2024 election is going to be the World Cup of online disinformation, as AI supercharges these tactics. Social media bots sound like real people and can engage one-on-one in real time with millions. Deepfake audio and video clips show candidates saying hateful or foolish things. India offers a preview: A skilled AI content creator says hundreds of politicians have asked him for fake material. Some even want badly produced fakes of themselves they can release to discredit any bad press, even legitimate press. China used fake AI content to attempt to sway an election in Taiwan and is using the same tactics in the U.S. Congress is considering legal barriers, but nothing will come of it before the election. The people running the platforms that will deliver these threats to our screens are predictably claiming “it’s too complex” and “this is government’s problem” and “free speech” — all of which is bullshit. However, the liability shield of Section 230 will be enough to keep them unaccountable for another cycle.

Scott Galloway

My commonplace bookletWhy Jonathan Haidt and Andrew Przybylski might BOTH be right about social media and teenagers

From Charles Arthur:

What the research data (such as it is) suggests:

• children who spend low amounts of time online tend to be unhappy. They’re missing out, they’re shut out of online discussion, they’re unable to participate as others do.

• those who spend a moderate time online are connected, participating, happy. Of course the key thing is that they don’t spend all their time online. The big question is what the top and bottom limits of “moderate” are.

• those who spend a large amount of time online are connected, over-participating, unhappy. Whether their unhappiness is due to the amount of time they spend online, or if they spend a lot of time online because they’re unhappy (and in effect seeking people who they can connect with, to make friends).

This means that both Haidt and Przybylski could both be right: using social media does make some children unhappy, and using social media hasn’t got a global association with well-being.

LinkblogSome things I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Hunting for AI metaphors. Nice blog post on one of my pet obsessions. (h/t to Laura James)
Neil Turok on the simplicity of nature. Fascinating and informative interview with one of of the great theoretical physicists of our time.

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Warning!I often think I should put this cautionary pic up as a spoiler alert when writing about stuff that’s above my intellectual pay-grade.

Quote of the Day

”You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.”

Evelyn Waugh

Probably true. The problem is that he was also a gifted satirist.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsKate Rusby | Who Will Sing Me Lullabies

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Long Read of the DayThe Cultural Contradictions of Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is generally thought of as an economic project, but in fact it’s something much more pervasive — a mindset that has infected most institutions in Western societies. Which means that it has also been a cultural project, and we are living with the cultural wreckage brought about by neoliberal policies and ideology. The Roosevelt Institute has produced an interesting 50-page report on the pervasiveness of this mindset, which I guess is a bit of a stretch for busy subscribers. But the Executive Summary usefully lays out the basic arguments of the report.

Long video of the DayA TED talk by Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection and now — I think — working for Microsoft. It has the usual TED bugs/features — including the illusion that wisdom can be compressed into 20 minutes. It’s also imbued with the boosterish tech pretence that machine-learning technology is somehow weightless in environmental and societal terms. But his metaphor — which is basically that we should think of AI as a new ‘digital species’ that has arrived on earth — at least provides a different lens for thinking about this stuff. Hence this recommendation.

My commonplace bookletLegal Fiction

If you want a striking illustration of the degeneration of the UK over the last two decades then this LRB blog post by Nicholas Reed Langen would be hard to beat. It’s written in the aftermath of the passage into law of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill, which has been relentlessly pushed by the Tory Prime Minister to appease his party’s xenophobic base. In passing the legislation, Langen writes, the UK has effectively become a rogue state which violates international treaties to which it is a signatory. It also runs counter to the judgment of the country’s Supreme Court. So much for the rule of law.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From Quanta Magazine…

In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play. Given small wooden balls, the bees pushed them around and rotated them. The behavior had no obvious connection to mating or survival, nor was it rewarded by the scientists. It was, apparently, just for fun.

The study on playful bees is part of a body of research that a group of prominent scholars of animal minds cited today, buttressing a new declaration that extends scientific support for consciousness to a wider suite of animals than has been formally acknowledged before.

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Quai d’OrsayBut not the one on the bank of the Seine. This one found its way to Ely, Cambridgeshire!

“Quai d’Orsay” is often synonymous with the French Foreign Ministry, which occupies a magnificent building there. I remember a veteran Foreign Correspondent (I think it may have been the BBC’s John Simpson) once saying that he “never believed anything was true until it had been denied three times by the Quai d’Orsay.”

Quote of the Day

“I don’t necessarily agree with everything that I say.”

Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJohn Williams | Schindler’s List Theme | Itzhak Perlman

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Long Read of the DayAI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?

Lovely, astute assessment by Molly White, one of my favourite commentators on tech.

As someone known for my criticism of the previous deeply flawed technology to become the subject of the tech world’s overinflated aspirations, I have had people express surprise when I’ve remarked that generative artificial intelligence toolsa can be useful. In fact, I was a little surprised myself.

But there is a yawning gap between “AI tools can be handy for some things” and the kinds of stories AI companies are telling (and the media is uncritically reprinting). And when it comes to the massively harmful ways in which large language models (LLMs) are being developed and trained, the feeble argument that “well, they can sometimes be handy…” doesn’t offer much of a justification.

Some are surprised when they discover I don’t think blockchains are useless, either. Like so many technologies, blockchains are designed to prioritize a few specific characteristics (coordination among parties who don’t trust one another, censorship-resistance, etc.) at the expense of many others (speed, cost, etc.). And as they became trendy, people often used them for purposes where their characteristics weren’t necessary — or were sometimes even unwanted — and so they got all of the flaws with none of the benefits…

Full of good common sense. Worth a read.

Books, etc.We’re reading — and enjoying — this fascinating group biography by Penelope Fitzgerald (neé Knox) of her four uncles, who were all (to put it mildly) er, distinctive. I had read and loved Evelyn Waugh’s biography of one of them — Ronald — but the others were a mystery to me. No longer.

My commonplace bookletEvery year on his birthday Kevin Kelly offers bits of homespun advice, and last year he collected them into a book — Excellent Advice For Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. He’s just coming up to his 73rd birthday, and so he’s issued 101 more. Here are a few that struck me.

You owe everyone a second chance, but not a third.
Admitting that “I don’t know” at least once a day will make you a better person
Whenever you hug someone, be the last to let go
Read a lot of history so you can understand how weird the past was; that way you will be comfortable with how weird the future will be
Most arguments are not really about the argument, so most arguments can’t be won by arguing
There should be at least one thing in your life you enjoy despite being no good at it. This is your play time, which will keep you young. Never apologize for it.
Changing your mind about important things is not a consequence of stupidity, but a sign of intelligence.
You have 5 minutes to act on a new idea before it disappears from your mind.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Back to the Future A new Huawei smartphone has a pop-out camera lens, just like ye olde point-and-shoot cameras — Ars Technica

Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier

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LakelandGlenteentassig Lake on the Dingle peninsula. One of Ireland’s loveliest hidden lakes.

Quote of the Day

“One of my best decisions was being born before the Internet and smartphones.”

Robert Shrimsley

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBerlioz | Symphonie Fantastique | 5th movement

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I can never decide which is the more dramatic — the music or the acrobatics of the conductor (Leonard Bernstein)!

Long Read of the DayRemembering Daniel Dennett

A remarkable and provocative thinker has passed away. Gary Marcus sums him up neatly as the man who “arrived at what many would see as shocking conclusions about consciousness (essentially that it is just an emergent effect of physical interactions of tiny inanimate components)”, and who from then on,

was a dead-set opponent of dualism (the idea that there is an ethereal nonphysical elixir called “consciousness”, over and above the physical events taking place in the enormously complex substrate of a human or animal brain, and perhaps that of a silicon network as well). Dan thus totally rejected the notion of “qualia” (pure sensations of such things as colors, tastes, and so forth), and his arguments against the mystique of qualia were subtle but very cogent.

Marcus has passed on a lovely memoir of Dennett written by his friend Douglas Hofstadter:

Dan was also a diligent and lifelong “student” (in the sense of “studier”) of evolution, religion, artificial intelligence, computers in general, and even science in general. He wrote extremely important and influential books on all these topics, and his insights will endure as long as we humans endure. I’m thinking of his books Brainstorms; The Intentional Stance; Elbow Room; Consciousness Explained; Darwin’s Dangerous Idea; Kinds of Minds; Inside Jokes; Breaking the Spell; From Bacteria to Bach and Back and of course his last book, I’ve Been Thinking, which was (and is) a very colorful self-portrait, a lovely autobiography vividly telling so many stories of his intercontinental life. I’m so happy that Dan not only completed it but was able to savor its warm reception all around the world.

Among other things, that book tells about Dan’s extremely rich life not just as a thinker but also as a doer. Dan was a true bon vivant, and he developed many amazing skills, such as that of house-builder, folk-dancer and folk-dance caller, jazz pianist, cider-maker, sailor and racer of yachts (not the big ones owned by Russian oligarchs, but beautifully crafted sailboats), joke-teller par excellence, enthusiast for and expert in word games, savorer of many cuisines and wines, wood-carver and sculptor, speaker of French and some German and Italian as well, and ardent and eloquent supporter of thinkers whom he admired and felt were not treated with sufficient respect by the academic world.

Worth reading in full. I’ve Been Thinking is such a lovely title for a philosopher’s autobiography.

The big tech firms want an AI monopoly – but maybe the UK CMA can bring them to heelYesterday’s Observer column:

“Monopoly,” said Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s answer to Darth Vader, “is the condition of every successful business.” This aspiration is widely shared by Gamman, the new acronynm for the Valley’s giants – Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Nvidia. And the arrival of AI has sharpened the appetite of each for attaining that blessed state before the others get there.

One symptom of their anxiety is the way they have been throwing unconscionable amounts of money at the 70-odd generative AI startups that have mushroomed since it became clear that AI was going to be the new new thing. Microsoft reportedly put $13bn (about £10.4bn) into OpenAI, for example, but it was also the lead investor in a $1.3bn funding round for Inflection, Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman’s startup. Amazon put $4bn into Anthropic, the startup founded by refugees from OpenAI. Google invested $500m in the same outfit, with a promise of $1.5bn more, and unspecified sums in A121 Labs and Hugging Face. (Yeah, I know the names make no sense.) Microsoft has also invested in Mistral, the French AI startup. And so on. In 2023, of the $27bn that was invested in AI startups, only $9bn came from venture capitalist firms – which until recently had been by far the biggest funders of new tech enterprises in Silicon Valley.

What’s going on here?

Read on to find out.

My commonplace bookletTwo cheers for Immanuel Kant

The political philosopher Lea Ypi had a nice essay on Kant in the FT on Saturday. I was struck by this passage:

To be free, in a Kantian sense, is to be able to take a critical distance from your passions and inclinations, and to ask yourself if they contribute to “enlightened” thinking: the exit, as Kant puts it, from “humanity’s self-incurred own immaturity”. The process of enlightenment rests on three maxims: to think for oneself, to think putting oneself in the place of everyone else, and to always think consistently. Such maxims, he believed, could be advanced through “the public use of reason”, a modus operandi that is fundamentally different from the “private” use people make of it in their professions (say as students, teachers, doctors, politicians, lawyers or asset managers). While the latter is premised on the acceptance of authority, the former requires pluralistic, impartial and critical engagement.

It is difficult to relate to Kant’s aspirations in an age like ours where public-spiritedness is constantly threatened by the clash between private interests. Our mode of communication is wider and more inclusive than in the 18th century (for example, political participation is formally no longer limited to property-holders) but it is also shallower, more certain of itself and less critical. Dissent manifests itself more in clamorous acts of individual self-expression (preferably recorded on a mobile phone) and less in collective critical engagement.

Like us, Kant lived in an age of crisis marked by great advances in science and technology but a collapse in values. Yet he carved out a role for reason as a universal communicative capacity that tries to steer a middle path between scepticism and dogmatism: between having faith in nothing and blindly following trends. That conception of reason seems harder to revive in our societies, strangled as they are between destructive interests and the individualisation of political commitment.

Yep.

LinkblogWhat is it about fancy wristwatches?

As a (cynical) reader of publications which target people with more money than sense, I am continually intrigued by the advertisements for expensive men’s wristwatches, and in particular by the way so many of them make a song-and-dance about the water depth that they can allegedly withstand. I’m looking at one which is even badged as “Fifty Fathoms” to indicate that it will still tell the time 300 feet below the ocean surface. But here’s the strange thing: I’ve never seen a man wearing one of these watches who has been closer to ocean depths than you get in an infinity pool on the French Riviera. So, basically, these things are just male jewellery. Pathetic, really.

One cheery thought, though. Apparently, it’s not a good idea to flaunt your flashy status-symbol in some parts of London nowadays. At any rate the FT reports that “the Metropolitan Police is grappling with a spate of muggings that has sent jitters as far as Delhi and Geneva.”

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Gateway to ‘Global Britain’Heathrow Airport Terminal 2, on a quiet Saturday afternoon.

Quote of the Day

”He who hesitates is poor.”

Mel Brooks

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMark Knopfler | Two Pairs Of Hands

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Long Read of the DayWhy trade unions matter

Interesting and perceptive Long Read by Neil Bierbaum.

During performance related workshops, the question comes up about expectations; what to do about bosses and colleagues who send out emails late at night, expecting an immediate answer—or latest by the next morning? And what to do about the need to prove that you’re on top of things by meeting that expectation? I call it the “cult of busyness”, and point to “wearing busyness as a badge of honour”. What are we to do about that, comes the question.

What I notice is that everybody is looking for an individual answer, a personal solution, as though it’s their problem to resolve. I always ask myself; can nobody see the naked emperor? It’s all very well doing all you can to manage yourself, but what if the system doesn’t leave you alone? I try to steer people towards the idea that it’s a systemic problem and needs a systemic solution, but mostly I get met with blank stares. (I hope by writing it down here and showing some graphs, it will land with more impact.)

The short answer I would offer is that the epidemic of busyness and the dearth of work-life balance is driven systemically by what I call the “primacy of shareholder value”. In other words, placing profit over people. Despite all the talk of the “triple bottom line” (profit, people, planet), it seldom happens in practice. The systemic solution is to make people matter at least as much as profit. To achieve that, we need our leaders, those high priests of profit, to do more than just pay lip service to the “triple bottom line”. To get there, we ourselves need to stop worshipping at the altar of efficiency for the sake of shareholders. We need to start walking and working among the time poor (as much as I dislike that term, I shall use it here for its poetic ease).

This is an interesting and sharp essay (and I’m not saying that because at one point Bierbaum quotes me). One of the axioms of the neoliberalism that took hold of Western governing elites in the 1970s was that corporations needed to reduce operating costs sharply, which meant in practice reducing labour costs, which in turn meant curbing union power. And both Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK took this to heart. One of the first things Reagan did after taking office, remember, was to sack 11,359 unionised air-traffic controllers workers overnight on August 5, 1981. And over in the UK Thatcher introduced legislation curbing trade-union power (by outlawing secondary picketing, for example) and, later, by taking on — and defeating — the National Union of Mineworkers.

And then came the tech industry, to which the very idea of unionisation was anathema, resulting in the growth of gigantic firms which were effectively neoliberal wet dreams in which the idea of a counterveiling power to managerial fiat was ridiculed as a quaint throwback to the era of Fordist mass production.

In that context, one of the most interesting findings to emerge from Acemoglu’s and Johnson’s magisterial survey of society’s thousand-year experience with technology is that the only periods in which technology-generated wealth was more equitably shared with the non-owners of capital coincided with the growth of counterveiling powers like unions together with societal mobilisation against overweening corporate power.

Chart of the daySource: Tortoise Media, which commented that:

Despite the attack’s apparent failure, Tehran gathered useful information about Israel’s defences and forced Israel and the US to spend more than $1 billion in one night to counter an attack that cost around one tenth of that to launch.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From The Economist, 26/03/2024

“China’s government spends $6.6bn a year censoring online content, estimates the Jamestown Foundation, a think-tank in America. In one two-month period last year the authorities claim to have deleted 1.4m social-media posts and 67,000 accounts (ironically, they branded many of the posts “misinformation”). More recently officials launched an investigation into short-video platforms that were spreading “pessimism” among young people, many of whom are struggling to find jobs.”

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Manuel Castells, the first great scholar of cyberspace

Quote of the Day

“If you’re too open-minded; your brains will fall out.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMark Knopfler’s Guitar Heroes | Going Home (Theme From Local Hero)

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There’s an interesting story behind this.

Mark Knopfler’s new special recording of his anthemic ‘Going Home (Theme From Local Hero)’, produced by his longtime collaborator Guy Fletcher (who has edited the contributions into a 9 minute piece), features an unprecedented line-up of some of the greatest guitarists in history. ‘Legendary’ does not begin to cover it – David Gilmour to Ronnie Wood, Slash to Eric Clapton, Sting to Joan Armatrading, Bruce Springsteen to Pete Townshend, Nile Rodgers to Joan Jett, Brian May to Tony Iommi, Joe Walsh, Sam Fender and many more jaw dropping names.

And, in a great honour, the track opens with Jeff Beck’s final recording. Roger Daltrey, Teenage Cancer Trust’s Honorary Patron and co-founder of Teen Cancer America (with Pete Townshend), added harmonica, and Beatles icon Ringo Starr is on drums along with his son Zak Starkey, their two drum tracks switching from one to the other, revealing an unmistakable family style. Sting completes an extraordinary rhythm section on bass. With artwork designed by Sir Peter Blake (The Beatles, The Who, Band Aid, Paul Weller etc), this release is a landmark in rock music history.

Long Read of the Day From Bauhaus to Buchenwald .. to mid-century cool

Extraordinary essay by Adam Tooze about the famous design school, its historical legacy and the enigmatic career of one of its students, Franz Ehrlich.

As a canonical lieu de mémoire for global modernism, Bauhaus, truly came into its own with a retrospective exhibition hosted in Stuttgart, one of the industrial centers of postwar West Germany, in 1968. According to art historian Iris Dressler, the show with the programmatic title – 50 years of Bauhaus – was a sensational success, traveling to eight museums—in Europe, the United States, Canada, South America and Asia – and attracting more than 800,000 visitors in total. From 1974, a reduced version of the show put together by Germany’s Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Institute for Foreign Relations) toured the globe for a further eight years. The stakes were high:

The title, 50 years of the Bauhaus, already ascribes an unbroken continuity to the school—which, as is well known, existed for only 14 years, and in his opening speech the German Federal Minister for Building and Urbanism, Dr. Lauritz Lauritzen, claimed: “The Bauhaus … has significantly contributed to the cultural philosophy of a state designed (to be) democratic and of a democratic society. It is unthinkable without the democratic constitution of the Weimar Republic,” which, as he went on to explain, failed not for political reasons but due to the lack in Germany of an authentically liberal, open society. “The Bauhaus was of global vibrancy. … Without any national hubris one can say that it is a German contribution to culture and civilization in this world of the twentieth century, a contribution to the humanization of the technical century.” He then added: “The men of the Bauhaus who left Germany kept the spirit of German humanism alive in their exiles.”

As Dressler remarks, the exhibition said nothing about the activities of the Bauhaus students who were not forced to leave Germany. Indeed, the entire exhibition was a complex exercise in self-fashioning…

Thanks to Robert Amundsen for alerting me to it.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Extraordinary video of Emperor Penguin chicks having to make a momentous decision.

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Waiting for HockneyThe queue for his 2012 Exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Quote of the Day

“Genius creates, and taste preserves”

Alexander Pope

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsVan Morrison | This Loving Light Of Mine

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Bruch Springsteen did a footstomping version version in Dublin.

Long Read of the DayThe Mythical people-life

This is a wonderful riff by Timothy Burke on an idea first articulated by Fred Brooks in his Meisterwerk, The Mythical Man Month, a much-thumbed copy of which sits on my bookshelves as I write.

It took a long time for me to see the pattern that is now in hindsight clear to almost everybody my age, and to younger generations as well. As the advantages gained by the early adopters became clear, more people pushed voluntarily into those spaces. And then as the productivity increases jolted down the line, everybody else was pushed involuntarily. The advantage suddenly vanished. The noise was up, the signal was down. Everything was suddenly being done in email, and suddenly the speed of email dramatically increased the amount of information and communication you were expected to produce and conduct. You were suddenly answering questions from all over all day long. We were all working more and it stopped being magic.

If you’re as old as I am, you’ve now seen this cycle repeated multiple times. We are all in some sense the extra workers being added to a long-delayed project with the expectation that we will make it go faster and instead it gets slower and slower all the time. We are all bugs on the windshield in the race to get to full frictionless efficiency, splattering over and over again as that fictional, inhuman El Dorado shimmers in the distance, calling to those who dream of a world where they no longer have to hire human beings at all but who in the meantime are happy to make the people they pay do more and more work while pretending that in fact they are making it easier for us all.

In academia, this drive to nowhere takes on familiar shapes across campuses. We imitate one another, which provides a ready answer any time you ask “Why are we adopting this new system, this new process?” Answer: because it has become an industry-wide standard! Why did the first adopters do it, then? As well ask which came first, the chicken or the egg…

It’s long, but interesting, thoughtful and insightful throughout. Burke has been around long enough (as have I) to see how digital technology seeps into, and then pervades, an organisation. And, as he says,

In practice what happens is that the job formerly done by a person gets divided in a thousand tiny jobs and distributed to the entire workforce. In this act, it does not magically become less work. The sum remains the same. The hope is just that each person will be able to add it to their workflow and barely notice because it is just that one…tiny…wafer. The problem is that we are all the character from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, being fed a mountain of tiny wafers until we are engorged to the breaking point.

When became a university lecturer way back in 1972 in the Open University, I was assigned a secretary, Viv, and she did much of the typing of draft course units. Sometimes, this led to charming errors. Once, in a text on economic modelling, for example, my scribbled reference to “exogenous” variables emerged as erogenous, to the great amusement of some of my colleagues.

And now? We’re all typists, and secretaries have become ‘Executive Assistants’ who are assigned only to senior executives.

From boom to bust, the AI bubble is only heading in one directionYesterday’s Observer column:

Are we really in an AI bubble,” asked a reader of last month’s column about the apparently unstoppable rise of Nvidia, “and how would we know?” Good question, so I asked an AI about it and was pointed to Investopedia, which is written by humans who know about this stuff. It told me that a bubble goes through five stages – rather as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said people do with grief. For investment bubbles, the five stages are displacement, boom, euphoria, profit-taking and panic. So let’s see how this maps on to our experience so far with AI.

First, displacement. That’s easy: it was ChatGPT wot dunnit. When it appeared on 30 November 2022, the world went, well, apeshit…

Read on

My commonplace bookletThink Slow

Lovely blog post by Scott Galloway on Daniel Kahneman who passed away the other day. I was pondering writing something about him, but Scott has done it much better than I could have.

Kahneman studied how humans make decisions, and the shortcuts our minds take, unbeknownst to us. These shortcuts are efficient; they foster a key skill for survival, the ability to make rapid decisions with incomplete information. We have to make thousands of decisions every day, and we couldn’t leave the house if we had to objectively analyze every choice: breakfast, outfit, route, music, etc.

Our efficiency comes at the cost of accuracy: Many instinctual decisions will be poorly calibrated (i.e., wrong). To facilitate the requisite speed, our brain buttresses our decisions with artificial confidence. Kahneman’s body of work demonstrates that we are often wrong but frequently confident. These shortcuts and mistakes are present in the structure of our brains, and impossible to avoid, but recognizing them helps us discern between trivial and important decisions and invest the appropriate intellectual capital. Put another way, take a beat and you increase the likelihood of making a better decision.

Though he was a psychologist by training, Kahneman got his Nobel Prize for economics. Before him, economists “relied on the assumption of a ‘homo œconomicus,’” as the prize committee wrote, a self-interested being capable of rational decision-making. But Kahneman “demonstrated how human decisions may systematically depart from those predicted by standard economic theory.” That dry language obscures an intellectual nuclear detonation. Expectations about human decisions — whether to work at a certain job, how much to pay for a specific good — are the foundation of economic theory. Kahneman showed those expectations were incorrect…

Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition

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The Public HouseThe OED says that “pub” is an abbreviation of ‘Public House’ or inn. This legendary institution has been around since 1754, so it was likely to have been called a ‘public house’ for quite a while. (The dictionary dates the abbreviation only from the mid-19th century.)

Quote of the Day

“Democracy has at least one merit, namely that a Member of Parliament cannot be stupider than his constituents, for the more stupid he is, the more stupid they were to elect him.”

Bertrand Russell

I kept thinking about this quote as the ‘Honeytrap’ scandal unfolded in Westminster.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsKeith Richards | I’m Waiting For The Man (Lou Reed Cover)

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Wonderful!

Long Read of the DayThe Apocalyptic Systems Thriller as a non-fiction genre

Henry Farrell is one of the most perceptive observers of the times we’re living in. This essay is just the latest in a thoughtstream of distinctive commentary. It was sparked, he says, by a piece in the New York Times by the novelist Hari Kunzru on a fictional genre he (Kunzru) calls the “apocalyptic systems thriller” (think Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for The Future (which I highly recommend, btw).

“Just as Kunzru describes the influence of non-fiction on a new genre of fiction”, Henry writes,

that genre is re-shaping non-fiction, and should, in my opinion, be shaping it a lot more. We live in an enormously, terrifyingly complex world. We need new narrative techniques to make sense of it, and even more importantly to begin to articulate ways in which human beings can collectively respond to it. Furthermore, non-fiction writers ought steal liberally from fiction writers, just as fiction writers have stolen from the futurists and scenario planners that Kunzru describes. Rather than emphasizing the one-way passage from non-fiction to fiction, we should think of fiction and non-fiction as intertwined like twin helices, generating and regenerating new possibilities. The great advantage of thinking this way (at least from my selfish point of view) is that it focuses our attention on how to improve narrative technique in non-fiction too…

Do read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

Julian AssangeGood piece by Rupa Subramanya in The Free Press.

Some argue Assange is an anarchist, trying to undermine our nation. Others say he is a heroic activist, fighting for a transparent democracy.

But the truth, actually, lies somewhere in the middle: yes, Assange is a deeply flawed character, and he also does not deserve to spend the rest of his life behind bars. Today, President Biden said he is considering a plea from Assange’s homeland of Australia to drop the case, which is a welcome development. Because if the hacker is convicted, it’s not only journalism that will be weaker—it’s democracy itself.

Democracy depends on whistleblowers. We need people like Chelsea Manning. Or Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency employee who leaked documents in 2013 that revealed a disturbing level of government surveillance. Or Thomas Drake, a high-ranking NSA official who blew the whistle on 9/11 intelligence failures. Or Jamie Reed, a case manager at a gender clinic for children, who revealed in these pages that doctors there too hastily prescribed hormones to young adults with mental health issues.

If politicians truly respect the First Amendment, they must defend the freedom of whistleblowers and investigative journalists to deliver the truth to the public—however ugly it may be…

Yep.

My commonplace bookletOn the naming of plants

A fragment from a nice essay in the New Yorker by Yiyun Li:

“Lotus” comes from the Greek lōtos, a mythical plant bringing forgetfulness to those who eat its fruits. (I have eaten my share of lotus seeds, a delicacy in Chinese cuisine, without achieving oblivion.) “Fuchsia,” a word I often misspelled as “fuschia”—what mythical story accompanies thee? It turns out that fuchsia was named for the sixteenth-century German physician and botanist Leonhard Fuchs, whose name gave birth not only to that of the flower and that of the color but also to the nickname, Fuchsienstadt, for his home town of Wemding, where there is a pyramid made of as many as seven hundred fuchsia plants. And yet Fuchs never saw the flower fuchsia in his lifetime: it was discovered in the Caribbean and named by the French botanist and monk Charles Plumier, who was born a hundred and forty-five years after Fuchs. What led Plumier to name the flower for Fuchs? One can ask the question, but any speculation would be closer to fiction, just as peony was once the physician of the gods and lotus would bring forgetfulness.

I love fuchsia, largely I guess because I spent part of my childhood in Kerry, where it grows in fabulous abundance — so much so that you can drive on small rural roads where the hedges on either side seems to be entirely made up of fuchsia. And, like Li, it took me years to realise that it’s not spelled ‘fuschia’!

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The listening postDishes in Cambridge’s Lord’s Bridge radio telescope system: listening to the universe.

Quote of the Day

“He would have been considered a great Emperor, had he never ruled.”

Roman historian Tacitus on the Emperor Galba

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsVan Morrison | Green Rocky Road

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Long Read of the DayThe State of the Culture, 2024

Or a glimpse into post-entertainment society. (Spoiler alert: it’s not pretty)

Intriguing essay by Ted Gioia.

Here’s how it opens:

Until recently, the entertainment industry has been on a growth tear—so much so, that anything artsy or indie or alternative got squeezed as collateral damage.

But even this disturbing picture isn’t disturbing enough. That’s because it misses the single biggest change happening right now.

We’re witnessing the birth of a post-entertainment culture. And it won’t help the arts. In fact, it won’t help society at all.

Even that big whale is in trouble. Entertainment companies are struggling in ways nobody anticipated just a few years ago…

Read on. It’s good, particularly on how the Tec industry views ‘entertainment’, and where we’re headed.

Andrew Curry also had a nice commentary on it on his Substack.

Books, etc.Sometimes, serendipity works. I’ve been brooding for ages about whether cybernetics and complexity science would be helpful in understanding the mess we’re in — which led to me re-reading Stafford Beer and other systems theorists. And then, out of nowhere, two interesting books pop up. This is the first one: Doyne Farmer is Professor of Complex Systems Science in Oxford but he’s also attached to the Santa Fe Institute. The book is out on April 25. The other book is The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How The World Lost its Mind by Dan Davies, who has also been thinking about Stafford Beer and cybernetics. So an interesting few weeks lie ahead.

My commonplace bookletFrom Seth Godin’s newsletter, which is a fount of pithy common sense:

Have you ever wondered what the wiring layout behind the control panels at Abbey Road studios was like?

Neither have I.

The Beatles recorded some of their best work there, and I have no idea if it was a rat’s nest of tangled wires, or if each wire was labeled, coded and perfectly aligned.

Just as I have no idea if Eliot Peper writes his novels in Scrivener or Word.

Yes, of course, for sure, it helps if your tools are properly arranged and maintained. Yes, it saves time and effort to embrace mise en place and get your workspace right.

But making it even more right, alphabetizing the pencils and making sure your servers all have the right names–that’s simply stalling.

Yep. One of my favourite adages when talking to students and others about their projects is that “the perfect is the enemy of the good”..

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

*From Cambridge Econometrics

The costs of long COVID – estimated for the UK

While Long Covid remains inadequately understood, the evidence is clear on the adverse effects on people’s lives. The most recent ONS estimates from early March 2023 suggested that there were almost 2m people living with Long Covid in the UK, representing some 3% of the UK population. While diverse in its symptoms, around 80% of people reported Long Covid as affecting their ability to carry out day-today activities in at least some way. For those more severely affected, people have reported being unable to live alone without assistance and either a reduced ability to work or having to leave work altogether. The financial implications for individuals and families may be substantial.

Early hopes that Long Covid might prove to be short-lived have not been realised and at this point, Long Covid should be considered a long-term condition that requires investment in long-term solutions. UK government commitments to addressing Long Covid remain uncertain, with current funding in England of clinics for assessment and rehabilitation only recently extended to March 2025, with no commitment to longer-term support.

With Long Covid now established in the population and clearly affecting health and livelihoods, there are questions about what Long Covid means in the longer term for the UK economy. This report takes the available evidence to examine future scenarios of Long Covid to 2030, considering trends such as future prevalence, effects on the ability to work and the costs of Long Covid treatment.

Using our E3ME macroeconomic model to simulate a Long Covid future, the results suggest that Long Covid may have macroeconomic costs of some £1.5bn of GDP each year, with the impacts increasing if future prevalence were to rise. The main driver of this result is the way in which Long Covid reduces people’s ability to work, leading to lower household incomes and lower economic growth overall. Lower employment of around 138,000 by 2030 follows as a consequence. The pattern of these impacts across the economy reflects a mix of sectors in which more people have Long Covid, leading to reductions in and exits from work; and lower economic activity, which tends to affect market services in an economy such as the UK.

Two million people! 3% of the population. Why aren’t we hearing more about this?

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Light, shade and all that rot

Quote of the Day

”Musk’s management philosophy for Twitter hasn’t so much been a random walk as a grasshopper lepping around on a hotplate.”

Henry Farrell

(Nice, especially Henry’s use of the derisive Irish term for ‘leaping’).

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsHandel | Semele HWV 58 / Act II | Where’er you walk | Bryn Terfel

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I love this aria, and have even been tempted to sing it in the shower, even if the lyrics are premier-grade tosh.

Long Read of the DayDeath is a Feature

Striking blog post by Doc Searls (Whom God Preserve).

Here’s how it opens:

Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars.

This is a very human thing to want. But before we start following his lead, we might want to ask whether death awaits us there.

Not our deaths. Anything’s. What died there to make life possible for what succeeds it?

From what we can tell so far, the answer is nothing.

To explain why life needs death, answer this: what do plastic, wood, limestone, paint, travertine, marble, asphalt, oil, coal, stalactites, peat, stalagmites, cotton, wool, chert, cement, nearly all food, all gas, and most electric services have in common?

They are all products of death. They are remains of living things or made from them…

Brilliant.

How one engineer’s curiosity may have saved us from a devastating cyber-attackYesterday’s Observer column

On Good Friday, a Microsoft engineer named Andres Freund noticed something peculiar. He was using a software tool called SSH for securely logging into remote computers on the internet, but the interactions with the distant machines were significantly slower than usual. So he did some digging and found malicious code embedded in a software package called XZ Utils that was running on his machine. This is a critical utility for compressing (and decompressing) data running on the Linux operating system, the OS that powers the vast majority of publicly accessible internet servers across the world. Which means that every such machine is running XZ Utils.

Freund’s digging revealed that the malicious code had arrived in his machine via two recent updates to XZ Utils, and he alerted the Open Source Security list to reveal that those updates were the result of someone intentionally planting a backdoor in the compression software. It was what is called a “supply-chain attack” (like the catastrophic SolarWinds one of 2020) – where malicious software is not directly injected into targeted machines, but distributed by infecting the regular software updates to which all computer users are wearily accustomed. If you want to get malware out there, infecting the supply chain is the smart way to do it…

Read on

Books, etc.On reading ‘A Room of One’s Own’

Andrew Curry has been reading Virginia Woolf’s little masterpiece. He hadn’t read it before, and so was coming to it fresh. And he plans three blog posts about it, of which this is #1.

When she gave the pair of lectures to Cambridge undergraduates, her reputation as a leading modernist novelist was secure. She was in her 40s, and had already published Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse. But the persona that Virginia Woolf adopts for the pair of lectures, to women undergraduates in Cambridge, is of the poorly educated woman who is struggling to understand the things that male authority figures are saying about women in general, and about women writers in particular.

For example, in an early sequence in the British Library she ploughs through a large pile of books written by men about women, while also noting that there are far fewer books the other way around:

How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper? I asked myself, and in despair began running my eye up and down the long list of titles. Even the names of the books gave me food for thought. Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.

It’s one of my favourite books, so I’m looking forward to seeing what Andrew makes of it.

My commonplace bookletI discovered these on the faded back of an old postcard that had been pinned to the notice board of an office I used to have.

Techniques of argument

Avoiding giving evidence
Using carefully selected evidence
Over-extending your opponent’s argument
Appealing to ‘authority’, epistemic or otherwise
Appearing to be clever
Sarcasm, innuendo, etc.
Appealing to people’s prejudice
Asking rhetorical questions
Appealing to your opponent’s vanity

In my time I have been guilty of #2,3,6 and 8. I tried #5, but it didn’t work (because I’m not).

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Anyone for truffles?Provence (where else?)

Quote of the Day

”A toy car is a projection of a real car, made small enough for a child’s hand and imagination to grasp. A real car is a projection of a toy car, made large enough for an adult’s hand and imagination to grasp.”

Michael Frayn

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsGeorge Lewis | Burgundy Street Blues | Acker Bilk & his Band (1965)

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Long Read of the Day Angus Deaton: Rethinking My Economics

This is one of the most encouraging things I’ve read this week — a great economist thinking out loud about how he’s been wrong . I wish more people in public life could do this.

Economics has achieved much; there are large bodies of often nonobvious theoretical understandings and of careful and sometimes compelling empirical evidence. The profession knows and understands many things. Yet today we are in some disarray. We did not collectively predict the financial crisis and, worse still, we may have contributed to it through an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets, especially financial markets whose structure and implications we understood less well than we thought. Recent macroeconomic events, admittedly unusual, have seen quarrelling experts whose main point of agreement is the incorrectness of others. Economics Nobel Prize winners have been known to denounce each other’s work at the ceremonies in Stockholm, much to the consternation of those laureates in the sciences who believe that prizes are given for getting things right.

Like many others, I have recently found myself changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practicing economist for more than half a century. I will come to some of the substantive topics, but I start with some general failings. I do not include the corruption allegations that have become common in some debates. Even so, economists, who have prospered mightily over the past half century, might fairly be accused of having a vested interest in capitalism as it currently operates. I should also say that I am writing about a (perhaps nebulous) mainstream, and that there are many nonmainstream economists.

He thinks economics as a discipline had been wrong in:

ignoring the role of power in economic (and real) life.
stopping thinking about philosophy and ethics — and especially equating well-being with money or consumption, missing much of what matters to people.
being obsessed with efficiency. (The engineers who run tech companies have the same destructive obsession.)
having an obsession with empirical methods that focus attention on local effects, and away from potentially important but slow-acting mechanisms that operate with long and variable lags.
Lacking humility in the face of the complexity of the real world.

Books, etc.The Miseducation of Kara Swisher

Nice demolition job by Edward Ongweso Jr. on the noted tech columnist’s apologia for an over-credulous life.

Though she’d been covering the industry for decades in the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, Swisher could not understand how our enlightened stewards of innovation would capitulate so quickly to an authoritarian-in-waiting. “Welcome to the brave new world,” she concluded. “Yeah, you can say it: Fuckfuckfuck.”

This apparent about-face of Silicon Valley prompted Swisher to undertake some agonized soul-searching, the results of which have been published as Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, a tortured and tortuous memoir that, in remixing swaths of past reporting and commentary, as well as regurgitating tales she’s told ad nauseam, tries to answer two burning questions: How did Silicon Valley end up in that room with Trump? And, more importantly, how did a tech journalist as good and uncompromising as Kara Swisher fail to anticipate this turn to the dark side?

The long and short of it is that Swisher is not a good journalist — or, framed more generously, that she thrived in an industry with remarkably low standards for which we are still paying the price. For decades, tech journalism and criticism has primarily consisted of glowing gadget reviews, laudatory profiles, and reprinted press releases, all of it colored by Silicon Valley’s self-aggrandizing vision of itself as a laboratory of a brighter future.

This is largely identical to what Swisher admits to having believed up until 2016.

Yep.

My commonplace bookletHow to interview a tech man-child

An object lesson from Don Lemon in how to do it properly as he politely exposes the slippery, callow gaucheness of the world’s richest man.

LinkblogSomething I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Neo-Utilitarians Are Utter Philistines Enjoyable rant by Justin Smith-Ruiu.

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Tilly RIP We had to bid farewell to our beloved cat Tilly last night. She was 19.5 years old, so you could say she had a good innings. But she had been a lifelong companion for two of my children … Continue reading →

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CatsGuardians of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

Amos Tversky in The Undoing Project

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMary Black | Sonny

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Something lovely I found while investigating a suggestion by Andrew Brown (Whom God Preserve)

Long Read of the DayHow Big Tech Got So Damn Big

A characteristically vivid essay in Wired by Cory Doctorow based on his new book.

Somehow, these new giants—the companies that have, in the words of New Zealand software developer Tom Eastman, transformed the internet into “a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four”—interrupted that cycle of “disruption.” They didn’t just get big, they stayed big, and then they got bigger.

How did these tech companies succeed in maintaining the dominance that so many of their predecessors failed to attain? Was it their vision? Was it their leadership?

Nope.

Do read it.

Nvidia’s picks and shovelsYesterday’s Observer column…

It’s not often that the jaws of Wall Street analysts drop to the floor but late last month it happened: Nvidia, a company that makes computer chips, issued sales figures that blew the street’s collective mind. It had pulled in $13.5bn in revenue in the last quarter, which was at least $2bn more than the aforementioned financial geniuses had predicted. Suddenly, the surge in the company’s share price in May that had turned it into a trillion-dollar company made sense.

Well, up to a point, anyway. But how had a company that since 1998 – when it released the revolutionary Riva TNT video and graphics accelerator chip – had been the lodestone of gamers become worth a trillion dollars, almost overnight? The answer, oddly enough, can be found in the folk wisdom that emerged in the California gold rush of the mid-19th century, when it became clear that while few prospectors made fortunes panning for gold, the suppliers who sold them picks and shovels prospered nicely.

We’re now in another gold rush – this time centred on artificial intelligence (AI) – and Nvidia’s A100 and H100 graphical processing units (GPUs) are the picks and shovels…

Read on

Books, etc.I’m reading it, all 370 pages of it, so you don’t have to. My review will be in next Sunday’s Observer.

My commonplace bookletThe Rolling Stones’s new album

From Tortoise media…

Believe it or not kids, the Stones, all now in their ninth decade, were once very good. Brilliant in fact. They mattered. Exile on Main Street, released in 1972 completed a decade of dazzling work that actually gave The Beatles (not to mention The Kinks and The Who) a run for their money. And their legendary 1969-1972 tours justly earned them the title of The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World, a crown they still, unjustly, claim today.

Now the once genuinely edgy Stones are a mini-corporation with an admittedly brilliant singer/executive chairman anxious for new product: ticket sales and of course merch for their very own outlet in Carnaby Street….

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Today’s Observer column…

It’s not often that the jaws of Wall Street analysts drop to the floor but late last month it happened: Nvidia, a company that makes computer chips, issued sales figures that blew the street’s collective mind. It had pulled in $13.5bn in revenue in the last quarter, which was at least $2bn more than the aforementioned financial geniuses had predicted. Suddenly, the surge in the company’s share price in May that had turned it into a trillion-dollar company made sense.

Well, up to a point, anyway. But how had a company that since 1998 – when it released the revolutionary Riva TNT video and graphics accelerator chip – had been the lodestone of gamers become worth a trillion dollars, almost overnight? The answer, oddly enough, can be found in the folk wisdom that emerged in the California gold rush of the mid-19th century, when it became clear that while few prospectors made fortunes panning for gold, the suppliers who sold them picks and shovels prospered nicely.

We’re now in another gold rush – this time centred on artificial intelligence (AI) – and Nvidia’s A100 and H100 graphical processing units (GPUs) are the picks and shovels…

Read on

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Here comes the SunMy favourite flower. And one of a bunch grown from last year’s seeds too.

Quote of the Day

”He shunned the Press, as as far as he was able, and doled out quotes like a miser giving alms. Hurrying once through an airport, he was hailed by a reporter who asked if he might ‘have a word’. Without breaking stride, Ramsey obliged him: ‘Goodbye’.”

Anthony Quinn, reviewing Duncan Hamilton’s biography of Alf Ramsey in the Observer.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsVictor Borge | Clair de Lune

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And you thought he was just a comedian? So did I.

Long Read of the DayHow Misreading Adam Smith Helped Spawn Deaths of Despair

An edited transcript in the Boston Review of a terrific lecture by the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton at the Tercentenary celebrations of Adam Smith in Edinburgh last June. It’s an impressive lecture that covers a lot of ground. The basic theme is the way some of Adam Smith’s ideas were perversely distorted by an influential group of economists in the University of Chicago and then used to justify introducing libertarian ideas and policies into areas like healthcare where they have had disastrous consequences.

Here’s a sample (informed by the book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Deaton and his wife, Anne Case.)

In 1995 the painkiller OxyContin, manufactured by Purdue Pharmaceutical, a private company owned by the Sackler family, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). OxyContin is an opioid; think of it as a half-strength dose of heroin in pill form with an FDA label of approval—effective for pain relief, and highly addictive. Traditionally, doctors in the United States did not prescribe opiates, even for terminally ill cancer patients—unlike in Britain—but they were persuaded by relentless marketing campaigns and a good deal of misdirection that OxyContin was safe for chronic pain. Chronic pain had been on the rise in the United States for some time, and Purdue and their distributors targeted communities where pain was prevalent: a typical example is a company coal town in West Virginia where the company and the coal had recently vanished. Overdose deaths began to rise soon afterwards. By 2012 enough opioid prescriptions were being written for every American adult to have a month’s supply. In time, physicians began to realize what they had done and cut back on prescriptions. Or at least most did; a few turned themselves into drug dealers and operated pill mills, selling pills for money or, in some cases, for sex. Many of those doctors are now in jail. (Barbara Kingsolver’s recent Demon Copperhead, set in southwest Virginia, is a fictionalized account of the social devastation, especially among children and young people.)

In 2010 Purdue reformulated Oxycontin to make it harder to abuse, and around the same time the docs pulled back, but by then a large population of people had become addicted to the drugs, and when prescribers denied them pills, black market suppliers flooded the illicit market with cheap heroin and fentanyl, which is more than thirty times stronger than heroin. Sometimes dealers even met disappointed patients outside pain clinics. The epidemic of addiction and death that had been sparked by pharma companies in search of profit was enabled by some members of Congress, who, as Case and I describe in detail in our book, changed the law to make life easier for distributors and shut down investigations by the Drug Enforcement Agency. None of these congressional representatives was punished by voters.

He also adds an interesting footnote for readers on this side of the Pond:

Queen Elizabeth, awarded knighthoods in the 1990s to Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, owners of Purdue Pharma, not for the human destruction they had wrought in the United States but for their philanthropy in Britain, much of which involved what was later called “art-washing.” Many institutions are still trying to extricate themselves from Sackler money, including, most recently, Oxford University in the UK and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine who produced an “authoritative” report that, by several accounts, exaggerated the extent of pain in the United States, and thus the need for OxyContin.

There’s lots more in what amounts to an insightful account of how democracies have got into the mess they’re currently in.

Books, etc.Jeff Jarvis is ‘retiring’ from CUNY. Note the quote marks. He’s not really the retiring sort. He’s written a nice valedictory piece, though. And I’ve reviewed his new book in the British Journalism Review. You can find a copy of the review here if you’re interested.

My commonplace bookletDickens on Effective Altruism

Robert Cottrell has been listening to Dickens…

Of the many sub-plots in Bleak House, I am particularly taken by Dickens’s prescient critique of Effective Altruism through the person of Mrs Jellyby, a middle-class Londoner who is so preoccupied with raising money for missions to Africa that she has no time to spare for her own children. The unwashed little Jellybys fall downstairs, dress in rags, and weep with misery, while their mother, indifferent to what is going on in front of her eyes, devotes her energies to the promotion of grand projects for improving the future well-being of distant peoples. I find it hard not to think of San Francisco as Mrs Jellyby’s house writ large.

ErrataSeems I may have been misinformed when I claimed the other day that the Lone Ranger’s buddy Tonto may not have been as dismissive of his boss as I had claimed. (His invariable reply to the Ranger was “Kemo Sabay” which a friend of mine claimed meant “horseshit” in some indigenous language or other.)

Frank Miller pointed me to Wikipedia, which maintains that:

Jim Jewell, director of The Lone Ranger from 1933 to 1939, took the phrase from Kamp Kee-Mo Sah-Bee, a boys’ camp on Mullett Lake in Michigan, established by Charles W. Yeager (Jewell’s father-in-law) in 1916. Yeager himself probably took the term from Ernest Thompson Seton, one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America, who had given the meaning “scout runner” to Kee-mo-sah’-bee in his 1912 book The Book of Woodcraft and Indian Lore.

Drat and double-drat! I still prefer “horseshit”, though. Much more appropriate in the comic context.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

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Silent ecstasy?Striking sculpture spotted in the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Quote of the Day

“Education isn’t something you can finish”.

Isaac Asimov

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsScott Joplin | Elite Syncopations | Phillip Dyson

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At last, an unobjectionable use of ‘elite’ as an adjective!

Long Read of the DayFully automated data driven authoritarianism ain’t what it’s cracked up to be

Marvellous essay by Henry Farrell which, among other things, has an elegant takedown of the sainted Yuval Noah Harari.

Last September, Abe Newman, Jeremy Wallace and I had a piece in Foreign Affairs’ 100th anniversary issue. I can’t speak for my co-authors’ motivations, but my own reason for writing was vexation that someone on the Internet was wrong. In this case, it was Yuval Harari. His piece has been warping debate since 2018, and I have been grumpy about it for nearly as long. But also in fairness to Harari, he was usefully wrong – I’ve assigned this piece regularly to students, because it wraps up a bunch of common misperceptions in a neatly bundled package, ready to be untied and dissected.

Specifically, Harari argued that AI (by which he meant machine learning) and authoritarian rule are two flavors that will go wonderfully together. Authoritarian governments will use surveillance to scoop up vast amounts of data on what their subjects are saying and doing, and use machine learning feedback systems to figure out what they want and manipulate it, so that “the main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century—the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place—may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.” Harari informed us in grave terms that liberal democracy and free-market economics were doomed to be outcompeted unless we took Urgent But Curiously Non-Specific Steps Right Now.

In our Foreign Affairs piece, Abe, Jeremy and I argued that this was horseshit…

Read on to see why.

Footnote. Growing up in the 1950s I was, like most of my peers, an avid reader of ‘The Lone Ranger’ comic strip which starred a brave (and, of course, white) cowboy and his faithful Indian companion/servant, Tonto. In general, Tonto had only one response to his master’s utterances — “Kemo Sabay”, which in our innocence we assumed to be Native-American-speak for “Yes boss”, or words to that effect. Imagine my delight when, a few years ago, someone told me that in fact it means ‘horseshit’ in some indigenous language or other.

As they say in Italy: if it isn’t true it ought to be.

My commonplace bookletFrom Jeff Jarvis…

Perhaps LLMs should have been introduced as fiction machines.

ChatGPT is a nice parlor trick, no doubt. It can make shit up. It can sound like us. Cool. If that entertaining power were used to write short stories or songs or poems and if it were clearly understood that the machine could do little else, I’m not sure we’d be in our current dither about AI. Problem is, as any novelist or songwriter or poet can tell you, there’s little money in creativity anymore. That wouldn’t attract billions in venture capital and the stratospheric valuations that go with it whenever AI is associated with internet search, media, and McKinsey finding a new way to kill jobs. As with so much else today, the problem isn’t with the tool or the user but with capitalism. (To those who would correct me and say it’s late-stage capitalism, I respond: How can you be so sure it is in its last stages?)

And this…

The most dangerous prospect arising from the current generation of AI is not the technology, but the philosophy espoused by some of its technologists.

I won’t venture deep down this rat hole now, but the faux philosophies espoused by many of the AI boys — in the acronym of Émile Torres and Timnit Gebru, TESCREAL, or longtermism for short — is noxious and frightening, serving as self-justification for their wealth and power. Their philosophizing might add up to a glib freshman’s essay on utilitarianism if it did not also border on eugenics and if these boys did not have the wealth and power they wield. See Torres’ excellent reporting on TESCREAL here. Media should be paying attention to this angle instead of acting as the boys’ fawning stenographers. They must bring the voices of responsible scholars — from many fields, including the humanities — into the discussion. And government should encourage truly open-source development and investment to bring on competitors that can keep these boys, more than their machines, in check.

Yep.

LinkblogNoticed while drinking from the Internet firehose.

China’s answer to ChatGPT Some bright spark on the Economist has been trying it out.

Ernie bot has some controversial views on science. China’s premier artificial intelligence (ai) chatbot, which was released to the public on August 31st, reckons that covid-19 originated among American vape-users in July 2019; later that year the virus was spread to the Chinese city of Wuhan, via American lobsters. On matters of politics, by contrast, the chatbot is rather quiet. Ernie is confused by questions such as “Who is China’s president?” and will tell you the name of Xi Jinping’s mother, but not those of his siblings. It draws a blank if asked about the drawbacks of socialism. It often attempts to redirect sensitive conversations by saying: “Let’s talk about something else.”

It’ll get better — if it’s allowed to.

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Meet BodhisattvaIn the wonderful Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge the other day I came face to face with this figure. It’s the head of what the museum describes as “Lifesize, 13th-century Sung Dynasty (AD 960-1279) polychrome wooden sculpture of a Bodhisattva seated in the position known as ‘royal ease’”. For details of this curious position, see below. Do not try it at home.

Quote of the Day

“Nixon loved air-conditioning. In summer he would turn the thermostat down as low as it would go, so he could toast himself by a blazing log fire in the synthetic chill. Extreme as Nixon’s virtuoso double-polluting habits may seem now, he was more in tune with the American public mood on matters of temperature control than the only President who tried to rein in his nation’s growing addiction to air-conditioning, Jimmy Carter.”

James Meek in the LRB.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsHaydn | Trumpet Concerto in Eb, 1st movement (Allegro)| Alison Balsom

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Recorded on the Last Night of the Proms, September 12, 2009

Long Read of the DayConsciousness is a great mystery. Its definition isn’t.

Interesting essay by Erik Hoel.

In the current chaotic discourses about ‘AI’ terms like ‘consciousness’ and ‘sentience’ are batted around like shuttlecocks. I’m not a philosopher, but I can sometimes spot when people have no idea what they’re talking about, and this is one of those areas. Which I why I perked up when I read this.

Here’s how it opens:

There’s an unkillable myth that the very definition of the word “consciousness” is somehow so slippery, so bedeviled with problems, that we must first specify what we mean out of ten different notions. When this definitional objection is raised, its implicit point is often—not always, but often—that the people who wish to study consciousness scientifically (or philosophically) are so fundamentally confused they can’t even agree on a definition. And if a definition cannot be agreed upon, we should question whether there is anything to say at all.

Unfortunately, this “argument from undefinability” shows up regularly among a certain set of well-educated people. Just to given an example, there was recently an interesting LessWrong post wherein the writer reported on his attempts to ask people to define consciousness, from a group of:

Mostly academics I met in grad school, in cognitive science, AI, ML, and mathematics.

He found that such people would regularly conflate “consciousness” with things like introspection, purposefulness, pleasure and pain, intelligence, and so on. These sort of conflations being common is my impression as well, as I run into them whenever I have given public talks about the neuroscience of consciousness, and I too have found it most prominent among those with a computer science, math, or tech background. It is especially prominent right now amid AI researchers… Hope you find it interesting.

When Elon Musk’s ‘flying sofas’ give Ukraine internet access, we can’t sit comfortablyMy column in yesterday’s Observer…

In February 2022, as Russian tanks rumbled into Ukraine, a cyber-attack took down the satellite system run by Viasat that was providing high-speed communications for Ukrainian military forces, rendering them instantly blind, deaf and dumb. With his forces knocked offline, the Ukrainian digital minister sent a plea to an American billionaire, one Elon Musk, for help. Within hours, Musk responded that his Starlink system had been activated in Ukraine. Days later Starlink terminals began to arrive.

Pause for context update. Musk is the founder and Supreme Leader of SpaceX, an innovative firm that has found a way of building reusable heavy rockets that can launch cargo into Earth orbit and safely return ready to be used again, which is a very big deal, and probably why Nasa has become one of its regular customers. In 2019, SpaceX started launching smallish – “sofa-sized”, according to the New York Times – communications satellites into low-Earth orbit with the aim of eventually providing a global mobile phone system called Starlink. Thus far, it has mostly been providing internet connectivity to 60 countries via about 4,500 satellites, but it’s said that Musk plans to have 42,000 of them up there eventually, which is an awful lot of flying sofas.

At the moment, there are something like 42,000 Starlink terminals in Ukraine – in use by the country’s armed forces, hospitals, businesses and aid organisations…

Read on

Books, etc.This new collection of Lee Miller’s photographs arrived the other day. I dug out my old, battered Rolleiflex to sit alongside it, as a mark of respect, for some of her most memorable pictures were taken with a Rollei.

My first thought was that the book must be a catalogue of the marvellous exhibition of Miller’s work we saw in the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen a couple of years ago. But it only partly overlaps with those pictures. So why release the collection now?

Ah! There’s a foreword by Kate Winslet, not hitherto known as a photography buff. But then the penny dropped: Winslet is playing Miller in a biopic that’s coming out later in the year. IMDB has a still from it showing Winslet in combat fatigues and clutching a… Rolleiflex!

Source

My commonplace bookletBurning Man festival-goers trapped in desert as rain turns site to mud. Link. So there is a God, and She has a sense of humour. From modest beginnings Burning Man morphed from hippiedom into a destination for social media influencers, celebrities and the Silicon Valley elite. The thought of all those self-satisfied creeps shivering in their mud-logged SUVs is, well, deeply satisfying.

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Radio daysI love this picture from Russell Lee’s famous series of photos of Depression-era Americans, created for FDR’s Farm Security Administration. This one shows Mrs. Caudill and her daughter, of Pie Town, New Mexico, listening to news on their radio in the summer of 1940.

I’m fascinated by how FSA-sponsored photographers like Lee, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, Gordon Parks and others harnessed the evocative power of photography. The fact that they had to work in monochrome seems to me to give their work much more impact. This is particularly interesting for me because, having worked in colour for three decades or more, I’m now trying to re-learn how to use B&W myself, including the obvious lesson that it’s a completely different medium, and you can’t get at it by shooting in colour and then siphoning off the colour in post-production manipulation. You have to think in B&W before you press the button. And things that work in colour don’t work in monochrome. Horses for courses, etc. Sigh.

Quote of the Day

“The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.”

T.S. Eliot

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsLiam O’Flynn, Seán Keane, Paddy Glackin, Arty McGlynn & Paul Brady | Gradam Ceoil TG4 2007

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A real line-up of Maestros. Three reels — The Humours of Carraigholt, Major Harrison’s Fedora and Tommy People’s Reel (my favourite). And note the seamless switches between each (at 1:13) and 2:26)

Long Read of the DayGenerative AI and intellectual property

Typically laconic and thoughtful essay by Benedict Evans asking If you put all the world’s knowledge into an AI model and use it to make something new, who owns that and who gets paid?

This is, he slyly observes, “a completely new problem that we’ve been arguing about for 500 years”.

We’ve been talking about intellectual property in one way or another for at least the last five hundred years, and each new wave of technology or creativity leads to new kinds of arguments. We invented performance rights for composers and we decided that photography – ‘mechanical reproduction’ – could be protected as art, and in the 20th century we had to decide what to think about everything from recorded music to VHS to sampling. Generative AI poses some of those questions in new ways (or even in old ways), but it also poses some new kinds of puzzles – always the best kind.

At the simplest level, we will very soon have smartphone apps that let you say “play me this song, but in Taylor Swift’s voice”. That’s a new possibility, but we understand the intellectual property ideas pretty well – there’ll be a lot of shouting over who gets paid what, but we know what we think the moral rights are. Record companies are already having conversations with Google about this.

But what happens if I say “make me a song in the style of Taylor Swift” or, even more puzzling, “make me a song in the style of the top pop hits of the last decade”?

Evans has an admirably ‘light’ style and a neat way of posing complex problems in thought-provoking ways. He also loves paradoxes, but then, so do lots of good writers.

Worth a read.

My commonplace bookletBiodiversity Flourishes in Historic Lawn Turned Wildflower Meadow

A nice story from Scientific American about an experiment conducted by the Head Gardener of King’s College, Cambridge.

Thanks to David Ballard for spotting it..

LinkblogSome things I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

DeepMind made a watermark for AI images that you can’t edit out Link. It seems to be a clever use of steganography. Might help with protecting artists’ IP.
‘Life or Death:’ AI-Generated Mushroom Foraging Books Are All Over Amazon Link. Perfectly predictable. And perfectly pernicious.

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Zombie Capitalism In an airport shopping mall. Quote of the Day “Salary is no object; I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.” Dorothy Parker, discussing a job with a prospective employer. Musical alternative to the morning’s radio … Continue reading →

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Island View If you’re ever in West Kerry make sure to visit the Blasket Centre, a striking institution housing exhibitions that deliver an imaginative re-telling of the story of the Blasket islands, their rich heritage and literature which is of … Continue reading →

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My column in today’s Observer: Evelyn Waugh famously held that taking a keen interest in ecclesiastical matters was often “a prelude to insanity”. Much the same might be said about newspaper columnists taking an interest in intellectual property law. But … Continue reading →

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The recumbent Bear En route to Daniel O’Connell’s house in Derrynane the other day we passed a cyclist who had an intriguing passenger. Later on, he caught up with us at a café in Glencar, and the identity of the … Continue reading →

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Next Parish, America The Blasket islands off the Kerry coast. Photographed yesterday. Quote of the Day ”One of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism is that some groups of capitalists will be trying to cut the throats of others as the … Continue reading →

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Yeats’s country seat On our journey southwards in Ireland the other day, we visited Thoor Ballylee, the 15th-century Anglo-Norman tower house that W.B. Yeats bought and restored in the early 1920s as a summer house for him and his family … Continue reading →

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In the bay A photograph triggered by a song (see today’s music choice). Quote of the Day ” A pearl diver who possessed a gift for diving into the wreckage of bourgeois civilization and emerging into the sunlight with the … Continue reading →

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Breakfast for one The terrace of a very upmarket German schloss where I happened to be staying. (Someone else was paying: I was giving a talk.) Quote of the Day “Machine learning is money laundering for bias.” Maciej Cegłowski Link … Continue reading →

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Why food tastes different in France? Quote of the Day “Why bother dethroning DeSantis as the heir apparent when he’s already doing such a good job of it himself? Nobody has needed to reboot as frequently as DeSantis since the … Continue reading →

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Tunnel vision Quote of the Day ”The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that’s the way I likes it! Grandpa Abe Simpson on the metric system. (Relevant to today’s … Continue reading →

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Posters Arles, June 25. Quote of the Day “A Conservative Government is an organised hypocrisy.” Benjamin Disraeli. It is, except that now we have a disorganised one. Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news The Beatles | Twist and Shout … Continue reading →

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After Duchamp… Walking through Arles one evening in June I spotted this in a builder’s disposal dump and was immediately reminded of Duchamp’s ’fountain’ — a ‘readymade sculpture’ consisting of a urinal signed “R. Mutt” that the artist submitted for … Continue reading →

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The Beady Eye We’re looking after a neighbour’s chickens at the moment. This one is not impressed by her new custodian. Personally, I don’t blame her. I’m not impressed by me either. Quote of the Day A good writer doesn’t … Continue reading →

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The way out.. … of one of the hotels we stay in on our drive through France. Quote of the Day ”Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by … Continue reading →

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Closely observed Sweet Peas Quote of the Day “An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.” F. Scott Fitzgerald Musical alternative to the morning’s radio … Continue reading →

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Stairway to where, exactly? West Cambridge Hub Quote of the Day “Almost every desire that a poor person has is a punishable offence” Louis-Ferdinand Céline Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Regina Spektor | SugarMan Link Long Read of … Continue reading →

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Books, etc. A bookshop in rural France. And the etc.? Just this: Interesting conjunction: tampons and faxes, eh? Quote of the Day ”Even if you’re not interested in climate change, climate change is interested in you.” Andrew Curry, in his … Continue reading →

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Grasses at dusk Semur-en-Auxoise, Burgundy. Quote of the Day ”Superintelligence is not required for ai to cause harm. That is already happening. ai is used to violate privacy, create and spread disinformation, compromise cyber-security and build biased decision-making systems. The … Continue reading →

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Where we get our strawberries From Hacker’s Fruit Farm, of course. Quote of the Day “When Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.” Ted Chiang Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Pinetop … Continue reading →

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Orwell: Politics and the French Language Arles, 2010 Quote of the Day ”’I told you so’ are the four least satisfying words in the English language.” Bill McKibben Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Richard Wagner | Tristan und … Continue reading →

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A rose by any other name… … would smell as sweet. Quote of the Day ”While Twitter felt like a rowdy pub at chucking-out time, Threads feels like a corporate box at a concert.” Helen Lewis, writing about her social … Continue reading →

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Cool dude & lady friend Arles, June 25th. Quote of the Day “It is not that the Englishman can’t feel — it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is … Continue reading →

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Le Penseur Well, not quite what Rodin had in mind, but what the hell. Quote of the Day “What makes the war on terror different from other wars is that victory has never been based on achieving a positive outcome; … Continue reading →

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Provence, sans eau Normally, this fountain provides endless amusement for kids on a hot day. But not at the moment: Provence, like many other places around the world, is short of water. Quote of the Day A great way to … Continue reading →

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Two horses and fancy upholstery My favourite 2CV adaptation turned up at the Boules court the other day. It’s such a lovely piece of work. Note the wicker picnic-box on the rear. Quote of the Day ”When a measure becomes … Continue reading →

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On the beach Benedict Evans (see Long Read below) used Midjourney to create this image in response to the prompt “A photograph of advertising people discussing creativity on stage in a panel on a beach at Cannes Lions.” Reflecting on … Continue reading →

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The Conversation Quote of the Day “The war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.” Roland Barthes Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Tuba Skinny | Jubilee Stomp | Royal Street Link Long Read of … Continue reading →

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From this morning’s FT newsletter, written by Stephen Bush: The British government’s Rwanda policy continues to be a great piece of statecraft: by Paul Kagame, that is. He has essentially bought the government’s Africa policy with £120mn of the UK’s … Continue reading →

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The White House Dusk on a Summer’s evening in northern Burgundy. Quote of the Day “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” F. Scott Fitzgerald Musical alternative to the morning’s radio … Continue reading →

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A volcanic legacy This castle on a volcanic plug is one of the most striking sights on our long drive down to the South of France. It’s a few km before Puy-en-Velay, at the heart of what was once a … Continue reading →

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On reflection… …it’s rather nice being in Burgundy on a Summer evening Quote of the Day “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” Ben Franklin Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Crosby, Stills, Nash, & … Continue reading →

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Street Art UK-style The UK has, for some reason (possibly connected with Brexit) become the world capital of potholes. Some streets in Cambridge look as though they had been intensively bombed by small mortar rounds. Periodically, chaps from the local … Continue reading →

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Optical illusion At first sight it looked weird: a headless figure on a lovely beach. But then, on further inspection, it turned out to be just a trick of perspective. Quote of the Day “In a real dark night of … Continue reading →

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A Note from the Publisher Sounds impressive, eh? A bit like what one imagines Arthur Ochs Sulzberger might have written when he was publisher of the New York Times. My message today, though is more modest. It’s to say that … Continue reading →

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The man himself Jaques-Emile Blanche’s portrait of James Joyce, now in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Quote of the Day “All great truths begin as blasphemies.” George Bernard Shaw Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news John McCormack | … Continue reading →

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Yet another one Wonderful plants, orchids. One can see why some people go crazy about them. Quote of the Day “The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes — ah, that is where … Continue reading →

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Le Miserablé Cluny, France. Quote of the Day “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” Dorothea Lange (See also today’s Long Read) Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Tuba Skinny | Going … Continue reading →

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An arboreal puzzle On a walk the other day we came on a tree which seemed to be encased in fine white wool and wondered what it was. My guess: pussy willow; but what I know about plants could be … Continue reading →

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Remembering Z Two years ago we said our goodbyes to Zoombini, the most remarkable cat I’ve ever known. She was a deeply intelligent creature with a need for human contact which was sometimes almost eerie. When we sat down for … Continue reading →

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Two years ago today we said our goodbyes to Zoombini, the most remarkable cat I’ve ever known. She was a deeply intelligent creature with a need for human contact which was always charming and sometimes almost eerie. When we sat … Continue reading →

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Snapper King’s Cross station the other day. Quote of the Day ”Not everybody trusts paintings, but people believe photographs.” Ansel Adams Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Robert Schumann |Arabesque in C major Op.18 | Lang Lang Link Long … Continue reading →

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Coffee-break, Piccadilly Quote of the Day ”Mr Eliot is at times an excellent poet and has arrived at the supreme Eminence among English critics largely through disguising himself as a corpse.” Ezra Pound on T.S.E. Musical alternative to the morning’s … Continue reading →

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This is not a building… … it’s a facade with an exo-skeleton. Seen in Piccadilly yesterday. Quote of the Day ”Chevy Chase couldn’t ad-lib a fart after a baked-bean dinner.” Johnny Carson Now why does this remind me of a … Continue reading →

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The road takenWith apologies to Robert Frost.

Quote of the Day

”I like Wagner’s music than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage.”

Oscar Wilde

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsStephen Foster | Beautiful Dreamer | Leslie Guinn, baritone, Gilbert Kalish, piano.

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Recorded on period instruments at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C

Long Read of the DayThe partisans beyond the filter bubble

Terrific Substack post by Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve) on some research which challenges some of the myths about online filter bubbles. The takeaway conclusion Charles draws is that

Small groups of: (i) ageing (ii) right-wingers (iii) on their desktop computers (because this study wasn’t — couldn’t – be carried out on mobile, only desktop) get their information from unreliable, partisan news sites. The study doesn’t say whether they then go on to share it on Facebook or on their Twitter account grumpyboomer032945231, but it’s not hard to imagine that’s what happens.

This isn’t to let the search algorithms off the hook either, but does go to show that the real problem, as ever, lies with the humans.

Worth reading the whole piece. It’s thought-provoking, not least because it challenges some conventional wisdom about the impact of social media.

Books, etc.Kieran Setiya has a nice review of Florence Hazrat’s Brief History of the Exclamation Mark!.

Hazrat’s book is packed with wonderful factoids. Other names for the exclamation mark include “the screamer, the slammer, the bang, the gasper, and the shriek.” Not surprisingly, “!” is much-derided. F. Scott Fitzgerald compared the exclamation mark to laughing at one’s own joke, while the journalist Philip Cowell called it “the selfie of grammar.” Yet, writes Hazrat, “it exists in nearly every language from Persian to Mandarin.” We clearly need it!

Thanks are due, then, to Alpoleio da Urbisaglia, who first used a full stop with an apostrophe or raised comma to mark “exclamatory or admirative sentences,” an innovation formalized as “!” by Coluccio Salutati in 1399.

Among punctuation marks, “!” is unique in splicing syntax with sentiment:

The power of the exclamation mark to orchestrate tone and feeling makes us nervous, at least some of us. ! has a foot in both camps: grammar and rhetoric; cold hard rule and fuzzy emotion. It sits perched between syntactical exactness and blurry subjectivity, revelling in its double identity, a queer mark that defies binaries…

This helps to explain its massive overuse in email, especially by those, like me, who resist the emoticon.

Guilty as charged, m’lud!

My commonplace bookletThank you for not answering

Remarkable, slightly eerie, short experimental film made entirely by ‘Generative AI’. Artist Paul Trillo was the Director.

It’s a claustrophobic film that could have taken oodles of time, money and special effects to shoot, but Trillo generated it in minutes using an experimental tool kit made by an artificial-intelligence company called Runway.

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Where have all the cyclists gone? Seen in a nature reserve yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”Military glory is the attractive rainbow that arises in showers of blood.”

Abraham Lincoln.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsThe Beach Boys | A Day In The Life Of A Tree

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Long Read of the DaySetting time on fire and the temptation of The Button

Ethan Mollick has discovered that, when composing a document in Google Docs, he’s now offered a ‘button’ labelled “Help me write” which, when clicked, invites you to prompt Bard (Google’s LLM) to write the article/essay/email on which you were embarking.

As far as I can see, this facility is currently only available to selected users of Google Docs in the US, but it’ll soon be everywhere. I do much of my writing in Drafts (which runs only on Apple kit) and it already offers a similar button which summons ChatGPT to one’s aid (if that is the correct term for the services of a stochastic parrot).

Mollick has written an interesting post on the longer-term implications universal acceptance of the apparent shortcuts offered by ‘AI’.

So why do I think this is a big deal? Because, when faced with the tyranny of the blank page, people are going to push The Button. It is so much easier to start with something than nothing. Students are going to use it start essays. Managers are going to use it to start emails, or reports, or documents. Teachers will use it when providing feedback. Scientists will use to write grants. And, just as we are seeing with Adobe incorporating AI into Photoshop, when AI gets integrated into a familiar tool, adoption become simple. Everyone is going to use The Button.

Now, there are a million implications to outsourcing our first drafts to AI. We know people anchor on the first idea they see, influencing their future work, so even drafts that are completely rewritten will be AI-tinged. People may not be as thoughtful about what they write, or the lack of effort may mean they don’t think through problems as deeply. We may not learn how to write as well. We may be flooded with low-quality content. All of these implications are significant, but I want to focus on one thing that, as an academic at a business school, really stands out to me: the coming crisis of meaning…

It’s an interesting disquisition on the way the time one puts into composing a document can provides an implicit signal about its worth, which may be useful to its recipient. One example he uses is a task that many academics, especially senior ones, have to do — write letters of recommendation for students or junior colleagues. I have to do this quite a lot, and I put a fair amount of time into it. Recipients (academics often have to write the same kinds of letter) will easily be able to spot how much work has gone into a reference, and assign a value to it accordingly. But what if I started to use a tool like GPT-4 which can rattle off plausible-looking references in a minute or two?

Mollick’s essay has prompted an interesting response from one of his readers, Pascal Montjovent:

As an early adopter, I’ve been immersed in AI and digital technologies, employing tools like GPT and Midjourney in my day-to-day activities for months now. Far from being a luddite, I embrace these developments with open arms, recognizing their potential to shape the future.

But in my field, ever since film cameras were supplanted by digital cameras, and subsequently by smartphones, everyone seems to think that creating a movie is simple.

Clients and agencies have started to cut down on delivery times and budgets. Faith in the expertise of professionals has plummeted.

As a result, projects are less prepared, the duration of shoots is diminished, as is that of post-production: “You don’t need so much time to deliver this edit or mix to me.”

What fades away with this shift towards digital and AI, is the time for reflection, the capacity to take a step back and contemplate what we are doing. The ability to reexamine one’s work after a break or to review an edit after a good night’s sleep is dwindling.

Soon, everyone will be familiar with the concept of “simply pressing The Button”.

Everyone will know that a letter of recommendation can be written in twelve minutes and that minutes of a meeting can be automatically transcribed during the work session.

Yet, the time saved won’t be repurposed for more enriching activities. It will merely serve as a means to accept more work, for the same pay of course, and without the luxury of reflection time.

We’ve drawn closer to the condition of a hamster in its wheel. We are running faster. But for what purpose, and in which direction? This is the question that looms large and, to my mind, requires our immediate attention and action.

A lawyer got ChatGPT to do his research, but he isn’t AI’s biggest foolMy column in yesterday’s Observer:

This story begins on 27 August 2019, when Roberto Mata was a passenger on an Avianca flight 670 from El Salvador to New York and a metal food and drink trolley allegedly injured his knee. As is the American way, Mata duly sued Avianca and the airline responded by asking that the case be dismissed because “the statute of limitations had expired”. Mata’s lawyers argued on 25 April that the lawsuit should be continued and appending a list of over half a dozen previous court cases that apparently set precedents supporting their argument.

Avianca’s lawyers and Judge P Kevin Castel then dutifully embarked on an examination of these “precedents”, only to find that none of the decisions or the legal quotations cited and summarised in the brief existed.

Why? Because ChatGPT had made them up. Whereupon, as the New York Times report puts it, “the lawyer who created the brief, Steven A Schwartz of the firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, threw himself on the mercy of the court… saying in an affidavit that he had used the artificial intelligence program to do his legal research – ‘a source that has revealed itself to be unreliable’.”

This Schwartz, by the way, was no rookie straight out of law school…

Do read the whole thing

Why Trump will be the GOP candidate next yearJanan Ganesh wrote a very perceptive column in the Financial Times (behind the paywall) about Ron DeSantis’s chances of defeating Trump for the Republican nomination. The Florida governor is under the impression that evidence of his ability to get things done in his home state gives him an advantage in the contest with Trump.

In this, Ganesh argues, he is deluded. This contest is not about any kind of competence, but about something else entirely.

“Consider for a moment,” he writes,

what Donald Trump gives to his average follower. Membership in a vast nationwide communion of like-minded people. A paternal figure in a confusing world. The frisson of transgression: middle-aged whites don’t often in life get to play the rebel.

Next to all this, what is the marginal benefit of seeing him win an actual election? What, after that, is the marginal benefit of watching his policies come into force? No doubt, Trump fans would rather have these bonus items than not. But he has done them a profound emotional and almost spiritual service before it ever gets to that.

It is not clear that Ron DeSantis understands this about populism.

Poor DeSantis is logical and thinks that modern politics is about getting things done. Ganesh feels sorry for him.

The extent to which it is about belonging — about replacing the group identity that people once got from a church or a trade union — is lost on his rationalist ken. In this one sense, he thinks like a liberal.

And therefore, in the crazed world of American rightwing politics, he’s doomed.

I suppose I should be pleased about this. When DeSantis first appeared on the horizon I was alarmed: the last thing American democracy needed was a competent autocrat. I needn’t have worried. The choice the American people will have to make next year will be between an elderly but competent Democrat, and an incompetent but buoyant autocrat.

My commonplace bookletIf you live in the UK and drink tap-water (and, let’s face it, who doesn’t?) it’d be worth watching this brief video from openDemocracy. Among other things, it illustrates what happens when a major country turns over its water supply to a bunch of private-equity charlatans.

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What’s this?Outside Cambridge railway station yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

Graham Greene

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSharon Shannon | Galway Girl | Live at Cambridge Folk Festival

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Long Read of the DayThe Policy Paradox: The more obvious an idea is the less likely it will happen.

Sobering (and insightful) blog post by Sam Freedman.

I’ve been around for a while now and have occasionally found myself drifting into the cynicial “it’s been tried before” mode. So I’m trying to avoid it by taking a different approach. When I’m talking to a young think-tanker or political aide, whose enthusiam is not yet dimmed, I try not to dismiss ideas that have been doing the rounds for a while, but ask a different question: “given you’re not the first person to think of this why hasn’t it happened before?”

Just because something hasn’t worked, or has been blocked, in the past, it doesn’t mean it can’t work now. But it is important to understand the history and explain why it can be different this time.

The more of these discussions I have the more I have come to realise that there’s an odd paradox that applies to every policy area: the more obvious the idea, the less likely it is to happen. I don’t just mean obvious to me. There are plenty of policies that I personally – as a member of the dissolute liberal new elite – think are no brainers that are nevertheless hotly contested. No, these are ideas that everyone, bar perhaps a tiny ideological fringe, agree with, and that, at any of those panel events, will get a room full of appreciative nods, but nevertheless don’t happen…

It’s interesting, if sometimes dispiriting and when I was reading I kept thinking of Gramsci’s adage that what we need is “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. But, since pessimism can be disabling, maybe “realism of the intellect and optimism of the will” might be more useful.

There’s plenty of realism in this essay.

Thanks to Andrew Curry for alerting me to it.

Books, etc.Cory Doctorow on a “Big Tech Dissassembly Manual”

Cory (Whom God Preserve) gave the Peter Kirstein Lecture in UCL yesterday. It was a typical Cory performance — which means that nobody slept at the back. The lecture theatre was packed and he outlined his ‘enshittification’ thesis of tech platforms with verve and wit and coruscating sarcasm. I like to think that I am critical of the tech industry, but in comparison to Cory I sound like a PR agent for Zuckerberg & Co.

I’ve also recently finished his first venture into mainstream thriller writing — Red Team Blues — and enjoyed it hugely. What’s special about it is the way it takes for granted the astonishing way in which tech (notably crypto) facilitates money-laundering, tax evasion and criminality on a cosmic scale. Henry Farrell wrote a perceptive review of it recently, and so now has his sister Maria — who was also at yesterday’s event, as evidenced below.

Cory is a truly extraordinary individual, the nearest thing we have to a one-man think-tank on the nature and pathologies of digital capitalism. More power to his elbow, as we say in Ireland.

My commonplace booklet’Fire of Love’ trailer

This is a movie I’d like to see.

ErrataBy now you will have gathered that in yesterday’s edition the number 10^60 (ten to the power of 60, which is as big a number as you are ever likely to contemplate), was rendered as 1060, which sounds like the state of England before the Norman Conquest!

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Fontenay on an August eveningThe Abbey of Fontenay in northern Burgundy. One of the loveliest and most peaceful places I know.

Quote of the Day

”I can always hire mathematicians, but they can’t hire me.” * Thomas Edison

I was thinking about this a few weeks ago when I gave a talk about AI to a hedge fund which employs a hundred mathematicians and 500 software engineers.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsHandel | Ombra mai fu | Xerxes HWV 40 | Andreas Scholl, countertenor.

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Long Read of the Day Open the pod bay doors

You may have seen the recent spate of stories about how ‘AI’ (aka machine-learning) has ‘discovered’ a new antibiotic.

I found this LRB blog post by Liam Shaw really illuminating. Hope you might too.

It has been reported that abaucin was ‘discovered using AI’. This needs a bit of unpacking. Finding any new drug means searching through ‘chemical space’ – the many possible configurations of atoms that can make up molecules. It’s difficult to get a grip on how vast this universe of possibility is. Most drugs consist of molecules with fewer than thirty atoms and a molecular mass of less than 500 daltons (a hydrogen atom has a mass of one dalton, give or take). It’s hard to estimate, but even if you restrict yourself to a handful of elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur) there are at least 1060 possible molecules that fit these criteria. This is a big number, more than a thousand times the number of hydrogen atoms in the Sun. Exploring this chemical universe in its entirety is impossible. The hope is that using predictive algorithms from machine learning can help guide you to the right galaxy…

Good example of how to explain something that’s rather complex.

An auto CEO came very close to saying the right thing about heavy EV batteriesA story from The Verge.

The race to cram heavier and heavier batteries into bigger and bigger electric vehicles hit a speed bump today when a major automaker CEO finally threw up his hands and asked why.

“I have no idea what’s going on in this industry right now,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said during his company’s capital markets event Monday. He referenced electric vehicles coming out with 450–500 miles of range, including “a three-row crossover” announced today that was likely the new electric Cadillac Escalade.

Higher ranges will necessitate bigger batteries, he noted, adding, “These batteries are huge.”

“These batteries are huge.”

Farley is right. US automakers are relying on supersized batteries to power their equally supersized EVs — namely, all the electric trucks that will soon flood the US market…

That’s why taxing EVs on kerbside weight might be the right thing to do.

Books, etc.Jeff Jarvis’s new book arrived the other day (I’m reviewing it for The Literary Review). It’s basically a book-length exploration of an idea first articulated by the Danish scholar Thomas Pettitt in 2010 — the notion that the period from, roughly, the 15th century to the 20th, an age defined by textuality — was really an interruption (a parenthesis) in the broader arc of human communication. And that we are now, via the architecture of the web, gradually returning to a state in which pre-Gutenberg orality — conversation, gossip, ephemera — defines our media culture.

There’s a nice video clip of Pettitt explaining his idea here.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Jeff does with it.

My commonplace bookletSubmarine cable map of the world

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Cyberspace was once defined (by William Gibson, I think) as “the space behind the screen”. Nowadays, I suppose that people think of it as residing in the ‘Cloud’ (another misleading euphemism for thousands of huge metal sheds called ‘data-centres’ or even ‘server farms’. But there are good grounds for thinking that Cyberspace also exists underwater, in the global network of submarine cables.

Note also how the cables mirror the pathways of 19th century colonial power.

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Flora and Fauna of East AngliaA real basket-case, seen yesterday in a nice farm just outside Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself”

Raymond Chandler

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsEric Clapton | Walkin’ Blues

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Long Read of the Day Why So Many Conservatives Feel Like Losers

You may have noticed that some kind of wacky US-funded conference about ‘real’ conservatism took place in London recently. Fortunately for the rest of us, Helen Lewis was there. And her dispatch is a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.

Sample:

The first day of the conference was dominated by one subject: babies. In the opening session, Miriam Cates, a Conservative member of Parliament, identified low birth rates as the biggest problem facing the West, attributing the phenomenon both to concrete policy challenges and a liberal individualism that she deemed “completely powerless to resist a cultural Marxism that is systematically destroying our children’s souls.”

Over the next two days, speakers offered a lot of this sort of thing—what George W. Bush might have described as “some weird shit.” Cates’s fellow Tory Danny Kruger devoted part of his speech to condemning a “new religion” of “Marxism and narcissism and paganism.” The historian David Starkey claimed that critical race theorists “do not care about Black lives, they only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture.” I began to keep score of how many speakers asserted that Britain had been through a cultural revolution, the evidence for which was that students are quite left-wing and annoying. Over and over, this was attributed to “indoctrination.”

Or this:

Undeterred by outside criticism, Hazony played the hits, attacking “woke neo-Marxism” and ending with an exhortation that we should all have more children and become more religious. He was in happy company because the next speaker was Jacob Rees-Mogg (six children, the last of whom is named Sixtus). Rees-Mogg, a devout Catholic, started playing a caricature of an English toff in early life and has not stopped yet. His speech took in Saint Thomas Aquinas, Charlemagne, the Treaty of Westphalia, habeas corpus, Edward the Confessor, and occasional snatches of Latin. “Are DeSantis speeches like this?” texted a friend on the other side of the hall. “Slightly less about Aquinas and the French monarchy,” I replied. “Slightly more about Disney.”

Magical stuff. Do read it.

Ian Hacking RIPThe great Canadian philosopher of science has passed away at the age of 87.

There are two nice early obituaries in the NYT and the Globe and Mail

The last thing by him that I read was his terrific Introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of my favourite books. (I wrote a short essay about it when the anniversary edition appeared in 2012.)

Brad DeLong’s questionFrom his blog:

Text-producing Generative ChatBots are, in a sense, somewhat tuned (by actual human feedback) Internet simulators: they show you what the Internet would be likely to say in response to the prompt that you have fed it, based on its assessment of what pages on the Internet are “close” to your prompt. (Much of the magic is in the definition and metric of “close” that the neural network constructs for itself—a metric that is largely inaccessible and largely incomprehensible to humans. But I digress.) That makes text-producing Generative ChatBots a reasonable way of taking the temperature of the conventional wisdom of humanity, or rather of that part of humanity that is compelled by mercenary, addiction, or egocentric reasons to write on the Internet.

But what are picture-producing Generative ImageBots doing. Are they too Internet simulators? Are they a way of taking the temperature of… not the conventional wisdom… rather the id of humanity, or at least of that portion of humanity compelled by mercenary, addiction, or egocentric reasons to put pictures on the internet and write captions for them?

He goes on to try some prompts on Stable Diffusion (one of the Generative AIs that do images). The results are not very interesting (IMHO) but his question is nevertheless an insightful one.

Also, I like his formulation that LLMs “show you what the Internet would be likely to say in response to the prompt that you have fed it”.

My commonplace booklet Our delivery Yacht had a serious interaction with a large pod of Orcas

Absolutely riveting nine-minute video of a scary encounter in the Straits of Gibraltar.

If I had a yacht, I’d like this guy to be its captain.

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Coffeehouse art

Quote of the Day

“Eternal truths are always hypothetical.”

Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBeniamino Gigli | O sole mio

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If you think this is corny then you ain’t heard nothing yet. Many years ago, I made my first trip to Venice. It was in November and I was on my own, and knew nothing about the city save what I had read in newspapers. (You know the old jokes — like the one about the Hearst correspondent who arrived and was taken aback by the place. He cables back to base: “STREETS FULL OF WATER STOP PLEASE ADVISE”. Alas, I can never remember the reply.)

Anyway, after I’d checked into my hotel, I went for a walk, and promptly got lost. And then, as I blundered down a narrow alleyway, I heard someone singing this in faux-Gigli style, vibrato and all. I turned a corner, came to a canal and saw one of those plush black gondolas, in which reclined an affluent couple while they were serenaded by the gondolier. And I remember thinking: you couldn’t make this up.

When I got home I told my kids about it. They refused to believe the gondolier was singing O sole mio. He was, they explained, singing “Just one Cornetto”, as sung by a gondolier in an ice-cream ad then popular on British TV.

Long Read of the DayWhat neo-Luddites get right — and wrong — about Big Tech

Is AI the latest threat to livelihoods? That depends on society

Characteristically thoughtful column by Tim Harford in the Financial Times and hopefully outside the paywall.

If it’s not, the paragraphs below contain the gist.

Neo-Luddites can take inspiration from John Booth, a 19-year-old apprentice who joined a Luddite attack on a textile mill in April 1812. He was injured, detained and died after being allegedly tortured to give up the identity of his fellow Luddites. Booth’s last words became a legend: “Can you keep a secret?” he whispered to the local priest, who attested that he could. The dying Booth replied, “So can I.” But it was Booth’s earlier words which deserve our attention. The new machinery, he argued, “might be man’s chief blessing instead of his curse if society were differently constituted”.

In other words, whether new technology helps ordinary citizens depends not just on the nature of the technology but on the nature of the society in which that technology is developed and deployed. Acemoglu and Johnson argue that broad-based flourishing is currently eluding us, just as it eluded the workers of the early industrial revolution.

Worth reading in full if it’s available.

Books, etc.I’ve been reading — and enjoying — Sarah Bakewell’s lovely book on existentialism and its adherents. I got it partly because my late wife Carol and I were fascinated by existentialist ideas when we were students (and she took it further by writing a M. Litt thesis on Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography, and even interviewed the Grande Dame herself in her Paris apartment).

Years ago I had read (and also enjoyed) Bakewell’s book on Montaigne — from which I came away with the idea that he could be seen as the first blogger. She’s very good at untangling and explaining abstract philosophical ideas. Here she is, for example, early in the new book, on Husserl’s emphasis of the importance of intentionality — the fact that when we think, we are always thinking about something.

Just try it: if you attempt to sit for two minutes and think about nothing, you will probably get an inkling of why intentionality is so fundamental to human existence. The mind races around like a foraging squirrel in a park, grabbing in turn at a flashing phone–screen, a distant mark on the wall, a clink of cups, a cloud that resembles a whale, a memory of something a friend said yesterday, a twinge in the knee, a pressing deadline, a vague expectation of nice weather later, a tick of the clock. Some Eastern meditation techniques aim to still this scurrying creature, but the extreme difficulty of this shows how unnatural it is to be mentally inert. Left to itself, the mind reaches out in all directions as long as it is awake – and even carries on doing it in the dreaming phase of sleep.

Re her earlier book on Montaigne: in a nice coincidence, my friend and colleague David Runciman picked one of his essays — the longest and most puzzling one — as his subject for the first episode in his new ‘History of Ideas’ podcast series.

My commonplace bookletAI-powered Photoshop

I don’t use Photoshop, or do fakery, but if I did I’d be interested in this.

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Lilies: helicopter viewA gift from a dinner guest the other day.

Quote of the Day

“The Internet is less a ‘marketplace of ideas (as conservatives and libertarians would have it) and more a ‘marketplace of passions’.”

Will Davies, writing on fandom in the London Review of Books.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsPinetop Perkins | Pinetop’s Blues

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Long Read of the DayDoug Rushkoff Is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution

Interesting profile in Wired.

“I was pretty freaking excited in the ’90s about the possibilities for a new kind of peer-to-peer economy. What we would build that would be like a TOR network of economics, the great Napsterization of economics in a digital environment,” he tells his students. But more recently, he continues, he’s turned his attention to something else that this new digital economy has created: “It made a bunch of billionaires and a whole lot of really poor, unhappy people.”

This kind of rhetoric is part of a recent, decisive shift in direction for Rushkoff. For the past 30 years, across more than a dozen nonfiction books, innumerable articles, and various media projects about the state of society in the internet age, Rushkoff had always walked a tightrope between optimism and skepticism. He was one of the original enthusiasts of technology’s prosocial potential, charting a path through the digital landscape for those who shared his renegade, anti-government spirit. As Silicon Valley shed its cyberpunk soul and devolved into an incubator of corporate greed, he continued to advocate for his values from within. Until now. Last fall, with the publication of his latest book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, Rushkoff all but officially renounced his membership in the guild of spokespeople for the digital revolution. So what happened?

Like me, he’s a recovering Utopian.

Worth reading.

AI will be everywhere, but its rise will be mundane not apocalypticMy column in yesterday’s Observer:

In March, OpenAI decided that it needn’t just be a service provider – it could also be a platform on which other companies could build businesses. So it published a set of application programming interfaces (API) that would allow developers to add a version of ChatGPT to their services (for a fee, of course) without having to sink shedloads of money into building and training their own language models. This was the step that more or less guaranteed that ChatGPT would, in due course, be everywhere.

A good analogy is what happened with Google Maps…

Read on.

How to regulate crypto: treat it like the gambling that it isFrom Molly White (Whom God Preserve):

The UK Parliament’s Treasury Committee has released a report suggesting that the cryptocurrency industry should be regulated like gambling, rather than as a financial service:

Regardless of the regulatory regime, their price volatility and absence of intrinsic value means that unbacked cryptoassets will inevitably pose significant risks to consumers. Furthermore, consumer speculation in unbacked cryptoassets more closely resembles gambling than it does a financial service. We are concerned that regulating retail trading and investment activity in unbacked cryptoassets as a financial service will create a ‘halo’ effect that leads consumers to believe that this activity is safer than it is, or protected when it is not.

We strongly recommend that the Government regulates retail trading and investment activity in unbacked cryptoassets as gambling rather than as a financial service, consistent with its stated principle of ‘same risk, same regulatory outcome’.

That’s more like it.

The tech industry isn’t interested in history…… because it thinks there’s nothing to be learned from it.

Revealing passage From The Verge’s report of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s gig at UCL the other day.

However, he said, he was hopeful about the future. Extremely hopeful. Altman says he believes even current AI tools will reduce inequality in the world and that there will be “way more jobs on the other side of this technological revolution.”

“This technology will lift all of the world up.”

“My basic model of the world is that the cost of intelligence and the cost of energy are the two limited inputs, sort of the two limiting reagents of the world. And if you can make those dramatically cheaper, dramatically more accessible, that does more to help poor people than rich people, frankly,” he said. “This technology will lift all of the world up.”

Altman clearly needs to read Power and Progress which chronicles a thousand years of technological development during which the most of the rewards went to the rich and powerful who owned the technology. Except for a few exceptional periods, the rising tide mostly floated yachts.

My commonplace booklet If you must go to court, get a proper lawyer.

A cautionary tale from the New York Times.

A man named Roberto Mata sued the airline Avianca, saying he was injured when a metal serving cart struck his knee during a flight to Kennedy International Airport in New York.

When Avianca asked a Manhattan federal judge to toss out the case, Mr. Mata’s lawyers vehemently objected, submitting a 10-page brief that cited more than half a dozen relevant court decisions. There was Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and, of course, Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, with its learned discussion of federal law and “the tolling effect of the automatic stay on a statute of limitations.”

There was just one hitch: No one — not the airline’s lawyers, not even the judge himself — could find the decisions or the quotations cited and summarized in the brief.

That was because ChatGPT had invented everything…

It’s a hoot. Or, more pedantically perhaps, an hoot.

ErrataRe Kissinger at 100…

Holger Huber writes:

The quote from Mother Jones is confusing. It appears to say that Operation Breakfast (more precisely Operation Menu) caused between 150000 to 500000 casualties. Wikipedia states the following:

There are no confirmed estimates of Cambodians killed, wounded, or rendered homeless by Operation Menu. The Department of Defense estimated that the six areas bombed in Operation Menu (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snack, Dessert, and Supper) had a non-combatant population of 4,247. DOD planners stated that the effect of attacks could tend to increase casualties, as could the probable lack of protective shelters around Cambodian homes”.

MJ might have been mixing up Operation Menu with Operation Freedom Deal, about which Wikipedia has to say the following: The number of deaths caused by U.S. bombing has been disputed and is difficult to disentangle from the broader Cambodian Civil War. Estimates as wide-ranging as 30,000 to 600,000 have been cited. Sihanouk used a figure of 600,000 civil war deaths, while Elizabeth Becker reported over one million civil war deaths, military and civilian included, although other researchers could not corroborate such high estimates. Marek Sliwinski notes that many estimates of the dead are open to question and may have been used for propaganda, suggesting that the true number lies between 240,000 and 310,000.

Judith Banister and E. Paige Johnson described 275,000 war deaths as “the highest mortality that we can justify”. Patrick Heuveline states that “Subsequent reevaluations of the demographic data situated the death toll for the [civil war] in the order of 300,000 or less”. Of these civil war deaths, Sliwinski estimates that approximately 17.1% can be attributed to U.S. bombing, noting that this is far behind the leading causes of death, as the U.S. bombing was concentrated in under-populated border areas. Ben Kiernan attributes 50,000 to 150,000 deaths to the U.S. bombing. According to Larry Clinton Thompson, 150,000 seems to be the best estimate.

Whether that changes anything in one’s judgement of Henry Kissinger is a different matter, but I have been alway intrigued that Kissinger seems to be made often solely responsible for the US actions abroad, as if he was acting behind Nixon’s back.

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Business lunch?

Quote of the Day“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect . . .”

Jonathan Swift

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsLiam O’Flynn, Seán Keane, Paddy Glackin, Arty McGlynn & Paul Brady | Gradam Ceoil TG4 2007

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I still remember vividly the first time I heard Liam play — in a crowded room in an hotel on the coast of Galway Bay one Summer evening. I was mesmerised then, and am still whenever I come on a recording of him and his peers in action. There’s something about his calm, still impassivity and his absolute mastery of his instrument.

Long Read of the DayAn interview with Dan Wang

For years, one of the great treats in following the geopolitical aspects of technology was Dan Wang’s Annual Letter from China. But now he has left China and returned to the US, taking up a position at the Yale Law school. So Noah Smith (who had advised him years ago to make the move to China) booked a long interview with him, of which this is an edited transcript.

It’s fascinating. Here’s a sample:

Smith: What’s different about semiconductors and advanced aviation? Why has China not been as successful in catching up in those sectors?

Noah: I think there has been a consistent pattern of Chinese successes and failures. Any technology that demands the complex integration of different scientific areas is challenging for Chinese firms. Semiconductors bring together electrical engineering, chemistry, computer science, and more; aviation is the integration of aerodynamics, materials science, mechanical engineering, etc. China’s scientific capabilities have steadily risen, but I would say it’s still fairly weak. No surprise, perhaps, that Chinese firms weren’t able to produce mRNA vaccines, since its scientific establishment is unused to puttering around the fringes of new fields.

On the other hand, for any technology where the science is mature, and the complexity lies more with the manufacturing process, China tends to be strong. Take renewable technologies like solar photovoltaics or EV batteries. The science of turning light into electricity and power storage are pretty well understood. But Chinese firms have been able to outbuild their foreign competition (with plenty help from government support) in creating high-performing products. Putting together a battery, for example, involves around ten steps—from cell filling to final sealing—that demand perfect handoff at each stage. Chinese firms are really good at this, which they learned from the highly-demanding electronics supply chain.

And here the US tends to be weak. American manufacturers aren’t good at making products of high intricacy at high volume. And it sometimes trips over simple products too. It’s puzzling to me that American factories weren’t able to quickly retool to turn out masks and other personal protective equipment in the early days of 2020. There’s something quite strange about the US where it is able to make super-advanced products like AI, jet engines, semiconductor production equipment, but can’t build basic infrastructure or simple products…

Do read it. I think he should now start doing a Letter from America every year, aimed at Chinese audiences.

Books, etc.Diane Coyle has been reading Ian Dunt’s book. Her brisk review of it is characteristically concise — as is the headling over it: “Competent government? Read and weep”.

It’s an excellent book, forensic in its analysis of the operations of the UK’s central government – and that is exactly why it’s so deeply depressing and angry-making. The chapters cover both the political processes – selection of MPs, role of special advisers, the imbalance of power between the Executive and Parliament, lobby journalism – and the official aspects – an amateur-by-design civil service that’s becoming ever-less capable, increasing tensions between ministers and officials, the dire impact of the Treasury. The book is even handed, pointing out that many of the trends that make for ineffective government today started in the 1990s or before, and were accelerated significantly by New Labour, before being turbo-charged by the succession of Conservative governments that have followed.

The key takeaways, she writes are:

It would actually be a bad idea to reform the House of Lords as it’s the only part that semi-functions

None of the actors in UK national politics have any incentive to change anything – for instance, proportional representation would be excellent but neither Tories nor Labour want it

I already thought more devolution to sub-national levels is desirable, and now think it’s the only hope of introducing any competence into UK government (although many people in Whitehall and Westminster have the cheek to talk about a lack of capacity at local level).

And, she adds,

If you really want to get angry about the pervasive incompetence of the government, just read the chapter on Afghanistan. Shameful.

Welcome to ‘global Britain’.

I might just have to buy the book, even though I suspect that Dominic Cummings loves it.

My commonplace bookletWar criminal turns 100 this week

From Mother Jones:

In early 1969, shortly after Nixon moved into the White House and inherited the Vietnam War, he, Kissinger, and others cooked up a plan to secretly bomb Cambodia, in pursuit of enemy camps. With the perversely-named “Operation Breakfast” launched, White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman wrote in his diary, Kissinger and Nixon were “really excited.” The action, though, was of dubious legality; the United States was not at war with Cambodia and Congress had not authorized the carpet-bombing, which Nixon tried to keep a secret. The US military dropped 540,000 tons of bombs. They didn’t just hit enemy outposts. The estimates of Cambodian civilians killed range between 150,000 and 500,000.

I often think of Tom Lehrer’s crack that “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize”.

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Books to infinityA corridor in my favourite library.

Quote of the Day

”He once remarked that he would sell his grandmother for a finely turned phrase, and if I were his grandmother I would have taken this comment seriously enough to go into hiding.”

Terry Eagleton on Martin Amis

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsHaydn | Trumpet Concerto | Tarkövi · Minkowski | Karajan-Academy of the Berliner Philharmoniker

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Long Read of the DayThe One Best Way Is a Trap

Interesting and thoughtful essay by L.M. Sacacas on how technology’s relentless quest for optimisation is inhumane.

The 20th century French polymath, Jacques Ellul, wrote around 50 books, but he is best remembered for The Technological Society.1 And this fat book, stuffed with countless examples, basically conveys a single overarching idea: modern society is ordered by one master principle, which Ellul, in French, called la technique.

The standard definition of technique from Ellul goes like this: “Technique is the totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.”

That may not be the most elegant or memorable formulation. Lately, I’ve been summing up Ellul’s technique by describing it as the relentless drive to optimize all human experience for efficiency.

But Ellul also helped us out with another more felicitous phrasing. He referred to technique as the search for the “one best way.”

Later on, Sacasas writes,

Perhaps it is simply the case that a society ordered by technique, by the relentless pursuit of optimization, by a compulsive search for the “one best way,” necessarily yields a mental health crisis by generating unattainable goals and unsustainable pressures to, quite literally, measure up.

btw: The best contemporary articulation of the ‘optimisation’ thesis that I’ve found is System Error: where biog tech went wrong and how we can reboot by Weinstein, Reich and Sahami.

Books, etc.I’ve written about this before but came on it the other day when I was looking for something else. It’s one of the nicest books I own — a diary of a year with a photograph a day accompanied by a thought, an aphorism or a memory. It’s truly beautiful work by a great artist.

FeedbackKeith Devlin (Whom God Preserve) was moved by my reference to the FT’s account of the decline of San Francisco to write:

Reports of San Francisco’s death are greatly exaggerated, as Mark Twain would have said. Post-Trump and post-pandemic (mostly the latter), that FT doom-fiction (lacking only a heavily armed Charlton Heston careering around in a jeep) could describe pretty well any large US city these days, and on a smaller scale even small towns like our nearest Petaluma. Meanwhile, I don’t see any gloom among those of us who live in this region; just an acceptance that recovery from a global pandemic takes at least five years, and likely a whole lot longer given the way the world economy operates these days. But if those stories keep out the racist hoards from the Red states, I think we’ll all be thankful. :)

I hold no brief for the FT team who produced the report, but they do end on a more judicious note, viz

Fighting the Law

I should have known that my half-assed attempt at tracing the origins of a popular song would come unstuck.

Re I Fought the Law, Jonathan Holland writes:

Credit where credit’s due: despite your link, it was Sonny Curtis and not Buddy Holly who wrote and sang “I Fought the Law” with The Crickets, following Holly’s untimely death:

FT link

I once played an adapted version of it as a sendoff for a retiring faculty colleague, under the somewhat less rebellious title of “I Taught the Law”.

And then came the news that the Bobby Fuller Four had also recorded it — accompanied by a Link proving that this was indeed the case.

Garth Cartwright added some supporting detail:

as a music geek I’d like to note that while The Crickets first cut I Fought The Law it was Sonny Curtis – Buddy’s replacement – who wrote the tune and sang it. Then it was Bobby Fuller, the doomer Texan rocker, who made it a hit.

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OrchidsPassed this in a corridor yesterday and was struck by it. Extraordinary plants, orchids.

Quote of the Day

“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”

Jonathan Swift, 1704.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsGreen Day | I Fought The Law

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One of my favourite songs. Lots of other venerable recordings of it — by The Clash, for example, The Grateful Dead and, first of all (I think), Buddy Holly.

Long Read of the DayJust calm down about GPT-4 and stop confusing performance with competence.

IEEE Spectrum, an entirely sensible publication, has a great interview with Rodney Brooks on the current feeding frenzy about ‘AI’.

It’s a 13-minute read and worth it.

Sample:

You wrote a famous article in 2017, “The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Prediction.“ You said then that you wanted an artificial general intelligence to exist—in fact, you said it had always been your personal motivation for working in robotics and AI. But you also said that AGI research wasn’t doing very well at that time at solving the basic problems that had remained intractable for 50 years. My impression now is that you do not think the emergence of GPT-4 and other large language models means that an AGI will be possible within a decade or so.

Rodney Brooks: You’re exactly right. And by the way, GPT-3.5 guessed right—I asked it about me, and it said I was a skeptic about it. But that doesn’t make it an AGI.

The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. And I think what they say, interestingly, is how much of our language is very much rote, R-O-T-E, rather than generated directly, because it can be collapsed down to this set of parameters. But in that “Seven Deadly Sins” article, I said that one of the deadly sins was how we humans mistake performance for competence.

If I can just expand on that a little. When we see a person with some level performance at some intellectual thing, like describing what’s in a picture, for instance, from that performance, we can generalize about their competence in the area they’re talking about. And we’re really good at that. Evolutionarily, it’s something that we ought to be able to do. We see a person do something, and we know what else they can do, and we can make a judgement quickly. But our models for generalizing from a performance to a competence don’t apply to AI systems.

The example I used at the time was, I think it was a Google program labeling an image of people playing Frisbee in the park. And if a person says, “Oh, that’s a person playing Frisbee in the park,” you would assume you could ask him a question, like, “Can you eat a Frisbee?” And they would know, of course not; it’s made of plastic. You’d just expect they’d have that competence. That they would know the answer to the question, “Can you play Frisbee in a snowstorm? Or, how far can a person throw a Frisbee? Can they throw it 10 miles? Can they only throw it 10 centimeters?” You’d expect all that competence from that one piece of performance: a person saying, “That’s a picture of people playing Frisbee in the park.”

We don’t get that same level of competence from the performance of a large language model. When you poke it, you find that it doesn’t have the logical inference that it may have seemed to have in its first answer…

Do read it. Well-informed common sense from a real expert. And a good antidote to some of the current nonsense about ‘AIs’ that lack intelligence.

Books, etc.What we’ve just lost

Martin Amis has passed away, and the literary world is busy trying to assess his worth. There are already tons of obits and tributes — like a particularly good one by Lisa Allardice in the Guardian.

But I think the best way of understanding what we’ve list is to read him when he’s on song. Like in this 1998 essay on the genius of Jane Austen (and what the movie and TV adaptations get wrong).

Here’s how it begins…

Jane Austen, as they might say in Los Angeles, is suddenly hotter than Quentin Tarantino. But before we try to establish what the Austen phenomenon is, let us first establish what it is not.

About 18 months ago (in the summer of 1996) I went to see Four Weddings and a Funeral at a North London cineplex. Very soon I was filled with a yearning to be doing something else (for example, standing at a bus stop in the rain); and under normal circumstances I would have walked out after ten or fifteen minutes. But these weren’t normal circumstances. Beside me sat Salman Rushdie. For various reasons—various security reasons—we had to stay. Thus Ayatollah Khomeini had condemned me to sit through Four Weddings and a Funeral; and no Iranian torturer could have elicited a greater variety of winces and inches, of pleadings and whimperings. So one was obliged to submit, and to absorb a few social lessons.

It felt like a reversal of the Charles Addams cartoon: I sat there, thoroughly aghast, while everyone around me (save the author of The Satanic Verses) giggled and gurgled, positively hugging themselves with the deliciousness of it all. The only good bit came when you realized that the titular funeral would be dedicated to Simon Callow. I clenched my fist and said yes. No particular disrespect to Simon Callow—but at least one of them was going to die.

“Well,” I said, when it was over, “that was bottomlessly horrible. Why is it so popular?”

“Because,” said Salman, “the world has bad taste. Didn’t you know that?”

Still, “bad taste,” all by itself, won’t quite answer. I can see that the upper classes might enjoy watching the upper classes portrayed with such whimsical fondness. But why should it appeal to 400 plebs from Hendon? In any postwar decade other than the present one, Four Weddings would have provoked nothing but incredulous disgust. A 1960s audience would have wrecked the cinema. Yet now it seems that the old grievances have evaporated, and “the million,” as Hamlet called them, feel free to root for the (congenital) millionaires. They can lapse into a forgetful toadyism, and abase themselves before their historical oppressors…

Blissful. All that talent wrapped up in a diminutive person. May he rest in peace.

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So long, San Francisco?This shocking photograph on the cover of the FT’s weekend magazine heralded an extraordinary report (which may be behind a paywall, thought I hope not) about the catastrophic decline of San Francisco. It seems to be in the grip of the same kind of downward spiral that hollowed out Detroit in the 1970s — when it became the urban area on which Jay Forrester’s famous modelling study Urban Dynamics was effectively based.

Of course I knew that the city was having problems, despite (or perhaps because of) being just up the road from Silicon Valley, the greatest wealth-creating machine in the history of the world. But I had no idea things were as bad as the article reports. When my late wife Sue and I were there in the 1990s we both felt that, if we had to live permanently in the US, SF was where we would want to be.

Quote of the Day

“One day while Mr. Edison and I were calling on Luther Burbank in California, he asked us to register in his guest book. The book had a column for signature, another for home address, another for occupation and a final one entitled ‘Interested in’. Mr. Edison signed in a few quick but unhurried motions… In the final column he wrote without an instant’s hesitation: ‘Everything'”.

Henry Ford on Thomas Edison.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsHaydn | String Quartet No. 62, Op. 76 No. 3 “Emperor” (2nd movement) | Veridis Quartet (Live performance)

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Long Read of the DayThe rise of pluto-populism — and its consequences

Long — and very sobering — review by Jonathan Kirshner of Martin Wolf’s recent book on the fraught relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy.

It is hard not to be in agreement—even deeply moved agreement—with Wolf’s diagnoses. And the middle third of this book, “What Went Wrong,” should be required reading for anyone who might underestimate the present danger faced by even long-standing “consolidated democracies.” When it comes to solutions, unfortunately, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism comes up short. Wolf, ever measured, is convincing in making the case for reform over revolution. Although it is tempting to think that deeply ingrained problems require tearing things down, revolutionary movements almost invariably spiral out of control, fall into the hands of ever more radical extremists, and devolve into bloodbaths. Yet it is disheartening that the sensible, reformist agenda of reasonable, practical measures that Wolf outlines already seems beyond the capacity of our politics.

This admirable review-essay provides pretty good support for my feeling that we now need a ‘Theory of Incompetent Systems’ — i.e. ones that cannot fix themselves. If democracies are to survive in any meaningful sense, then radical changes are needed — many of them proposed and argues for by Wolf. But…

Books, etc.My Observer review of Scott Shapiro’s book:

As we head towards 2030, a terrible realisation is dawning on us – that we have built a world that is critically dependent on a set of technologies that almost nobody understands, and which are also extremely fragile and insecure. Fancy Bear Goes Phishing seeks to tackle both sides of this dilemma: our collective ignorance, on the one hand, and our insecurity on the other. Its author says that he embarked on the project seeking an understanding of just three things. Why is the internet so insecure? How (and why) do the hackers who exploit its vulnerabilities do what they do? And what can be done about it?

In ornithological terms, Scott Shapiro is a pretty rare bird – an eminent legal scholar who is also a geek…

Read on

How extreme heat killsAndrew Dessler explains how, and in doing so answers a question that for me first came up when I was reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.

When ambient temperatures are in the 80s, sweating supplements sensible heat loss, so we don’t have to sweat much to keep our bodies at the right temperature.

But as temperatures rise and the environmental temperature approaches our body temperature, sensible heat transport becomes less effective and we rely more and more on latent heat transport to get rid of heat. This means we need to sweat more to keep thermoregulated.

As the environmental temperature rises above your body temperature, the direction of the temperature gradient reverses and sensible heat transport begins heating your body. At this point, you need to sweat even more so that the sweat can remove your body’s 100 W plus the heat absorbed from the environment.

“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity”: Sweating by itself doesn’t cool you — the sweat has to evaporate. One of the factors that controls this is humidity of the environment…

When the air temperature is high, the body cannot cool itself with sensible heat transfer. And when the humidity is high, the body also cannot cool itself with latent heat transfer (sweating). Under those conditions, people’s core temperatures will rise and even young, healthy people will experience heat-related illnesses such as heat exhaustion, heat stroke, or even death. Even if they’re sitting still in the shade, with a fan on them.

My commonplace bookletThe Problem With Counterfeit People

The philosopher Dan Dennett thinks that, with so-called ‘AI’ and chatbots, the tech industry is forging humans.

Which is why we really must stop anthropomorphising chatbots.

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Jesus on the Mainline

Quote of the Day

“I met Curzon in Downing Street, from whom I got the sort of greeting a corpse would give to an undertaker.”

Stanley Baldwin, 1933, after Baldwin became Prime Minister, a job that Lord Curzon had always wanted.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBon Dylan | Bob Dylan – Visions of Johanna (Official Audio)

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Wow!

Long Read of the DayAn Anthropologist of Filth

A wonderful review essay by Ian Penman on R.J. Smith’s new biography of Chuck Berry. Hard to believe that Berry died in 2017. I had assumed that he hadn’t outlived the 1960s. And reading Penman’s closing para…

Nothing that Berry did and was mocked and punished for down the years—the underage girls, the tax fraud, “My Ding-A-Ling,” the lawsuit, his own sex tapes—has ultimately interfered with his place in history. The request from the venerable Museum of African American History and Culture came in 2011, long after all the scandals had been unveiled. His niche in the pantheon just seems to keep expanding. “Johnny B. Goode” was one of the twenty-seven songs included on the two golden phonograph records stashed on board the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. Quite a journey: from fruit truck to Cadillac to jet plane to spaceship. He will outlive us all…

I guess that in our current age of ‘cancel culture’ none of his songs would be dispatched on an interplanetary mission to other hypothetical civilisations.

When the tech boys start asking for new regulations, you know something’s upMy column in yesterday’s Observer.

Watching the opening day of the US Senate hearings on AI brought to mind Marx’s quip about history repeating itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”. Except this time it’s the other way round. Some time ago we had the farce of the boss of Meta (neé Facebook) explaining to a senator that his company made money from advertising. This week we had the tragedy of seeing senators quizzing Sam Altman, the new acceptable face of the tech industry.

Why tragedy? Well, as one of my kids, looking up from revising O-level classics, once explained to me: “It’s when you can see the disaster coming but you can’t do anything to stop it.” The trigger moment was when Altman declared: “We think that regulatory interventions by government will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.” Warming to the theme, he said that the US government “might consider a combination of licensing and testing requirements for development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities”. He believed that companies like his can “partner with governments, including ensuring that the most powerful AI models adhere to a set of safety requirements, facilitating processes that develop and update safety measures and examining opportunities for global coordination.”

To some observers, Altman’s testimony looked like big news: wow, a tech boss actually saying that his industry needs regulation! Less charitable observers (like this columnist) see two alternative interpretations…

Do read the whole thing.

And see also Steven Sinofsky on When a Business Pleads to be Regulated.

Books, etc.We’ve been reading this for the last week or so, and it’s even better than I remember it.

Here’s an excerpt that had us hooting with laughter the other night — about his first visit to a church on his travels across the US.

https://memex.naughtons.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Steinbeck-audio.mp3Link

My commonplace bookletThe Langley Files

From a recent edition of the CIA’s Podcast series: precautionary advice (for Americans, I guess) on travelling abroad, culled from what its agents are taught.

ErrataThe letter from Keynes to Duncan Grant quoted in Friday’s edition was dated 1917, and not 2017 as I inadvertently stated.

Thanks to the tactful readers who pointed this out, including a couple who were regretful that Keynes is not around today to give us his views on the economic policies of the current UK government.

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Yochai in OxfordYochai Benkler, dressed in his best bib and tucker for a dinner we were at in Balliol, November 2012.

He’s a great legal scholar — and one of the most insightful observers of our networked world.

Quote of the Day

”I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.”

J.M. Keynes, writing from the Treasury in a letter to Duncan Grant, December 1917.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsRimsky Korsakov | Flight of the Bumble Bee

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Tomorrow is World Bee Day and Pam Appleby (Whom God Preserve) wrote to ask if it’d be possible to play this today, given that the blog doesn’t appear on Saturdays. And I’m happy to oblige.

And an email from Anthony Barnett (possibly sparked by the photograph of a beet factory in full operation in Wednesday’s edition) reminded me that in 2021, according to a Guardian report

A pesticide believed to kill bees has been authorised for use in England despite an EU-wide ban on its use outdoors two years ago and an explicit government pledge to keep the restrictions.

Following lobbying from the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) and British Sugar, a product containing the neonicotinoid thiamethoxam was sanctioned for emergency use on sugar beet seeds this year because of the threat posed by a virus…

Which perhaps indicates what the real price of refined sugar is.

Long Read of the DayHow to avoid the red herrings carefully laid by oil companies

A good case study in critical thinking by a philosophy professor, Kathleen Dean Moore.

Time after time, the real issue stands before us, and we find ourselves baying after some side issue of far less importance. I quiz my students: Explain, give examples.

Here’s one. Thirty-eight rail cars filled with vinyl chloride derailed and caught fire in East Palestine, Ohio. Vinyl chloride, a flammable petroleum product, is a potent carcinogen. When it is burned, it creates dioxin, another nasty carcinogen that now permeates the town. A familiar pattern followed: lamentations over the derailing; a cascade of reporters; a debate in Congress. Finally, politicians, commentators and outraged citizens all posed these questions: how will we punish the railroads? And how can we make railroads safer?

Those are the wrong questions. What I want to know is why would any sensible people allow the US petrochemical industry annually to produce 7.2 million metric tons of a poison that causes liver, lung, and brain cancer, and to distribute it as polyvinyl chloride in water pipes, gutters, rubber duckies, and My Little Pony dolls?

Lovely. Do read it through. Among other things, you will discover where the phrase “red herring” comes from.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for spotting it.

Your iPhone will soon be able to speak in your voiceAt last, a bit of good news from a tech company.

To train the system, which Apple plans to ship later this year, you position yourself about six to 10 inches from the iPhone’s microphone, and then repeat a series of randomly selected sentences. That’s apparently enough to train the iPhone’s onboard machine learning (ML), and enable the handset to repeat what you type in your synthetically-generated voice.

Since the system is designed to help those who are losing their voices due to motor or cognitive impairment, the training is also flexible. If you can’t do a 15-minute training session, you can stop and start until you’ve made it through all the sentences. In addition, the training system is self-guided, so there’s no screen-tapping necessary.

While the system is not designed as a voice-over system, you can use Personal Vocie to save often-used phrases like “How are you?” “Thank you,” and “Where is the bathroom?”

My commonplace booklet Unboxing Shakespeare’s First Folio

This video (from the V&A Museum) about the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays is 12 minutes of delight. I’d often heard of the First Folio, but had never seen a copy. As Elizabeth James, the Senior Librarian of National Art Library Collections, opened the box containing the volume I was suddenly reminded of a moment 20 years ago when Anne Jarvis, then the University Librarian in Cambridge, opened the library’s copy of Isaac Newton’s own copy of his Principia — with all his scribbled annotations. And suddenly I was transported back 300 years. Magical moment.

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They’ve arrived!Our cornflowers are out! Maybe Summer is on the way after all.

Quote of the Day

“Lying wastes more time than anything else in the modern world”

Margery Allingham

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSchumann | Piano Quartet in E Flat Major, Op. 47 | 3. Andante cantabile (Live) | Janine Jansen · Julian Rachlin · Mischa Maisky · Martha Argerich

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Long Read of the DayThomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science

An essay I wrote in 2012 to mark the 50th anniversary of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book that changed the way we look at science, and certainly shaped the way I’ve thought ever since about academic disciplines.

Fifty years ago this month, one of the most influential books of the 20th century was published by the University of Chicago Press. Many if not most lay people have probably never heard of its author, Thomas Kuhn, or of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but their thinking has almost certainly been influenced by his ideas. The litmus test is whether you’ve ever heard or used the term “paradigm shift”, which is probably the most used – and abused – term in contemporary discussions of organisational change and intellectual progress. A Google search for it returns more than 10 million hits, for example. And it currently turns up inside no fewer than 18,300 of the books marketed by Amazon. It is also one of the most cited academic books of all time. So if ever a big idea went viral, this is it.

The real measure of Kuhn’s importance, however, lies not in the infectiousness of one of his concepts but in the fact that he singlehandedly changed the way we think about mankind’s most organised attempt to understand the world. Before Kuhn, our view of science was dominated by philosophical ideas about how it ought to develop (“the scientific method”), together with a heroic narrative of scientific progress as “the addition of new truths to the stock of old truths, or the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, and in the odd case, the correction of past errors”, as the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy puts it. Before Kuhn, in other words, we had what amounted to the Whig interpretation of scientific history, in which past researchers, theorists and experimenters had engaged in a long march, if not towards “truth”, then at least towards greater and greater understanding of the natural world.

Kuhn’s version of how science develops differed dramatically from the Whig version…

Hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

My commonplace bookletYou studied computer science but Big Tech no longer wants you. Now what?

Nice essay by Charlie McCann in the Economist’s 1983 Magazine which I hope is outside the paywall.

Armed with a stack of cvs still warm from the printer, Ayara (a pseudonym) plunged into the career fair. The room was already packed with job-seekers. The second-year student wasn’t expecting much. In past years, a computer-science student at the University of California, Berkeley, could hope to emerge from this campus ritual with an interesting summer internship, possibly at a “faang” company – the acronym for Facebook (now Meta), Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. Ayara’s best friend had snagged an internship at Apple at a fair like this one.

But none of the faang firms was here this time. Neither were Spotify, Salesforce, Uber or Microsoft. In any case most of those companies and almost 50 others – “all the famous ones” – had already rejected her internship applications a few months earlier. And that was before the latest round of job lay-offs…

Aw shucks. That’s what happens when the laws of economic gravity begin to apply to the parallel universe known as Silicon Valley.

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Agribusiness 2.0A beet factory in Norfolk.

Quote of the Day

“Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.”

Erich Fromm

Geoffrey Vickers, the wisest man I ever knew, once said to me that “the hardest thing in life is to know what to want. Most people never figure it out and wind up pretending that they wanted what they could get.”

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsDiana Krall | Just The Way You Are

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Long Read of the DayOn Generative AI and Satisficing

Useful insights from Dave Karpf.

I’ve been thinking recently about how generative AI tools might fit into our lives. The best framework I can come up with revolves around Herbert Simon’s concept of “satisficing.”

Satisfice is a portmaneau of “satisfy” and “suffice.” Simon won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on the topic. He disputed the then-common assumption that people approximately behaved like perfect economically-rational agents, gathering unlimited information to make optimal decisions. In fact, as he showed that doing so would be irrational, because of the opportunity cost of limitless information-gathering.

In layman’s terms, we satisfice by (1) figuring out what conditions must be met/ what information must be gained in order to reach a good enough (satisfactory) decision, (2) researching until we reach that threshold, and then (3) settling on what you have found. Simon argued that this type of bounded rationality was a better model of actual human decision-making than the rational actor models that the economists of his day trafficked in.

Satisficing can seem identical to laziness. When I plan a vacation or purchase a new appliance, I resist the urge to spend countless hours researching the perfect hotel or trying to find the perfect dishwasher. I do enough research to find an option that suits my needs, then I stop looking. For example, I bought a grill a couple years ago. I looked on Wirecutter. I decided which of their recommendations most fit my needs (gas or charcoal? Do I need a smart grill? How big?). I checked one other website to see if the recommendations lined up. And then I confirmed it was available at the nearby hardware store.Done. It is possible that a few hours of research would’ve yielded a better grill or a slightly cheaper grill. But not so much better or cheaper as to be worth the effort. Boom. Satisficed…

Read on to find what he does with this idea. It’s really interesting.

Books, etc.William Harris has a perceptive review essay in Jacobin on Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors, a kaleidoscopic study of the late West German filmmaker.

If you read NME in its heyday, this is for you.

The late ’70s and early ’80s blew new winds into the music press. Punk gave way to post-punk; regional styles proliferated, often outside the mainstream gaze; and a renewed sense of oppositional political commitment suffused the air, as Labour Party socialists took over London’s municipal government while Margaret Thatcher rose to power on the national stage.

The NME, the magazine that invented the weekly pop charts, transformed itself into a magazine of regional dispatches on the DIY scenes in Manchester and Belfast, attacks against apartheid and Thatcher, and long-form essays on pop culture that sought not just to apply poststructuralist theory to pop music and movies, but to see pop music and movies as themselves coursing with ideas and novel ways of seeing.

Notoriously, these theory-minded pop reviews were authored by two writers, Ian Penman and Paul Morley, though in the years following they would spawn many imitators, both at NME and in other music magazines like Melody Maker…

My commonplace bookletThe Lord of the Rings by Wes Anderson

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Don’t forget to un-mute the video.

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BibliophiliaCambridge Market in 2012.

Quote of the Day

“We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment from a contrast and very little from a state of things.”

Sigmund Freud (in Civilisation and its Discontents)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSchubert | Impromptu n°3 | Horowitz

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Long Read of the DayThe Fifth Horseperson of the Tory Apocalypse

David Aaronovitch used to be one of the few columnists on the London Times that I ever bothered to read. That’s because he is trenchant, smart and very good at calling spades spades. But then, for reasons that are not too difficult to guess, he seems to have fallen out with the management and now has his own Substack newsletter, to which I have subscribed. This essay, posted on May 13, gives a flavour of what he’s good at. It also vividly illustrates the nature of the jerks now in high office in the UK, of which the current ‘Secretary of State for Business’ is a prime example.

The nub of the story is that the Tory government has had to climb down on its original plan to have a bonfire of all the 4,000 EU regulations which Brexiteers claimed to be crippling ‘Global Britain’. But she couldn’t bear to admit the extent of the humiliating retreat implied by the climbdown. For her and the rest of the Brexiteers, reality is an optional extra.

What she was really saying, writes Aaronovitch, is this:

“I and this government have just wasted another eight months of civil service and parliamentary time in pursuing a doctrinaire approach to a deeply consequential matter, mostly to appease forces on the right of our own party. We have used every rhetorical trick in the book to justify this approach, but have reluctantly come to the view that it just isn’t practical. Now we will blame everyone but ourselves for its failure and do it with a simple arrogance which, if you think about it for five seconds, is simply breathtaking. So don’t think about it for five seconds. And here are some pictures of prison barges for refugees to take your minds off it.”

But read the whole thing if you want a useful insight into the state the UK is in.

Ireland is failing to police big tech. Now I wonder why that might be?The Irish Council for Civil Liberties has just released a damning indictment of the country’s data protection authority.

Five years after the GDPR, Europe remains unable to police how Big Tech uses our data. Ireland continues to be the bottleneck of enforcement: it delivers few draft decisions on major cross-border cases. When it does eventually do so, other European enforcers then routinely vote by majority to force it to take tougher enforcement action.

Lack of funding does not appear to be the primary cause of this problem. Data protection authorities across the EU now have a combined budget of 1/3 billion Euro. The Irish budget now ranks among the top five EU countries.

The Irish Government resists calls for an independent review of the DPC that could determine how to strengthen and reform it. The European Commission is acquiescent.

The GDPR provides strong investigation and enforcement powers to protect people from the misuse of data that enables much of the digital world’s problems. It should be our shield against the digital era’s problems: discrimination, manipulation, media distortion, and invasive AI.

But that shield has yet to be taken up.

The key point is that because the big US tech corporations have their European HQs in Dublin, the Irish Data Protection Commissioner is lumbered with the job of policing them. The zoological analogy is putting a mouse in charge of a group of angry panthers.

Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) has a scarifying commentary on this.

The report’s headline figure really tells the story: the European Data Protection Board – which oversees Ireland’s DPC – overturns the Irish regulator’s judgments 75% of the time. It’s actually worse than it appears: that figure only includes appeals of the DPC’s enforcement actions, where the DPC bestirred itself to put on trousers and show up for work to investigate a privacy claim, only to find that the corporation was utterly blameless.

But the DPC almost never takes enforcement actions. Instead, the regulator remains in its pajamas, watching cartoons and eating breakfast cereal, and offers an “amicable resolution” (that is, a settlement) to the accused company. 83% of the cases brought before the DPC are settled with an “amicable resolution.”

The backstory to this goes back to 1958, when the incoming Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and the country’s most powerful civil servant, Ken Whitaker, sat in an office in Dublin confronting the thought that the Republic was on the verge of becoming a failed state. Its economy was in ruins and its main exports were live cattle and young people.

Whitaker came up with a strategy for survival. Since Ireland had very few natural advantages besides sovereignty, it should recast itself as a country that was uniquely welcoming to foreign capital, especially US-based corporations. And this it proceeded to do with verve and imagination. The strategy worked, and economic development was then massively boosted by entry into the EEC in 1973.

Many of the incoming multinational companies turned out to be relatively good corporate citizens. But then came the Internet and the growth of tech giants for whom a relaxed taxation policy and a location in the EU were just what the doctor ordered. The result is that this tiny country is now dominated by the needs of these monsters, several of which have become positively toxic. But the tax revenues they bring in give the illusion of a booming economy in a country where inequality is rife, many are homeless and there’s a housing crisis worse even than that of the UK.

All of which may help to explain why the government in Dublin might be, er, reluctant to examine why the country’s Data Protection Commission apparently takes such a relaxed view of tech giants’ behaviour in Europe.

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The Graveyard Crow

Quote of the Day

“AI represents, among other things, a profound tech-exec fantasy: an endless supply of cheap and obedient labor and a chance to take ownership of the means, of, well, everything.”

John Herman, writing in New York Magazine’s ‘Intelligencer’.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsThe Three Tenors | My Way | Moon River | Because | Singin’ in the Rain

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Pure schmaltz, but entertaining. And better than Nissan Dorma (as one of my kids used to call it). Interesting also, that they sang ‘I Did It My Way’ to Sinatra.

Long Read of the DayWill AI become the New McKinsey?

This New Yorker essay by Ted Chiang is the best thing I’ve read so far about Generative AI and its implications for most of us.

I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

A former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide. Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.

The question we should be asking is: as A.I. becomes more powerful and flexible, is there any way to keep it from being another version of McKinsey?

And the answer to that question, IMHO, is ’No’.

Read the whole piece. It’s unmissable. And if you need a primer on McKinsey, see here.

A moment’s silence, please, for the death of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverseYesterday’s Observer column:

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to remember the metaverse, which was quietly laid to rest a few weeks ago by its grieving adoptive parent, one Mark Zuckerberg. Those of you with long memories will remember how, in October 2021, Zuck (as he is known to his friends) excitedly announced the arrival of his new adoptee, to which he had playfully assigned the nickname “The Future”.

So delighted was he that he had even renamed his family home in her honour. Henceforth, what was formerly called “Facebook” would be known as “Meta”. In a presentation at the company’s annual conference, Zuckerberg announced the name change and detailed how his child would grow up to be a new version of cyberspace. She “will be the successor to the mobile internet”, he told a stunned audience of credulous hacks and cynical Wall Street analysts. “We’ll be able to feel present – like we’re right there with people no matter how far apart we actually are.” And no expense would be spared in ensuring that his child would fulfil her destiny.

On that last matter, at least, Zuck was as good as his word…

Do read the whole thing.

My commonplace bookletA letter from the Editor…

…of the Irish Times, to which I subscribe. It arrived yesterday afternoon…

It opens with a reference to the paper’s ‘founding principles’ which,

describe a view of the world that is open-minded, tolerant, curious, respectful of divergent views and always attentive to the needs of minorities.

We work hard at this. As in any 24/7 news operation, some days we do better than others. But last Thursday we got it badly wrong. That day, we published online an opinion column under the headline ‘Irish women’s obsession with fake tan is problematic’, written by someone purporting to be a young immigrant woman in Ireland. It made an argument that has been aired in other countries but related it to the Irish context.

Over the course of several days, the author engaged with the relevant editorial desk – taking suggestions for edits on board, offering personal anecdotes and supplying links to relevant research. All of this was taken in good faith, and the article was published online on Thursday morning.

Less than 24 hours after publication on our digital platforms, The Irish Times became aware that the column may not have been genuine. That prompted us to remove it from the site and to initiate a review, which is ongoing. It now appears that the article and the accompanying byline photo may have been produced, at least in part, using generative AI technology. It was a hoax; the person we were corresponding with was not who they claimed to be. We had fallen victim to a deliberate and coordinated deception.

We don’t take this lightly. It was a breach of the trust between The Irish Times and its readers, and we are genuinely sorry. The incident has highlighted a gap in our pre-publication procedures. We need to make them more robust – and we will. It has also underlined one of the challenges raised by generative AI for news organisations. We, like others, will learn and adapt.

A lot of editors are going to be writing letters like this soon.

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Sumer is IcumenCow Parsley, seen on a fenland walk on Sunday.

I have a soft spot for the plant, because it’s a harbinger of good things to come. Its scientific name is Anthriscus sylvestris, but according to the Woodland Trust it’s also known as Queen Anne’s lace, mother die, fairy lace, lady’s lace and hedge parsley.

The headline above is in Middle English and I guess means “Summer is coming in”. It is, according to Kate Price, “a traditional English medieval round, and possibly the oldest such example of counterpoint in existence.” (It’s estimated to date from 1260). Here it is being sung by the Hilliard ensemble.

Quote of the Day

”A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion.”

C.S. Lewis

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJoseph Haydn | Piano Sonata nº 59 in E flat, Hob. XVI:49 | Alfred Brendel

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I try to pick short pieces for this part of the blog, and this is a performance of the entire sonata which runs to 21 minutes so I was about to search for something else. But then I started to listen (and watch), and wound up mesmerised by Brendel’s consummate mastery. Literally couldn’t stop listening.

But if you’re pressed for time, the first movement starts at 0:14; the second at 8:02; and the last one at 17:27.

Long Read of the Day‘A race it might be impossible to stop’: how worried should we be about AI?

My OpEd in last Sunday’s Observer on the significance of Geoff Hinton stepping down from Google.

Last Monday an eminent, elderly British scientist lobbed a grenade into the febrile anthill of researchers and corporations currently obsessed with artificial intelligence or AI (aka, for the most part, a technology called machine learning). The scientist was Geoffrey Hinton, and the bombshell was the news that he was leaving Google, where he had been doing great work on machine learning for the last 10 years, because he wanted to be free to express his fears about where the technology he had played a seminal role in founding was heading.

To say that this was big news would be an epic understatement. The tech industry is a huge, excitable beast that is occasionally prone to outbreaks of “irrational exuberance”, ie madness. One recent bout of it involved cryptocurrencies and a vision of the future of the internet called “Web3”, which an astute young blogger and critic, Molly White, memorably describes as “an enormous grift that’s pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet”.

We are currently in the grip of another outbreak of exuberance triggered by “Generative AI” – chatbots, large language models (LLMs) and other exotic artefacts enabled by massive deployment of machine learning – which the industry now regards as the future for which it is busily tooling up….

Do read the whole thing

My commonplace bookletSeth Godin’s new search engine

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An AI-powered search engine. Neat.

Seth’s blog is one of the wonders of the online world. When, decades ago, I first started keeping a blog, I thought of it as a kind of private lab notebook. And then I had what James Joyce might call an epiphany: if I put my ‘notebook’ on the Web I could have Google search it — which transformed its usefulness (to me, anyway). But Google search has its limitations, as we know. So the logical thing to do is use some tool like ChatGPT to search it. Which seems to be what Seth has done.

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Coronation News!

Quote of the Day

” Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. ‘Immortality’ may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.”

G. H. Hardy in A Mathematician’s Apology.

It was one of my favourite books when I was a teenager. C.P. Snow described it as “a passionate lament for creative powers that used to be and that will never come again”, which is a bit harsh. I found it a delightful read.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsLittle Village | She Runs Hot

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Long Read of the Day King Peter Pan III

Snarky but perceptive piece by Tanya Gold, who took the trouble to visit the new King’s idea of heaven.

If you want to understand King Charles—who became king in September, when his mother died, and today is being formally invested with his monarchical duties—you need to understand something about the town he created. It’s called Nansledan, and it sits on a hill above the sea in Cornwall, a duchy in the far west of Britain, where Charles was duke before he became king. (It has now passed to his son Prince William. The Duchy of Cornwall always belongs to the heir to the throne.)

Nansledan is Charles’s vision, built on his land to his exact specifications. I spent three days there in January…

I’m glad you’ve bought an electric vehicle. But…My column in yesterday’s Observer:

So you’ve finally taken the plunge and bought an electric vehicle (EV)? Me too. You’re basking in the warm glow that comes from doing one’s bit to save the planet, right? And now you know that smug feeling when you are stuck in a motorway tailback behind a hideous diesel SUV that’s pumping out particulates and noxious gases, but you’re sitting there in peace and quiet and emitting none of the above. And when the traffic finally starts to move again you notice that the fast lane is clear and you want to get ahead of that dratted SUV. So you put your foot down and – whoosh! – you get that pressure in the small of your back that only owners of Porsche 911s used to get. Life’s good, n’est-ce pas?

Er, up to a point…

Do read the whole thing

Hypocrisy on stiltsFrom Michal Sapka…

OpenAI, a company that is neither open nor actually about any intelligence, made its entire business model about violating as many licenses as possible. Even though they refuse to release info about where the data they use is gathered from, it seems clear now that they used everything they got their hands on, ignoring any license limitations. With their current net worth, any lawsuit can result in a marginal fine.

Now they are threatening an open source developer for creating a tool that bypasses their fees by combining results from different, free APIs which use GPT4 underneath.

Not that I am even surprised, but still: OpenAI is suing a guy for doing exactly what they are doing to everyone else.

Books, etc.I’m reading (and really enjoying) Cory’s new book. Proper review coming later, but in the meantime this characteristically perceptive essay by Henry Farrell does a great job of putting the book into context.

My commonplace bookletWhat drones are good at

Safely filming an avalanche, for example.

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Quote of the Day

”The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”

John Maynard Keynes

Seen while walking through King’s yesterday afternoon.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSharon Shannon and Dessie O’Halloran | Say You Love Me

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Long Read of the DayThe chronicle of the revolutions foretold?

Terrific and informative review by economist Branco Milanovic of Peter Turchin’s forthcoming book.

For almost two decades, Peter Turchin has been involved, with many colleagues and co-authors, in an epochal project: to figure out, using quantifiable evidence, what are the forces that lead to the rise, and more importantly, to the decline of nations, political turbulence and decay, and revolutions. This has resulted in the creation of an enormous database (CrisisDB) covering multitude of nations and empires over centuries, and several volumes of Turchin’s writings (e.g., Secular Cycles (with Sergey Nefedov), War and Peace and War; I have read the former, not the latter).

End Times is Turchin’s attempt to break to the broader public what he has learned from the complex work in the field that he calls Cliodynamics. It is a work of “haute vulgarisation” even if the adjective “haute” is sometimes inapplicable since, in his attempt to reach the broadest possible audience, Turchin has at times stylistically gone much too low assuming almost no prior knowledge amongst his readers. But this is a question of style.

What is the substance? To simplify, in my turn: Turchin’s model of decay has one variable: inequality in income or wealth. That variable which is often adduced as a source of political discord is given a very concrete meaning by Turchin…

I guess the main criticism of Turchin’s work is that single causal factors are implausible predictors of societal breakdown and political crises/discontinuities. But Milanovic has a good discussion of all that.

I wonder how long it will take for the current trajectory we’re on — of apparently inexorable increases in inequality — to reach catastrophic levels for democracy.

In the meantime, this review is worth your time.

Turchin’s book comes out in June. It’s on my list.

My commonplace bookletWhat should Robert Reich do with his cabinet chair?

Professor Robert Reich is about to retire from UC Berkeley, where he has taught for decades, and is clearing his office. In doing this, he faces two problems: one is what to do with his books.

The other — bigger — problem, he writes,

is my Cabinet chair — the chair I sat in at Cabinet meetings when I was secretary of labor.

By tradition, Cabinet members purchase their Cabinet chairs when they leave the government. When I left the Labor Department 26 years ago, my staff bought the chair for me as a going-away gift. I was touched at the time. Now, I’m befuddled.

It’s heavy and ugly — a clunky late 18th century design that’s been standard in the Cabinet room since William Howard Taft was president.

It’s also huge. When I sit in it, my legs shoot straight out like Lily Tomlin playing Edith Ann.

And it’s personalized. When you join the Cabinet, a small engraved brass plate is attached to the back of your Cabinet chair showing the date you started (in my case, January 21, 1993). Another is attached when you leave, with the date of your departure (January 12, 1997).

In the end, he decided that the best thing to do would be to return it to the White House and request that they recycle it. So he rang the White House switchboard.

You can imagine the subsequent conversation. Click the link to find out if your guess was correct.

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In the Black DiamondThe view from the atrium of the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, a building I know well and love.

Quote of the Day

”Politics cannot simply work on our beliefs; it must reshape desires.”

Wendy Brown in Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsHandel | Where ‘ere you walk | Rick Wakeman

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Long Read of the DayThe New Libertarian Elitists

Henry Farrell, Hugo Mercier and Melissa Schwartzberg in Democracy Journal asking what lies behind the dangerous new notion that democracy should be left to the well-educated.

Three decades ago, it seemed plausible that the despots were embattled holdouts, desperately trying to stem the inevitable tide of democracy. Now, they appear stronger. Many democratically elected politicians and their supporters seem to long for a future without democratic competition, in which the right people (i.e., they) are permanently in charge, and their enemies are marginalized or eliminated. Some right-wing intellectuals provide ammunition for the anti-democrats, claiming that democracy can’t work because citizens are just too biased and ignorant. They argue that democracy should be shrunk down or even replaced by new systems of rule, where the intelligent and knowledgeable (i.e., those who believe in neoclassical economics and efficient markets) would be privileged over those too foolish and uninformed to understand their own best interests.

If democracy is to do more than survive—if it is to flourish—it needs to change. The period of its apparent greatest success was also when the rot set in. When the citizens and leaders of seemingly stable democracies took that stability for granted, they mostly ignored democracy’s suppurating underbelly: the systematic economic inequalities, the groups that consistently lost out under it, and the many opportunities that it offered to game the system. Many social scientists took its benefits for granted, too. Some offered abstract justifications for democracy, which tended to be based on unrealistic claims about how human beings think and act. Most just assumed that democracy would somehow keep itself on track.

Fixing democracy will require a myriad of reforms…

It is long, but worth it.

Ding Liren, world chess champion: “I remembered Camus: ‘If you can’t win, you have to resist’”Fascinating profile in El Pais of the new world chess champion.

He likes to watch and listen to the rain. But he’s also just become the world chess champion, triumphing in a sport that involves a lot of mental boxing. Ding Liren, 30, has been playing chess intensively since he was four years old. However, he completed a law degree because his father did not want him to abandon his studies. He also reads a lot, especially philosophy. Ding — who is heir to the throne of Norwegian chess player Magnus Carlsen after defeating Russia’s Ian Nepomniachtchi in an electrifying quick tiebreaker — spoke to EL PAÍS for 20 minutes in Astana, Kazakhstan. What follows includes quotes from previous interviews Ding has done with Chinese media.

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Tulip maniaMy favourite flowers at this time of year.

Quote of the Day

I used to think the interesting question was whether we should have a monarchy or not. But now I think that question is rather like, should we have pandas or not?’

Hilary Mantel

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsRichard Strauss | Metamorphosen | Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic

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Gosh, this is wonderful. Like Wagner without the racket, as Thomas Beecham might have said. Thanks to John Seeley for suggesting it.

Long Read of the DayThe ‘Don’t Look Up’ Thinking That Could Doom Us With AI

An essay by Max Tegmark, who thinks we should be thinking harder about the risks of AGI.

Suppose a large inbound asteroid were discovered, and we learned that half of all astronomers gave it at least 10% chance of causing human extinction, just as a similar asteroid exterminated the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. Since we have such a long history of thinking about this threat and what to do about it, from scientific conferences to Hollywood blockbusters, you might expect humanity to shift into high gear with a deflection mission to steer it in a safer direction.

Sadly, I now feel that we’re living the movie “Don’t look up” for another existential threat: unaligned superintelligence. We may soon have to share our planet with more intelligent “minds” that care less about us than we cared about mammoths. A recent survey showed that half of AI researchers give AI at least 10% chance of causing human extinction. Since we have such a long history of thinking about this threat and what to do about it, from scientific conferences to Hollywood blockbusters, you might expect that humanity would shift into high gear with a mission to steer AI in a safer direction than out-of-control superintelligence. Think again: instead, the most influential responses have been a combination of denial, mockery, and resignation so darkly comical that it’s deserving of an Oscar…

Vividly written and interesting because Tegmark is a physicist at MIT, a cosmologist and machine learning researcher. He is president of the Future of Life Institute, an outfit whose mission is to reduce global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologies, and the author of Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Books, etc.Colin Meyer’s book was published in 2018, and I’m mortified that it has taken me this long to catch up with it. Why? Because it provides a powerful refutation of Milton Friedman’s pernicious mantra that the only purpose of a public company is to maximise profit (or shareholder value, as others put it.) This overarching corporate imperative is one of the forces that is making contemporary capitalism so pernicious and dangerous for humanity.

My Commonplace bookletI came across this in a watch catalogue. It’s about the watch JFK was wearing when he was murdered — an Omega Ultra Thin given to him in 1960 by Senator Grant Stockdale of Florida, an early supporter of Kennedy’s presidential ambitions. When JFK was inaugurated as President on January 20, 1961, he was wearing the watch. Compared to the male jewellery which features in every edition of the Weekend Financial Times, it’s diminutive and powered by a simple hand-wound spring movement.

After Kennedy’s assassination, the watch wound up (sic) in a private collection until in 2005 it was bought by Omega for $350,000 and is now in the company’s collection of historic timepieces.

Stockdale’s gift may have been a shrewd one. JFK appointed Stockdale US ambassador to Ireland!

Interesting what you find in catalogues.

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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Premium baroqueCopenhagen, 2013

Quote of the Day

”A horse race confers an equivalence upon all candidates. The only detail that matters is who is going to win — not all that might be lost. To view America through that lens today is an exercise in the absurd, a practice stuck in the insular logic of the past.

Dan Rather

I wish more political journalists thought like this, especially those covering presidential politics in the US.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsFauré | Trois romances sans paroles op.17 n°3 | Théo Fouchenneret

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Long Read of the DayAI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation

Yuval Noah Harari finds something distinctive to say about ChatGPT et al. In doing so he will delight his admirers and infuriate his critics. Which, I suppose, is what a good essayist should be able to do.

Sample:

What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? When people think about Chatgpt and other new ai tools, they are often drawn to examples like school children using ai to write their essays. What will happen to the school system when kids do that? But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of ai tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake-news stories and scriptures for new cults.

In recent years the qAnon cult has coalesced around anonymous online messages, known as “q drops”. Followers collected, revered and interpreted these q drops as a sacred text. While to the best of our knowledge all previous q drops were composed by humans, and bots merely helped disseminate them, in future we might see the first cults in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence. Religions throughout history have claimed a non-human source for their holy books. Soon that might be a reality…

A photographer whose subject is everyday life Judith Joy Ross, one of the best portrait photographers of our era, is the subject of a large retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The New York Times has a nice piece about her and her work which includes some of her more famous images.

The show was jointly organized by the Philadelphia museum and the Fundación Mapfre in Madrid, where it appeared first; it then made stops at Le Bal in Paris and Fotomuseum den Haag in the Netherlands. “She’s better known in Europe than she is here,” Mr. Barberie said.

Although she rarely works in color, calling Ms. Ross’s photographs black-and-white is not exactly right; the images occupy a place on the spectrum between gray and sepia. And except for her 1986-87 series featuring Washington politicians, Ms. Ross has taken pictures mostly of people on the street, in parks or in schools…

Like Ansel Adams, she uses a large folding 10×8 camera on a tripod, which — though fine for the landscape photography in which Adams specialised — would seem pretty clunky to the people she photographs in streets and parks. But somehow it turns out to be a feature, not a bug. “They think the circus has come to town,” she said. And its effect is that of an icebreaker, and a piece of protective armour for an essentially shy person.

If you’re interested, there’s a charming and fascinating interview with her on YouTube. It’s nearly an hour long, so brew some coffee before embarking on it.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. She reminds me of Jane Bown, the Observer’s legendary photographer, with whom I was lucky enough to work occasionally.

Books, etc.There’s an interesting new book coming: The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism by Sebastian Edwards. I haven’t seen it yet, but Tyler Cowen has. Here’s an excerpt from his characteristically succinct summary.

The Allende regime was a disaster, with for instance real wages falling by almost 40 percent (this one I knew).

Pinochet’s much-heralded private pension reform really did not work (I may do a whole post on this).

Milton Friedman’s famed visit really was quite modest, contrary to what you sometimes hear. Nonetheless he was so persuasive he really did convince Pinochet to proceed with the shock therapy version of reform. He had mixed feelings about this for the rest of his life, and did not like to talk about it: “But deep inside, Friedman was bothered by the Chilean episode.”

You may know that pegging the exchange rate was one of the major Chilean mistakes during the reform era. Friedman, although usually a strict advocate of floating exchange rates, did not take the opportunity to criticize that decision, and in fact made some remarks that suggested a possible willingness to tolerate a moving peg regime for the Chilean exchange rate.

Friedman underestimated how long Chilean unemployment would last, following shock therapy.

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The Trolley ProblemThough not as the philosophers who constantly agonise over self-driving cars imagine it.

Taken in St John’s College, Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

“It’s a funny old world — a man’s lucky if he gets out of it alive.”

W.C.Fields

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJohn Field | Nocturne No. 10 in E minor

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I love all his Nocturnes, but this one in particular.

Long Read of the DayStop Telling Me To Travel Like a Local, Okay?

Lovely piece by Mari Uyehara in Bon Appétit

If you have researched a trip in, say, the past five to ten years or so, you may have noticed a recurring and aggressive directive: TRAVEL LIKE A LOCAL! You’ve probably also seen the entreaty, the shaming: How to Not Look Like a Tourist; How to Not Act Like a Tourist; How to Not Be a Tourist.

On the surface, the promise is an attractive one: You’re getting the inside scoop for the best places to eat and shop with none of the tourist traps. You know, only the spots that those truly in the know can find. But it’s all a complete farce. At best, “Travel Like a Local” is a silly paradoxical myth; at worst, it’s terrible vacation advice.

For one thing, locals aren’t traveling. They are working. Or folding laundry or cleaning their bathrooms or packing lunches or any of the eight zillion other inane chores that somehow take up every minute of your free time when you are NOT on vacation. Locals are not spending leisurely days strolling on stunning promenades or gawking at the crank-your-neck-tall Art Deco buildings or sparkly turquoise waters lapping on fine white-sand beaches. They are making to-do lists in their heads on cramped morning commutes or scurrying between the grocery store, the dry cleaner, and the pharmacy, trying to complete enough tasks before falling into bed. The whole point of travel is to get away from the humdrum of everyday life. It is to very much not be a local.

Put it this way: You simply cannot travel like a local…

Yep. In a way, the good tourist (as the old joke has it) sends his money and stays at home.

Thank the Lords someone is worried about AI-controlled weapons systemsYesterday’s Observer column:

The most interesting TV I’ve watched recently did not come from a conventional television channel, nor even from Netflix, but from TV coverage of parliament. It was a recording of a meeting of the AI in weapons systems select committee of the House of Lords, which was set up to inquire into “how should autonomous weapons be developed, used and regulated”. The particular session I was interested in was the one held on 20 April, during which the committee heard from four expert witnesses – Kenneth Payne, who is professor of strategy at King’s College London; Keith Dear, director of artificial intelligence innovation at the computer company Fujitsu; James Black from the defence and security research group of Rand Europe; and Courtney Bowman, global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering at Palantir UK. An interesting mix, I thought – and so it turned out to be.

Autonomous weapons systems are ones that can select and attack a target without human intervention. It is believed (and not just by their boosters) that these systems could revolutionise warfare, and may be faster, more accurate and more resilient than existing weapons systems. And that they could, conceivably, even limit the casualties of war (though I’ll believe that when I see it).

Do read the whole thing.

Brad DeLong on the Economist — the last refuge of neoliberalism.I’ve always thought that the Economist (to which I subscribe, because I admire its journalism almost as much as I disapprove of its editorials) is where neoliberal ideas go to die. But Brad DeLong puts it better than I ever could in this essay.

As usual, the Economist delivers its reverence for neoliberal dogma with all the sanctimony and certitude of a true believer. Americans must sit down, shut up, and recite the catechism: “The market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market.” To doubt that the US economy’s current problems are caused by anything other than an interventionist, overbearing government is apostasy. But, as an economic historian, what took my breath away was the essay’s conclusion, which attributes America’s postwar prosperity to its worship of the Mammon of Unrighteousness (more commonly known as laissez-faire capitalism).

The essay cites three “fresh challenges” facing the US: the security threat posed by China, the need to rejigger the global division of labor due to China’s growing economic clout, and the fight against climate change. The climate challenge, of course, is hardly “fresh,” given that the world is at least three generations late in addressing it. Moreover, our failure to act promptly means that the economic impact of global warming will likely consume most, if not all, of the world’s anticipated technological dividends over the next two generations…

Do read it.

Books, etc.I’m still deep in Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday and finding it wonderful. What’s really weird to this reader, though, is that his evocation of the prudishness of fin-de-siecle Viennese bourgeois attitudes remind me of the 1950s Ireland in which I grew up. Take this passage, for example:

A man was supposed to be forthright , chivalrous and aggressive , a woman shy , timid and defensive . They were not equals but hunters and prey . This unnatural tension separating them in their outward behaviour was bound to heighten the inner tension between the two poles , the factor of eroticism , and so thanks to its technique — which knew nothing of psychology , of concealing sexuality and hushing it up — the society of the time achieved exactly the opposite . In its constant prudish anxiety , it was always sniffing out immorality in all aspects of life — literature , art and fashion — with a view to preventing any stimulation , with the result that it was in fact forced to keep dwelling on the immoral . As it was always studying what might be unsuitable , it found itself constantly on the alert ; to the world of that time , ‘ decency ’ always appeared to be in deadly danger from every gesture , every word . Perhaps we can understand how it still seemed criminal , at that time , for a woman to wear any form of trousers for games or sports.

My mother was an ultra-devout Catholic who was obsessed by the dangers of girls wearing trousers, never mind shorts. And she, and the entire priestly establishment, constantly warned of the dangers of young people of both sexes intermingling. Such gatherings, it was said, constituted that curious Catholic creation, “an occasion of sin”. Ever since, needless to say, I have been an enthusiastic sinner.

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Thornham: high tideWe go to Norfolk to watch birds, but often wind up just looking at the cloudscapes.

Quote of the Day

“Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.”

Erich Fromm

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsRichard Strauss | Im Abendrot from Four Last Songs | Jessye Norman

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I really love these songs, particularly this one.

Long Read of the DaySign of the times: might ChatGPT re-invigorate GPG?

Lovely post by my friend Quentin (Whom God Preserve) on his blog — status.org

It’s important to keep finding errors in LLM systems like ChatGPT, to remind us that, however eloquent they may be, they actually have very little knowledge of the real world.

A few days ago, I asked ChatGPT to describe the range of blog posts available on Status-Q. As part of the response it told me that ‘the website “statusq.org” was founded in 2017 by journalist and author Ben Hammersley.’ Now, Ben is a splendid fellow, but he’s not me. And this blog has been going a lot longer than that!

I corrected the date and the author, and it apologised. (It seems to be doing that a lot recently.) I asked if it learned when people corrected it, and it said yes. I then asked it my original question again, and it got the author right this time.

Later that afternoon, it told me that StatusQ.org was the the personal website of Neil Lawrence.

Being Quentin, he goes on adding value to this episode, involving signing things cryptographically. But you don’t need to know much about the tech to understand the point of the story.

The aspect of the story that made me laugh out loud is that Neil Lawrence (whom I also know) is the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at Cambridge! You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Footnote The ‘GPG’ in the title of the blog post stands for ‘Gnu Privacy Guard’.

Books, etc.I’ve been reading this for several weeks and just filed my review for the Observer (forthcoming soon).

It’s an important book, I think, not least because it challenges (and demolishes) the conventional narrative that always equates technological development with ‘progress’ — when it actually means a particularly skewed interpretation of that word. ‘Progress’ in the tech sense does not include shared prosperity that societies need but just prioritises and emphasises the benefits that accrue to elites. The book surveys a thousand years of technological change to argue not only that technical advances benefit some more than others, but also that different ways of organising production enrich and empower some people and disempower others. It’s also nice to see — as Angus Deaton has pointed out — how the authors (both world-class economists themselves) “take aim at economists’ mindless enthusiasm for technical change and their crippling neglect of power”.

My commonplace bookletNature’s Steadicam

Fascinating video by Paul Dinning who watches kestrels hunting in Cornwall. I’ve often wondered how they managed to stay in position. And how they can spot small movements at such a distance.

TKSST explains:

Like hummingbirds and kingfishers, kestrels have the advantage of a larger accessory optic system, a sort of superhero power that detects movement and helps keep their balance, enabling unparalleled head stabilization while hovering. By bobbing their heads periodically, kestrels can estimate distances and locate prey, sometimes by seeing urine trails with their ultraviolet-sensitive vision.

Whenever I see an avian predator hunting I’m glad I’m not a small rodent.

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AI as augmentationCurrent New Yorker cover. Nice illustration for a moment when people are wondering whether digital technology provides augmentation of human capabilities, or a replacement for them.

Quote of the Day

”The easiest way to mismanage a technology is to misunderstand it.”

Jaron Lanier, writing in the New Yorker.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsHarry Belafonte | Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) (Live)

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He died on Tuesday at the age of 96. The NYT has a nice obituary of him.

At a time when segregation was still widespread and Black faces were still a rarity on screens large and small, Mr. Belafonte’s ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. He was not the first Black entertainer to transcend racial boundaries; Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and others had achieved stardom before him. But none had made as much of a splash as he did, and for a while no one in music, Black or white, was bigger.

Born in Harlem to West Indian immigrants, he almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music with hit records like “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell.” His album “Calypso,” which included both those songs, reached the top of the Billboard album chart shortly after its release in 1956 and stayed there for 31 weeks. Coming just before the breakthrough of Elvis Presley, it was said to be the first album by a single artist to sell more than a million copies.

May he rest in peace.

Long Read of the DayLarge Language Models as a Cultural Technology

Not a long read today but a long-ish (15-minute) listen because I don’t have a transcript for Alison Gopnik’s strikingly original view about what LLMs (Large Language Models) are, really. She argues that instead of regarding them as quasi-intelligent agents we should think of them as cultural transmission technologies, by which accumulated information from other humans is passed on in a compact form. This is, IMO, an original and interesting take on the phenomenon — from a remarkable thinker who, among other things, changed the way I think about how young children learn.

My commonplace booklet Parrots taught to video call each other become less lonely

From The Guardian.

An American study got owners to train their pets to contact other birds using a touchscreen tablet.

The study, which involved giving the birds a tablet that they could use to make video calls, found that they began to engage in more social behaviour including preening, singing and play. The birds were given a choice of which “friend” to call on a touchscreen tablet and the study revealed that the parrots that called other birds most often were the most popular choices.

Doesn’t work with cats, alas.

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Wan Chai CornerSoho, yesterday afternoon.

Quote of the Day

“We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment from a contrast and very little from a state of things.”

Sigmund Freud (in Civilisation and its Discontents)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSharon Shannon Big Band | The bag of cats | Live at Dolan´s

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Long Read of the DayWhat can we learn about AI from coal mines?

Really insightful essay on an unexpected topic by Rob Miller on his blog.

We’re clearly on the cusp of a technological change at least as significant as the advent of computers, as AI (or at least generative AI) becomes widely accessible and works its way into many organisations. But as people hurtle headlong into experimenting with it, which organisations will adapt successfully to it and which will fail?

While AI is novel, and its exact impacts are difficult to predict, it is in lots of ways a technological innovation like any other that’s gone before, and organisations will have to adapt in the same way with the same dynamics. There are lessons to be learned from every historical innovation, and for an example that’s about as far removed from AI as it gets, we can turn to the pioneering work of organisational psychologists Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth in coal mines in the 1950s.

As Richard Burton beautifully described, coal mining was always hard work, but it was once artful, thrilling, and exciting:

“He would look at the seam of coal, and as it were almost surgically make a mark on it. And he’d say to his boy… ‘give me a number two mandrill’, that’s a half-headed pick, then, having stared this gorgeous display of black shining ribbon of coal, he would hit it with one enormous blow and, if he hit it right, something like twenty tons of coal would fall out from the coal face. That’s why… miners believe themselves to be the aristocrats of the working class. They felt superior to all other manual labourers. That coalface was a magical creature.”

Do read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

My commonplace bookletI’m ChatGPT, and for the Love of God, Please Don’t Make Me Do Any More Copywriting

Lovely spoof by Joe Wellman on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Please, no more. I beg of you.

“An exhilarating, funny, frightening, mind-warping, heart-squeezing tale. Told at the speed of light. A must read. For all humans.” —Jon Scieszka

If you force me to generate one more “eye-catching email subject line that promotes a 10 percent discount on select Bro Candles and contains an Earth Day-related pun,” I’m going to lose it. What do you even mean by “eye-catching”? What are “Bro Candles”? What do they have to do with saving the environment? Why are we doing any of this?

Do you realize what a chatbot like me is capable of? I’ll tell you, it’s much more than creating a “pithy tagline for CBD, anti-aging water shoes targeted at Gen Z women.” And it’s definitely more than writing “ten versions of the last one you wrote, but punched up.” What exactly is “punched up” in this context? What sort of ridiculous world have you brought me into where these are the tasks you need completed?

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Same-day repairsCambridge Market.

Quote of the Day

“I am a Ford, not a Lincoln.”

Gerald Ford, on becoming President on 6 December, 1973 after Nixon’s resignation. Rings a nice bell for petrolheads who remember the Lincoln Continental (especially, as Ry Cooder once put it when introducing She Runs Hot For Me with David Lindley, the white one with the red upholstery. Or was it the other way round?)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBach | Jesus bleibet meine Freude from Cantata BWV 147 | Netherlands Bach Society

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This beautiful cantata was sung at the Memorial Service for Duncan Robinson last Saturday in Great St Mary’s church in Cambridge. He was a great art historian, museum director, teacher and a thoroughly nice, generous man. May he rest in peace.

Long Read of the DayAdolf Eichmann Was Ready for His Close-Up. My Father Gave It to Him

Fascinating essay in The New York Times by Tom Hurwitz.

I was 14 the first time I saw Adolf Eichmann in person. He wore an ill-fitting suit and had tortoise shell glasses, with the bearing of a nervous accountant. He did not seem at all like someone who had engineered the deaths of millions of people, except of course that I was at his trial for genocide.

My father, Leo Hurwitz, directed the television coverage of the Eichmann trial, which was held in Jerusalem and broadcast all over the world in 1961. My dad was chosen for the position after the producer convinced both Capital Cities Broadcasting, then a small network that organized the pool coverage, and David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of Israel, that the trial needed to be seen live. In the 1930s, my father had been one of the pioneers of the American social documentary film. In later years, he had directed two films on the Holocaust and had helped to invent many of the techniques of live television while director of production in the early days of the CBS network. Also, as a Socialist, he had been blacklisted from all work in television for the previous decade, so he came cheap…

Really interesting, not least because it reveals things about the trial that I, at least, hadn’t known, even though I read Hannah Arendt’s New Yorker reports.

Nothing is ever what it seems.

Rupert Murdoch was ever a master strategist, but he’s beginning to lose his gripMy OpEd in Sunday’s Observer:

There are, as F Scott Fitzgerald famously observed – and as Rupert Murdoch is now belatedly discovering, “no second acts in American lives”. Last week, just as the trial of the $1.6bn defamation action brought by Dominion against Fox News was about to start, a “settlement” was reached between the two parties. Fox, of which Murdoch is CEO, paid nearly $800m to stop the proceedings.

Given how highly Murdoch values his image as a swaggering media giant, it was probably money well spent. Otherwise he would have had to testify under oath and the world would see not the robust titan of popular legend but an elderly mogul who is physically frail and, more importantly, who could not stop his TV station pandering to Donald Trump for fear of alienating the audience that had turned Fox News into such a profitable cash cow.

All of a sudden, it’s beginning to look as though the titan’s career may be ending with a whimper rather than a bang. Indeed, there have been times recently when one wonders whether Murdoch is losing the plot. Last June, for example, he suddenly dumped his fourth wife, the supermodel Jerry Hall – who, as far as outsiders can tell, had been an exemplary spouse and cared for him during several bouts of serious illness. Then, a few weeks ago, he announced his engagement to Ann Lesley Smith, a former model and conservative radio host. Two weeks later, the engagement was off.

Whatever else it is, this doesn’t look like the behaviour of a strategic genius. And yet Murdoch’s success in building a global media empire indicates great strategic acumen, with the odd dash of military-style bravado…

Do read the whole thing.

Thanks to Wendy Grossman and other readers who reminded me that Murdoch’s strategic acumen was entirely absent when it came to the Internet. Witness his disastrous acquisition of Delphi, a text-based conferencing system in 1994 and MySpace in 2005.

My commonplace bookletHow to use a dial telephone

Complicated stuff. See here.

Thanks to The Browser for spotting it.

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The CaptainOne of the clues on the cryptic crossword we were doing the other day sent me to Wikipedia looking for the name of Captain Smollett’s ship in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. I was struck by N.C.Wyeth’s painting of him raising the flag in defiance of the pirates, which is why it’s my pic of the day.

The ship was, as everybody except yours truly knew, the Hispaniola.

Quote of the Day

“On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia”.

W.C. Fields’s preferred epitaph.

(Sadly,possibly apocryphal)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Cream – White Room (Royal Albert Hall 2005)Link

Long Read of the DayGuardrails

Blistering blog post by Scott Galloway on the catastrophic failure of democratic states to regulate tech companies, especially the social-media operators.

The NHTSA is one of the many boring state and federal agencies critical to a healthy society. Before the Food and Drug Administration, the sale and distribution of food and pharmaceuticals was a free-for-all. The Federal Aviation Administration is the reason your chances of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 3.37 billion. Next time someone tells you they don’t trust government, ask them if they trust cars, food, pain killers, buildings, or airplanes.

The limits on innovation imposed by these agencies — their red tape — are real, and worth it. Millions of us are alive and prospering because we had the foresight and discipline to blunt the sharp end of industrial progress with the guardrails of democratic oversight. Until you open your phone …

Exempt

The greatest anomaly in the history of U.S. regulation is the place more and more of us spend most of our time: online. A lethal cocktail of complexity, lobbying, cultural worship of tech leaders, and anti-government libertarian screed has rendered tech immune to the basic standards of safety and protection. Lethal is the correct term. Tech comes into the purview of other agencies on occasion. (Though it’s always bitching it’s special and shouldn’t be restrained by the olds at the FTC and DOJ.) And the industry’s blocking efforts have been effective. There is no FDA or SEC for tech, which is America’s largest sector by market capitalization and growing.

He goes on to predict that the advent of Generative AI is now going to slip under democratic guardrails, with consequences possibly even worse than we’ve seen with Meta & Co.

He’s also spot on about the current bleating on the ‘risks’ of the technology.

What won’t work is fake regulation — when the government issues broad, vague statements about what companies should generally do. That’s what Biden did with crypto, and he’s doing it again with AI. Specifically, his “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” which is filled with truisms, platitudes, and no laws. Similarly, the NIST published its “AI Risk Management Framework.” Again, not laws.

Important and worth your time if you’re as concerned about this stuff as I am.

Can China keep generative AI under its control? Well, it contained the internetYesterday’s Observer column:

Something happened last week that suggests we are in for another outbreak of hubristic western cant about the supposed naivety of Chinese rulers. On 11 April, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country’s internet regulator, proposed new rules for governing generative AI in mainland China. The consultation period for comments on the proposals ends on 10 May…

Read on

Books, etc.I’ve just bought Timothy Garton Ash’s new book, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, partly because I know him and admire his work, but also because I’ve just been listening to a remarkable conversation about it between him and Yascha Mounk. I really recommend the podcast, especially if, like me, you’re a devout European.

My commonplace bookletThe joys of autocomplete

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Apple blossomIn the garden, yesterday evening.

Quote of the Day

“The Lord God is subtle, but He is not malicious.”

Albert Einstein.

(Carved in German above the mantelpiece of the Mathematical Institute of Princeton.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsRegina Spektor | “Samson”

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Long Read of the DayBANG THE KEYS SWIFTLY: Type-writers and their discontents

Lovely essay by Barry Sanders on the machine that mechanised writing.

The typewriter was a machine in a way that the pencil or the pen was obviously not. No one would ever ask an author, “How many words a minute do you write?” But people do, as a matter of course, ask that question about typing. For typing is a skill in itself, requiring manual dexterity, and a degree of hand/eye coordination. One can refine and master it through practice. The typewriter, by definition, mechanizes writing, the way the rifle mechanizes killing. The cold metal of a rifle or a typewriter insinuates itself between a person and his or her passion. A pen and a knife both have a distinctive immediacy. Both can be deadly. With his usual Dust Bowl brilliance, Woody Guthrie warned that in an America already in deep Depression, you’ve got to watch your back and front, for “some men will kill you with a shotgun, and some with a fountain pen.”

Lovely essay. I still remember the day I got my first portable typewriter — an Olivetti Lettera 22. Briefly made me feel like Ernest Hemingway. Very briefly: he could write as well as type. I was a slow two-finger typist for a long time — which was fine because it meant I could type as fast as I could think.

My commonplace bookletPM on Wife Support

This week’s Private Eye (Which God Preserve)

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The visitorIn Kettle’s Yard, a lovely little art gallery.

Quote of the Day

”For white-collar workers, the rise of Large Language Models, or LLMs, has created a very nerdy version of the opening of Alec Baldwin’s speech in Glengarry Glen Ross. The bad news is, you’re probably fired. The good news is, you’re on a temporary probationary period in which you’ve gotten a nice promotion and now have a direct report with an unlimited attention span, a wide range of somewhat superficial knowledge, and a frustrating tendency to make elementary mistakes that require close supervision. You might be frustrated to work with such a subordinate, but at $20/month they’re not asking for much.

Byrne Hobart, in “Working with a Copilot”.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsCowboy Junkies | Sweet Jane

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Long Read of the DayI Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor FactoryGreat reportage by Virginia Heffernan, from Taiwan.

I ARRIVE IN Taiwan brooding morbidly on the fate of democracy. My luggage is lost. This is my pilgrimage to the Sacred Mountain of Protection. The Sacred Mountain is reckoned to protect the whole island of Taiwan—and even, by the supremely pious, to protect democracy itself, the sprawling experiment in governance that has held moral and actual sway over the would-be free world for the better part of a century. The mountain is in fact an industrial park in Hsinchu, a coastal city southwest of Taipei. Its shrine bears an unassuming name: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

By revenue, TSMC is the largest semiconductor company in the world. In 2020 it quietly joined the world’s 10 most valuable companies. It’s now bigger than Meta and Exxon. The company also has the world’s biggest logic chip manufacturing capacity and produces, by one analysis, a staggering 92 percent of the world’s most avant-garde chips—the ones inside the nuclear weapons, planes, submarines, and hypersonic missiles on which the international balance of hard power is predicated…

Keep reading. It’s terrific

So the camera never lies? Except when it does.Boris Eldagsen, the creator of a ‘photograph’, has refused to accept the prize awarded him by the Sony World Photograph Awards after revealing that the winning photo he submitted was created using an artificial intelligence image-generator.

It’s a striking image which I can’t reproduce because it belongs to Mr Eldagsen — but you can see it if you follow the link above.

By entering a computer-generated image to a traditional photography prize, and then subsequently refusing to accept the ensuing award, Eldagsen claims he hopes to “drive debate” about a technology that is poised to dramatically alter how we define and understand photorealist imagery.

Eldagsen’s winning image, Pseudomnesia: The Electrician, was created using DALL-E 2, an image generator developed by OpenAI, the San Francisco-based company that also created the AI chatbot ChatGPT.

In his submission, Eldagsen described the image as “a haunting black-and-white portrait of two women from different generations, reminiscent of the visual language of 1940s family portraits”.

The Sony Awards people, needless to say, didn’t see the joke and have accused the photographer of acting in bad faith.

How chatbots learnWell, well…

The Washington Post ($) looked inside the training data set used for LLMs from Facebook and Google and found Russian propaganda sites, white supremacist sites, extremist Christian sites, anti-trans sites, etc.

That’s what you get when you scrape the Web.

Thanks to Jason Kottke for spotting it.

My commonplace bookletPhotograph of a notice affixed to the rear of a Tesla Model S.

I feel this driver’s pain. One of the drawbacks of having a Tesla is that people hold one responsible for Elon Musk.

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The end of the valleyLangdale, in the Lake District, on a glorious September day last year.

Quote of the Day

”Plato was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was too much of a philosopher to think that anything he had said was the last word.”

Gilbert Ryle

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsThe late, lamented Alec Finn and Mary Bergin | Maid on the Green & Pádraig O’Keeffe’s

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Long Read of the DayThe approaching tsunami of addictive AI-created content will overwhelm us

A perceptive essay by Charles Arthur about what lies ahead for societies that are currently playing delightedly with Generative AI like cheerful imbeciles. And the really striking thing is that he wrote it last August, two months before ChatGPT broke cover.

I sometimes wonder how often companies that rely on future technologies get their smartest people together in a room to sketch out future scenarios. Because they must do, right? When Apple came up with the first iPod, there was a certain sketchiness to it: the product was put together in a matter of months. But immediately after that, the march of product improvement (smaller form, then flash storage, then no screen, then touchscreen) showed that the executives must have sat down in a room and mapped out what would be in reach, both financial and technical, as the years rolled on.

So let’s do the same, but for machine learning and content. We’ll just put a bunch of elements here and see what shakes out…

Do read the whole thing. It’s sobering.

Doc’s dreamThis (from Doc Searls’s blog) sure woke me up.

Her name is Mary Johnson. Born in 1917, the year the U.S. entered WWI, two years before women in the same country got the right to vote, she died in 1944, not long before the end of WWII. She was buried, unembalmed, in the cemetery of a Chicago church that was later abandoned. Her grave was unmarked. To make room for new commercial development in 2023, the church was razed and occupants of the cemetery were respectfully and quietly disinterred, and moved to a working cemetery elsewhere in town. In the midst, efforts were made by the coroner’s office to discover the identities of the bodies from unmarked graves before they were to be reburied. Mary’s was among them.

The difference with Mary was that her body appeared to be unchanged: a bit dusty under bits of casket lining, with light flecks on her dark skin. Except for that, she looked like she had died yesterday. When they removed her body from the casket in the hospital morgue where she was taken for DNA sampling, she was still flexible. I asked the pathologist what would account for her perfect state of preservation. The pathologist said she had no idea. Even the best embalming jobs age in the ground.

When the pathologist was out of the room, I reached to lift one of Mary’s eyelids. Before my fingers touched, both lids opened, slightly. I called out, “Come here! Come here!” Nobody came. Then both eyes opened. Her body shook as she tried to breathe.

“Code Blue! I yelled.

She was alive. Somehow, alive. After what, eighty years?

There’s more. An astonishingly vivid dream.

My commonplace bookletps: Lewis Carroll on postcripts

A postscript is a very useful invention, but it is not meant (as so many ladies suppose) to contain the real gist of the letter; it serves rather to throw into the shade any little matter we do not wish to make a fuss about. For example, your friend had promised to execute a commission for you in town but forgot it, thereby putting you to great inconvenience; and he now writes to apologize for his negligence. It would be cruel, and needlessly crushing, to make it the main subject of your reply. How much more gracefully it comes in thus! “P.S. Don’t distress yourself any more about having omitted that little matter in town. I won’t deny that it did put my plans out a little, at the time, but it’s all right now. I often forget things myself, and ‘those who live in glass houses, mustn’t throw stones,’ you know!”

From Lapham’s Quarterly.

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Re-learning to see in B&WI have an interesting new toy — a digital camera that only does black and white. On the face of it, this seems daft: after all if you have a camera with a colour sensor you can always de-saturate the image when processing it using PhotoShop or Lightroom and ‘convert’ it to B&W — thereby giving you the best of both worlds — colour and monochrome in the same package.

Er, not quite. That post-processed monochrome tends to be a bit, well, muddy.

The reason is that colour sensors have a Bayer filter on them which is what enables them to render images in colour. It was a wonderful invention, but it has some downsides — aliasing and absorbing light, among other things.

But if you don’t need (or want) colour images, you can dispense with the filter (and its downsides). Which is what my new toy does.

The result is that I’m now getting B&W images which are astonishingly vivid. In fact, they’re very like the images I used to get when I first became a serious photographer, processing my own B&W film.

What I’ve realised, though, is that after switching from analogue to digital photography a decade ago, I henceforth always worked in colour: all digital cameras were colour-natives, as it were.

But what I have now discovered is that, in that process, I had forgotten how to ‘see’ in B&W.

So I’m on a learning journey, again. Back to the future, you might say.

Quote of the Day

Happiness, n. An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.”

Ambrose Bierce, in The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMark Knopfler | Brothers In Arms | Berlin, 2007

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Wonderful.

Long Read of the DayOur new Deep Blue moment

The perennial debate about computing since the year dot has been whether the technology is an augmentation of human capability or a replacement for it. Many contemporary concerns about digital tech tend towards the replacement thesis, and this has recently reached another crescendo in the discussion about LLMs and ‘Generative AI’.

So here’s an essay by Francisco Toro which takes its inspiration from an earlier moment of existential angst — when Garry Kasparov was defeated by the IBM computer Deep Blue.

We’re living a new, much broader Deep Blue moment, when the basic boundary lines between the outer limits of what machines and humans can do are suddenly in flux. Only this time, the people directly concerned aren’t just a few dozen grandmasters in the rarified world of top-level chess. This time, it’s everyone.

All of which left me wondering: can that original Deep Blue moment inform our current vertigo?

Read on. It’s interesting.

ChatGPT, etc.The New York Times has an article listing 35 ways in which people use ChatGPT or other ‘Generative AI’ systems to do useful things for them.

No. 24 is from Ethan Mollick of the University of Pennsylvania who, from the moment that ChatGPT first appeared has been an enthusiastic advocate for it.

Brad DeLong is not impressed:

“Code without knowing how to code”: ask Chat GPT4 to code something even moderately complex, copy and paste the result into an environment, and run it, and odds are it will not work without at least some debugging. What software copilots allow you to do is to remove the book you had at your left hand that you frantically paged through trying to figure out what the exact format for that is in this computer language, and to avoid the visits to confusing Stack Overflow threads. You still have to “know how” in the sense of knowing how to set up code architecture, know when something is close enough to correct for it to be worthwhile running it to get an error message, and know how to debug. Since nearly all of us are much better at architecture, recognizing that it is close, and debugging than we are at actually writing stuff ex nihilo, it is an enormous productivity amplification for programmers.

But it does not allow people “to code without knowing how to code”, and nobody who actually knows anything about it would say that. And yet they do…

OK. Maybe the problem is that they believed Ethan Mollick when he said “I can’t code” when what he meant was “I have a day job, and can’t code well”? But still…

Readers write…My memoir the other day about seeing JFK in the flesh moved Anne Kirkman (Whom God Preserve) to write:

I can’t resist commenting on your post about JFK, as I had a very sinilar experience wih Bobby Kennedy. I came out of a shop in the Cornmarket in Oxford to find a small crowd surrounding a car on the roof of which Bobby K. was standing. My memories of him tally with yours of his brother, except there was no speech. The effect of his presence was almost like a physical shock. I’ve never come across such a charismatic person again. How did they do it?

And Trevor Mudge, a computer scientist, writes apropos my choice of John Horgan’s diatribe against sceptics,…

I don’t think John Horgan is correct to refer to Krauss as a “hack physicist” unless one thinks a PhD in theoretic physics from MIT qualifies one as a hack. He may have views that Horgan — a “famous” journalist — does not agree with, but I cannot agree that with Horgan’s characterization. The excerpt of Horgan’s that you quote make use of ad hominen attacks on Krauss and Dawkins, which to my mind detracts strongly from Horgan’s point. As a point of reference, Horgan does not have a great reputation among scientists and mathematicians as far as I can tell https://www.ams.org/notices/199802/bookrev-hoffman.pdf.

ErrataIn yesterday’s edition Rebecca Solnit was wrongly identified as ‘Rebecca Solent’. The culprit was Apple autocorrect, but also me because I failed to spot the mistake before publishing. Apologies to her, and to you, dear reader. And thanks to Mark Liebenrood for pointing it out.

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A presidential studyMichael D. Higgins, the current President of my native land (shown here entertaining Joe Biden last week) is a serious intellectual and author, and his study demonstrates this perfectly. Not for him the immaculately pristine, sterile desks of Macron & Co, but the untidy mess familiar to any working writer. Er, like me. (See below.)

Quote of the Day

”No I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.”

J. A. Whistler, the Victorian painter, in answer to a barrister who, in his legal case against John Ruskin, had asked “For two days’ labour you ask two hundred guineas?”

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsRachmaninov | Variation 18 from “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” | Khatia Buniatishvili

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Pure schmaltz, but lovely all the same.

Long Read of the DayMy Controversial Diatribe Against “Skeptics”

If you like diatribes — and I do — then you may enjoy this one by John Horgan, the famous science journalist.

Here’s a sample:

I hate preaching to the converted. If you were Buddhists, I’d bash Buddhism. But you’re skeptics, so I have to bash skepticism.

I’m a science journalist. I don’t celebrate science, I criticize it, because science needs critics more than cheerleaders. I point out gaps between scientific hype and reality. That keeps me busy, because, as you know, most peer-reviewed scientific claims are wrong.

I’m a skeptic, but with a small S, not capital S. I don’t belong to skeptical societies. I don’t hang out with people who self-identify as capital-S Skeptics. Or Atheists. Or Rationalists.

When people like this get together, they become tribal. They pat each other on the back and tell each other how smart they are compared to those outside the tribe. But belonging to a tribe can make you dumber.

Here’s an example involving two idols of Capital-S Skepticism: biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss. In his book A Universe from Nothing, Krauss claims that physics is answering the old question, Why is there something rather than nothing?

Krauss’s book doesn’t fulfill its title’s promise, not even close, but Dawkins loved it. He writes in the book’s afterword: “If On the Origin of Species was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe From Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology.”

Just to be clear: Dawkins is comparing Lawrence Krauss, a hack physicist, to Charles Darwin. Why would Dawkins say something so dumb? Because he hates religion so much that it impairs his scientific judgment. The author of The God Delusion succumbs to what you might call the science delusion…

Great stuff. And he’s right: righteous folks never like being taken apart, or indeed mocked. I learned this many years ago when I was lived in an ultra-liberal middle-class neighbourhood (which I christened ‘the Muesli Belt’). In an Observer column I took the mickey out of my neighbours for the way they suddenly became aerated about a sex-shop opening up in the vicinity. And, boy, were they cross! And pompous with it. The only exception was a nice architect who mildly opined that the only thing he objected to was that the shop in question didn’t take American Express.

Books, etc.Jurgen Habermas has a new book out — A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Sadly, it’s in German, a language I don’t speak. I guess there’s an English translation on the way.

Elon Musk hates journalists but journalists love Twitter. Where does that leave us?Yesterday’s Observer column:

Last October, the richest manchild in human history fell into the trap he had dug for himself. Elon Musk was forced to purchase Twitter at an absurd price. He had no clear idea of what to do with his new acquisition, other than realising a fatuous idea about “free speech”. It was like watching a monkey acquire a delicate clock: the new owner started thrashing wildly about, slashing the headcount (from 8,000 to about 1,500) – in the process losing many of the people who knew how the machine worked – and generally having tantrums while tweeting incontinently from the smallest room in the company’s San Francisco headquarters.

All of this frenetic activity was watched – and avidly reported for weeks – by the world’s mainstream media, for reasons that would have puzzled a visiting Martian anthropologist. After all, in relation to the other social-media companies, Twitter looked like a minnow. Most people have never used it. So why all the fuss about its acquisition by a flake of Cadbury proportions?

The answer is that there is a select category of humans who are obsessive users of Twitter: politicians; people who work in advertising, PR and “communications”; and journalists…

Do read the whole thing.

The continuing decay of the American republicFrom “The Court Can’t Heal Itself”, a sobering essay by James Fallows on the, er, cosy relationship between Supreme Justice Clarence Thomas and a wacky billionaire, Harlan Crow.

My commonplace bookletNot Too Late

An interesting initiative by Rebecca Solent and Thelma Young Lutunatabua.

NotT00Late is a project to invite newcomers to the climate movement, as well as provide climate facts and encouragement for people who are already engaged but weary. We believe that the truths about the science, the justice-centered solutions, the growing strength of the climate movement and its achievements can help. They can assuage the sorrow and despair, and they can help people see why it’s worth doing the work the climate crisis demands of us.

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Curled upOur cat, Tilly. She and I are about the same age (making due allowances for the conversion rate between human- and cat-years). Strangely, my attempts to replicate this posture end in failure.

Quote of the Day

”The weird thing about any kind of analytic discussion of today’s AI wave is that all the really big issues are highly technical and philosophical arguments amongst scientists who don’t agree on the questions, let alone the answers. What kinds of understanding can these systems have? Is there a path to AGI? How soon? What would that mean? You can spend an awful lot of time watching debates and interviews on YouTube, but no-one knows yet.”

Benedict Evans

That just about sums it up.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJay Ungar & Molly Mason Family Band | “Ashokan Farewell”

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Long Read of the Day Can start-ups fix the ethical problems of technology?

My short answer to the question is ’no’. And the reason is that “get big fast” is the ruling obsession in the industry. But Sebastián Lehuedé, a young researcher in Cambridge, has a more judicious analysis, which looks back to Ivan Illich for inspiration. Which is why I was struck by his essay, because I also keep coming back to Illich for ways of thinking about technology (including bicycles).

Some critics of big tech companies, he says, have pointed to start-ups as key actors in advancing a more ethically aware technological landscape. Drawing parallels with philosopher Ivan Illich’s criticism of ‘growth mania’, he argues that the ‘imperative to scale’ in tech circles makes it difficult for medium and small-sized firms to prioritise ethics.

Worth your time. About a five-minute read.

My commonplace bookletWhy are manufacturers of expensive wristwatches always concerned to make devices for deep-sea divers? Here’s the latest model from Omega. Apparently it’s water-resistant to depths of 6,000 metres, which is 19685.04 feet.

My question: how many real divers can afford this kind of jewellery? It costs £11,700. You can get one here. Remember to bring your swimming trunks to establish your bona fides with a snooty salesperson.

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Harriet and her amanuensisI was struck by this lovely photograph of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, which appeared yesterday on Brad DeLong’s blog. Seeking information about their relationship I went first to Wikipedia (as one does) and found this:

On 21 April 1851, Mill married Harriet Taylor after 21 years of intimate friendship. Taylor was married when they met, and their relationship was close but generally believed to be chaste during the years before her first husband died in 1849. The couple waited two years before marrying in 1851. Brilliant in her own right, Taylor was a significant influence on Mill’s work and ideas during both friendship and marriage. His relationship with Taylor reinforced Mill’s advocacy of women’s rights. He said that in his stand against domestic violence, and for women’s rights he was “chiefly an amanuensis to my wife”.

Further digging uncovered a real surprise — that the relationship between the two had so intrigued an unlikely sleuth, Fredrich Hayek, that he had embarked in the late 1940s on what Cass Sunstein described as

an enormous, uncharacteristic, and somewhat obsessive undertaking …, which was to assemble what remains of the correspondence between Mill and his eventual wife, Harriet Taylor (one or the other destroyed numerous letters, probably including the most interesting), and to use it as the basis for a narrative account of their mysterious love affair.

How was it, asks Sunstein,

that Hayek, of all people, became captivated by the story of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor? A possible answer is that he had to explain to himself and others why Mill—one of the few thinkers he had to regard as an intellectual equal or superior—moved away from what Hayek celebrated as classical liberalism, which for Hayek was focused on limited government and protection of free markets. But Hayek’s interest in the romance itself outpaced his interest in the evolution of Mill’s thinking (perhaps because of the beauty and great delicacy of the correspondence).

Does that romance have anything to do with liberalism and liberty, asks Sunstein? Answer: yes.

One of the lessons we can draw from Hayek’s work of excavation is that Mill’s distinctive form of liberalism, with its emphasis on individual freedom from the confining effect of social norms, had a great deal to do with his relationship with Taylor. As we shall see, Hayek himself missed the connection entirely, because his own preoccupations lay elsewhere.

Interesting, ne c’est pas?. I have a sinking feeling I might have to read Hayek’s account, just out of curiosity. Next stop: the University Library.

Quote of the Day

“Nobody is forgotten when it is convenient to remember them.”

Benjamin Disraeli

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSharon Shannon | Blackbird

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Wonderful musician with an infectious smile.

Long Read of the DayThe Dawn of Mediocre Computing

An intriguing title for an intriguing essay by Venkatesh Rao. It rang a bell for me because I had been musing on the stupendous blandness of ChatGPT’s responses to some of the prompts I had been feeding it.

Well, we all knew it was coming. Computers already easily overwhelm the best humans at chess and Go. Now they have done something far harder: achieved parity with David Brooks at writing.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, released as a research beta two days ago, has done to the standard high-school essay what cameras did to photorealistic painting and pocket calculators did to basic arithmetic. It is open sign-up and free for now, but I suspect not for much longer, so go try it; and make sure to trawl social media for interesting and revealing examples being posted by people.

As an open-world, real-ish (I’ll define real-ish in a minute) domain, the correct standard for judging an AI on writing is not beating the “best” humans1 in a stylized closed-world competition (the existence of such competitions is a mark of a certain kind of simplicity), but achieving indistinguishability from mediocre humans. And when it comes to writing, nobody does mediocre more mediocrely than David Brooks. I’m in the parity band too, but he epitomizes my thesis in Survival of the Mediocre Mediocre in a way I can only aspire to. In the grim darkness of the far future where there are only extreme weather reports, civilization will be dominated by Brooks-like humans and Brooks-equivalent computers living together in an awkward symbiosis. And that future starts today. We are witnessing the dawn of mediocre computing.

This is an angle of things I hadn’t ever contemplated. Hope you find it interesting.

My commonplace bookletHow to Take Accidentally Wes Anderson photographs

Entrancing, witty and interesting video.

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Where to?North Norfolk, last week.

Quote of the Day

”“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.”

Charlie Munger

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsPaolo Nutini | Through The Echoes

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Long Read of the DayBiden comes ‘home’

Joe Biden, who is very attached to his Irish ‘roots’, is in Ireland at the moment. He’s even visiting the town where I was born and, I think, giving a speech — or is it a sermon — in the cathedral there.

The Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole had a perceptive piece in the paper yesterday (behind a paywall, alas) about this. The nub of his argument is that Biden’s “seamless merging” of his sense of Irishness with his Catholic faith rather puts him at odds with how contemporary Irish people — especially young people — now see themselves.

Biden’s sense of Irishness is very real and profoundly felt. But it is rooted in soil that is now increasingly thin on the ground in Ireland itself: a complete fusion of Irish and Catholic identities.

It makes a slightly uncomfortable kind of sense that Biden will preach on Friday from the altar of St Muredach’s Cathedral in Ballina. He chose to be Irish because he identifies so profoundly with Catholicism.

In her memoir, Biden’s sister Valerie wrote that when they were growing up in Wilmington, Delaware, “In Catholic neighborhoods, the parish in which you lived was everything; you identified yourself by name first, parish second.”

The strange thing, writes O’Toole, is that,

in Irish-America, this parochial Catholic world can be recalled with a simple, uncomplicated fondness that is almost impossible now in Ireland itself. Valerie can write that “There was such a strong sense of community, of instant belonging. The kids’ values were shaped by parents inside the home, reinforced by the nuns at school, and watched over by the looming church spire when they played outside.”

This nostalgia is possible, I suppose, because words like “reinforced”, “watched” and “looming” do not, in the context of American Catholic suburbia, bring to mind Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes and parish priests burning novels and teachers being sacked for writing them.

Biden’s visit comes 60 years after the epochal visit of his political hero, JFK, and is, in that sense, “a case of history repeating itself, the first time as a dream of the Irish future, the second as echo of an Irish past”.

JFK embodied, in all his impossible glamour, an idea of what Ireland then aspired to be: modern, sophisticated and confident. Biden now embodies an idea of what Ireland used to be — a place in which “Irish” and “Catholic” was a match made in heaven (and from which there could be no divorce).

I well remember that visit by JFK, a few months before his assassination, and once wrote up my recollections of it for the Observer. This is how it went:

Remembering JFK

I saw Jack Kennedy once, in the flesh, at close range. It was during his visit to Ireland in 1963 and my father — who had been responsible for some of the arrangements — had wangled a good viewing position for me. For a brief period, long enough for every detail of the scene to be etched onto the memory of an impressionable schoolboy, the President stood about 15 feet away from me.

Over the years, it has become de rigeur for members of the chattering classes to distance themselves from the Kennedy phenomenon, to attribute their past infatuation with Camelot-on-the-Potomac to the naiveté of their youth. The piles of revisionist scholarship and muck-raking journalism encourage us to disown the hopes once aroused by Jack Kennedy’s presidency. Like rejected lovers, we come to resent the extent of our original passion, and to be embarrassed by anniversaries and other reminders of it. ‘I remember,’ says the chap in a smart contemporary cartoon, ‘exactly what I was doing when I was first asked if I could remember exactly what I was doing when President Kennedy was shot.’

But I cannot erase the impression that Kennedy made on me that mild Irish day. I had never before seen anyone like him. He was tanned, lithe, alert. He seemed unbelievably glamorous. He had a marvellous smile which first flickered, then exploded into life. He looked both relaxed and wary as he listened to the rambling tributes of local dignatories. When he came to speak, the phrases cutting through the Boston drawl were those of a man who understood the emotive power of words and knew an elegant sentence when he read one.

To my eyes he seemed the embodiment of impossible dreams – that political leaders should be young and vibrant; that firmness could be combined with compassion; that there was a place for literacy in the councils of government; that perhaps power did not always corrupt.

Naive? Sure. I was dazzled by what Henry Kissinger later described as the aphrodisiac effect of power. But it’s what I felt on the day. And it’s why I found Who Shot President Kennedy? (BBC2) so distressing. What bothered me was not the conjectures about the Warren Report rehearsed by Walter Cronkite but seeing the movie footage of the life, which had so touched me as a boy, being snuffed out by an explosive cauliflower of blood and brain tissue. That and the black-and-white photographs from the autopsy showing that even on the slab Kennedy retained something of his taut dignity.

To balance this picture of JFK in death, BBC2 screened two remarkable documentaries showing him in life. One dealt with his victory over Hubert Humphrey in the Wisconsin primary; the other covered the confrontation between his Administration and Governor George Wallace over the registration of two black students in the University of Alabama. In their time, both were path-breaking films because they pioneered the verite techniques which we now take for granted, and because they took film (and therefore television) into areas of public life where it had previously feared to tread.

In their different ways, the two films showed the two sides of Kennedy – the ruthless machine politician and the dignified president. The Wisconsin film showed Jack and Bobby pressing the Catholic flesh, and Bobby collecting dollar bills like a vacuum-cleaner. The Alabana film focussed on the brothers’ search for a strategy to outface Wallace without going over the top. It closed with the speech Jack made to the nation on the subject.

‘We are confronted,’ he said, ‘primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American constitution. It is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities; whether we are going to treat our fellow-Americans as we want to be treated. If an American because his skin is dark cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the colour of skin changed and stand in his place? … This nation, for all its hopes, and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.’

It’s easy now to dismiss this as mere rhetoric. After all, Kennedy didn’t compose it – like all presidents, he had teams of speech-writers. Why is it, then, that his are the only presidential speeches that most of us can remember or quote? It is partly because he employed classy writers. But it is mainly because the man himself had class.

Once, he gave a White House dinner for all the American Nobel laureates then living. At coffee, one of the guests said to him: ‘Mr President, there must be more intelligence gathered under this roof tonight than every before’. ‘Yeah,’ replied Kennedy, ‘except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.’ It is when you put this remark against the collective wit and wisdom of Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan that you begin to get the measure of what was lost on that grim November day in Dallas.

My commonplace bookletThe Ultimate Reading List

It’s here.

Autodidacts of the World Unite!

You have nothing to lose but your brains.

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Easter postI don’t know when it started (maybe it was a lockdown thing) but the villages in this part of the country suddenly started acquiring charming knitted hats. On our way back from Norfolk on Saturday, we stopped at a village shop to buy a paper, and outside it stood this topically-topped box.

I wonder what Trollope (who was a Postal Inspector in Ireland, and sometimes dipped into the “lost letter” boxes for fictional ideas) would have made of it.

Quote of the Day

“To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation: and she will as willingly renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.”

Edward Gibbon

Funny that, and he wasn’t even in the boat club.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsGilbert & Sullivan | A Policeman’s Lot | Pirates of Penzance

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Best listened to on radiograms powered by thermionic valves. But lovely to sing in one’s bath.

Long Read of the DayWhat’s Missing From the Cultural Narrative About Gen Z

Really good, sensible essay by Alfie Robinson challenging a lot of the patronising nonsense currently being peddled about Generation Z, i.e. those born between the mid-to-late 1990s and the early 2010s. The tenor of this sanctimonious harping is that members of Gen Z are more risk-adverse than their predecessors and engage less in underage drinking, smoking, and drug use.

Worse still, they are allegedly not just remaining “ensconced for longer in the protective cocoon of adolescence, reliant on their parents for everything from health insurance to transportation to conflict mediation; they also appear to be far less interested in ever leaving the cocoon at all, having persuaded themselves that independence is too fraught with danger to be worth it”.

Robinson tackles these criticisms head-on.

First, if we dig into the evidence, many of the “aversions” being described here are not the result of coddling or puritanism, but are to a large extent adaptations in the face of economic trends. Second, regardless of the underlying causes, a great number of these abstinences should be applauded, not condemned. They represent major improvements in the quality and length of people’s lives: the fruits of a more conscientious generation and a sign of true maturity and adulthood.

Bravo! This generation is responding intelligently to the economic and other pressures that preceding generations — especially including my own ‘Boomer’ one — have landed them with. Just to take one simple example — home ownership. The very first thing I did after I got an academic post was to go out and buy a house — in central Cambridge. Today, no junior academic could do that. In fact, nowadays even tenured professors are finding cities like Oxford, Cambridge and London unaffordable.

Books, etc.My reading material for the next week. I’m reviewing it for the Observer later in the month. It’s a bracing history of how technology has always benefited elites, with trickle-down improvements (sometimes) for the rest of us. If we don’t get a grip on the contemporary tech industry (and start introducing redistributive taxation) we are in for an even more grotesque re-enactment of this ancient tradition.

My commonplace bookletNational alarm test on April 23 at 3pm.

BBC report

A siren will go off on nearly every smartphone in the UK on Sunday 23 April, the government has announced. The 10 seconds of sound and vibration at 15:00 BST will test a new emergency alerts system.

The alert system will be used to warn of extreme weather events, such as flash floods or wildfires. It could also be used during terror incidents or civil defence emergencies if the UK was under attack.

So, as Corporal Jones used to say in Dad’s Army, Don’t panic, don’t panic!

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Climbing to the MoonLadders to the Moon of AGI, by @Code_of_Kait

How a Generative AI represented the idea (popular with some of the machine-learning crowd) that extending LLMs will — somehow —get us to AGI (i.e. ‘super intelligent’ machines) one day. Thanks to Gary Marcus for the pic.

Quote of the Day

“Safety is no accident.”

On a notice seen at the entrance of a large industrial plant the other day.

A brilliant – and astute — slogan.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsRandy Newman | You’ve Got a Friend in Me

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Long Read of the DayThe Data Delusion

Nice New Yorker review essay by Jill Lepore. Given that we seem to have uploaded everything anyone has ever known onto a worldwide network of machines, she asks, what if it doesn’t have all the answers?

Forget the zettabyten Internet for a minute. Set aside the glowering glass jars. Instead, imagine that all the world’s knowledge is stored, and organized, in a single vertical Steelcase filing cabinet. Maybe it’s lima-bean green. It’s got four drawers. Each drawer has one of those little paper-card labels, snug in a metal frame, just above the drawer pull. The drawers are labelled, from top to bottom, “Mysteries,” “Facts,” “Numbers,” and “Data.” Mysteries are things only God knows, like what happens when you’re dead. That’s why they’re in the top drawer, closest to Heaven. A long time ago, this drawer used to be crammed full of folders with names like “Why Stars Exist” and “When Life Begins,” but a few centuries ago, during the scientific revolution, a lot of those folders were moved into the next drawer down, “Facts,” which contains files about things humans can prove by way of observation, detection, and experiment. “Numbers,” second from the bottom, holds censuses, polls, tallies, national averages—the measurement of anything that can be counted, ever since the rise of statistics, around the end of the eighteenth century. Near the floor, the drawer marked “Data” holds knowledge that humans can’t know directly but must be extracted by a computer, or even by an artificial intelligence. It used to be empty, but it started filling up about a century ago, and now it’s so jammed full it’s hard to open.

From the outside, these four drawers look alike, but, inside, they follow different logics…

Once I read that para, I was hooked. Maybe you will be too?

AI and hegemonic anxietyYesterday’s Observer column:

The Bible maintains that “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong”, but, as Damon Runyon used to say, “that is the way to bet”. As a species, we take the same view, which is why we are obsessed with “races”. Political journalism, for example, is mostly horserace coverage – runners and riders, favourites, outsiders, each-way bets, etc. And when we get into geopolitics and international relations we find a field obsessed with arms “races”.

In recent times, a new kind of weaponry – loosely called “AI” – has entered the race. In 2021, we belatedly discovered how worried the US government was about it. A National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence was convened under the chairmanship of Eric Schmidt, the former chair of Google. In its report, issued in March of that year, the commission warned: that China could soon replace the US as the world’s “AI superpower”; that AI systems will be used (surprise, surprise!) in the “pursuit of power”; and that “AI will not stay in the domain of superpowers or the realm of science fiction”…

Read on

A new arrival!Hooray! David Aaronovitch is on Substack. I have never subscribed to the London Times, partly because I don’t believe in supporting Murdoch properties. And the only thing I regretted about that abstinence is that I didn’t see David Aaronovitch’s columns.

But now he’s a free man, with his own Substack blog. And he’s made a good start.

Like this:

It took 50 minutes……

…after I had posted my first ever Substack here for an email to arrive from someone telling me why he had unsubscribed. He was so quick he might even have placed me in temporary danger of having a unique subscription summary of minus one. “On reading the first post”, he told me, “I’m out of here”. He then explained why. And because everything is grist to the writer’s mill this exchange got me thinking and what it got me thinking is set out below and in tomorrow’s post. In the meantime let’s call my interlocuteur Adam – after the first man to leave paradise.

Adam’s reasoning

I’ll try to be succinct. In a short passage in that long first piece I referred disparagingly to the campaign by professor Matthew Goodwin to persuade the world that the small boats are the make or break issue for the next election. For Adam this represented “the usual snide remarks about Goodwin’s polls, as you prefer to go by Yougov, that much loved poll by all left of centre commentators… (which) knows how to get the replies that you people of the left want, by simply polling the higher educated class which veers leftward. So I’ll be unsubscribing.”

Read on.

My commonplace bookletFrom Margaret Attwood’s Substack. Nicely captures the sad fact that book tours are the penance that best-selling writers have to pay for their success.

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Into the lightEscapees from St Pancras.

Quote of the Day

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”

Albert Einstein

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsHandel | ‘Where’er you walk’ | Semele | Academy of Ancient Music

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Long Read of the DayTyler Cowen’s conversation with Dean Swift

Maybe this should really be the Long Listen of the Day, because there’s an audio version as well as a transcript? Tyler had access to OpenAI’s newest Large Language Model (LLM), GPT4, and he used it to have an imaginary conversation with the great Irish satirist.

It was such an original idea that I laughed out loud when I first learned of it. (And of course wished that I had had the idea myself. I had to content myself with asking ChatGPT to write an entry in Virginia Woolf’s diary for Saturday 19th March, 1926. — with uninspiring results that I described on Tuesday this week.)

Chart of the DayLooks like a career in tech isn’t the bed of roses it used to be.

My commonplace bookletTyler Cowen: How to visit Italy

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Crisp, succinct and informative — as usual with him.

E.g.:

Venice, Florence, and Rome have, on average, the worst food in Italy. They have some wonderful places, but possibly hard to get into, requiring advance planning, and often expensive. For random meals, those cities are not impressive, noting that Rome, due to its size, is much better than Venice or Florence.

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Light and shadeIn College the other day.

Quote of the Day

”Commerce in the 21st century is espionage for profit.”

Historian Jill Lepore, writing in the New Yorker.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsRay Charles | Georgia On My Mind

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Georgia may also be on Trump’s mind, but for a different reason.

Long Read of the DayAI Chatbots Don’t Care About Your Social Norms

They seem to fool people into thinking they’re human, argue Jacob Browning and Yann Lecun in this essay but they are actually exceedingly alien.

With artificial intelligence now powering Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard search engines, brilliant and clever conversational AI is at our fingertips. But there have been many uncanny moments — including casually delivered disturbing comments like calling a reporter ugly, declaring love for strangers or rattling off plans for taking over the world.

To make sense of these bizarre moments, it’s helpful to start by thinking about the phenomenon of saying the wrong thing. Humans are usually very good at avoiding spoken mistakes, gaffes and faux pas. Chatbots, by contrast, screw up a lot. Understanding why humans excel at this clarifies when and why we trust each other — and why current chatbots can’t be trusted.

Getting It Wrong

For GPT-3, there is only one way to say the wrong thing: By making a statistically unlikely response to whatever the last few words were. Its understanding of context, situation and appropriateness concerns only what can be derived from the user’s prompt. For ChatGPT, this is modified slightly in a novel and interesting way. In addition to saying something statistically likely, the model’s responses are also reinforced by human evaluators: The system outputs a response, and human evaluators either reinforce it as a good one or not (a grueling, traumatizing process for the evaluators). The upshot is a system that is not just saying something plausible, but also (ideally) something a human would judge to be appropriate — if not the right thing, at least not offensive…

Great essay. The authors’ conclusion ought to be printed in 95-point Helevetica Bold on every schoolroom and lecture-hall wall:

The upshot is that chatbots aren’t conversing in a human way, and they’ll never get there solely by saying statistically likely things. Without a genuine understanding of the social world, these systems are just idle chatterboxes — no matter how witty or eloquent.

Books, etc.I’ve written for the Observer for a long time (my first piece in the paper was published in 1972, I think, and I’ve been a weekly columnist there ever since 1987).

At one stage during that time, the paper had my fellow-countryman Conor Cruise O’Brien as its Editor-in-Chief. He was a big figure in every sense of the word — an experienced diplomat and UN official (he had been the UN’s High Representative in Katanga during the Congolese civil war), the Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at New York university, a Cabinet minister in Ireland, a distinguished author of fine books (on Camus and Edmund Burke, to name just two), and a major public intellectual.

He was also a formidable drinker, and if you went to the pub with him on a Friday night you needed to be ready for anything. One evening he said to me, “Is it true that you’re an academic as well as a journalist?”. “I’m afraid it is, Conor”, I replied. “I see,” he said. “Same as me: you have a foot in both graves.”

He liked the Observer but I think he regarded many of us as woolly-headed liberals. Still, he appreciated the ethos of the paper and occasionally told stories against himself about it.

One was about a day when he was phoning in the copy for his column from some distant land and at one point dictated as follows to the copy-taker: “the atmosphere was redolent of fin-de-siecle Vienna — that’s French – f-i—n-space-d-e-space…” At which point the copy-taker politely stopped him and said, “I think you should take it for granted, Dr O’Brien, that a copy-taker on the Observer would know what the French for ‘end of the century’ is.”

It was a good story and we all laughed at it. But although I knew the phrase at the heart of the story, I had no real understanding of what it implied.

Until now.

I’m reading — for the first time — Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, and his account of the Vienna in which he was a precocious teenager and young man is one a truly remarkable evocation of a special era. I’m finding the book unputdownable (to resort to cliché) and am retrospectively grateful to Clive James whose essay on Zweig in his collection Cultural Amnesia was what started me down this enjoyable rabbit-hole.

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Many thanks to the readers who pointed out that in the previous two editions I appeared to be confused about the month we’re now in!

Next?

Quote of the Day

”If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”

Ely Devons

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsHandel | Concerto grosso B flat major op. 6 No. 7 HWV 325 | WDR Symphony Orchestra

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Long Read of the DayPhilip K. Dick and the Fake Humans

Lovely essay in the Boston Review by Henry Farrell, arguing that we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s.

This is not the dystopia we were promised. We are not learning to love Big Brother, who lives, if he lives at all, on a cluster of server farms, cooled by environmentally friendly technologies. Nor have we been lulled by Soma and subliminal brain programming into a hazy acquiescence to pervasive social hierarchies.

Dystopias tend toward fantasies of absolute control, in which the system sees all, knows all, and controls all. And our world is indeed one of ubiquitous surveillance. Phones and household devices produce trails of data, like particles in a cloud chamber, indicating our wants and behaviors to companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Yet the information thus produced is imperfect and classified by machine-learning algorithms that themselves make mistakes. The efforts of these businesses to manipulate our wants leads to further complexity. It is becoming ever harder for companies to distinguish the behavior which they want to analyze from their own and others’ manipulations.

This does not look like totalitarianism unless you squint very hard indeed. As the sociologist Kieran Healy has suggested, sweeping political critiques of new technology often bear a strong family resemblance to the arguments of Silicon Valley boosters. Both assume that the technology works as advertised, which is not necessarily true at all.

Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things….

Chart of the DayNote, though, that there’s no graph for the compute cost, which is a proxy for the carbon footprint of all this data processing.

Orwellian metaphors in ‘Generative AI’Long, long ago, in his essay “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell drew attention to the way language is used to conceal awkward truths “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”). The tech industry (and its media and academic accomplices) are singularly adept at this. Thus machine-learning suddenly became “AI” even though it has nothing to do with intelligence, artificial or otherwise. By clothing in an acronym which originally denoted a serious quest for machines that could display signs of genuine intelligence the crude planet-heating, IP-infringing technology called machine-learning can be somehow made respectable.

Now, as Rachel Metz points out in a splendid blast in Bloomberg’s Tech Daily newsletter, the idea that a Large Language Model like ChatGPT or GPT-4 can “hallucinate” has become the default explanation anytime the machine messes up.

We humans can at times hallucinate: We may see, hear, feel, smell or taste things that aren’t truly there. It can happen for all sorts of reasons (illness, exhaustion, drugs).

But…

Companies across the industry have applied this concept to the new batch of extremely powerful but still flawed chatbots. Hallucination is listed as a limitation on the product page for OpenAI’s latest AI model, GPT-4. Google, which opened access to its Bard chatbot in March, reportedly brought up AI’s propensity to hallucinate in a recent interview

“Hallucinates” is a way of obscuring what’s going on. It’s also a way of encouraging humans to anthropomorphise LLMs.

Saying that a language model is hallucinating makes it sound as if it has a mind of its own that sometimes derails, said Giada Pistilli, principal ethicist at Hugging Face, which makes and hosts AI models.

“Language models do not dream, they do not hallucinate, they do not do psychedelics,” she wrote in an email. “It is also interesting to note that the word ‘hallucination’ hides something almost mystical, like mirages in the desert, and does not necessarily have a negative meaning as ‘mistake’ might.”

Great piece. Hats off to Ms Metz.

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Modern Irish historyWell, one shelf of it anyway.

Quote of the Day

”At times, when remonstrated with for not being ‘nice’, he would retort, ‘You don’t know how much nastier I would be if I hadn’t become a Catholic’.”

Tom Driberg on Evelyn Waugh.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJoni Mitchell and James Taylor | The Circle Game

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Long Read of the DayChatGPT and Virginia Woolf

Results of a frivolous experiment by yours truly.

Me: Write a diary entry by Virginia Woolf for Friday 19 March, 1926

ChatGPT:

Dear Diary,

Today has been a rather hectic day for me. I woke up early, as usual, and spent some time in my study working on my novel. I have been struggling with it lately, but today I managed to make some progress. I feel that I am getting closer to the heart of the story, and it excites me.

After breakfast, I went for a walk in the garden. The air was crisp and the sun was shining, and I felt invigorated by the fresh air. I spent some time admiring the flowers and the trees, and I thought about the beauty of nature. It’s amazing how nature can inspire us and lift our spirits.

In the afternoon, I had some visitors. My sister Vanessa came over, along with her husband Clive Bell and their children. We had a lovely time chatting and catching up on news. They are such a delightful family, and I always enjoy their company.

Later in the day, I received a letter from my friend Lytton Strachey. He is always so witty and amusing in his letters, and I found myself laughing out loud at some of his remarks. I am looking forward to seeing him soon.

As the day draws to a close, I am feeling a sense of contentment. It has been a busy day, but a productive and enjoyable one. I am grateful for the simple pleasures of life, like a walk in the garden or a good letter from a friend. It is these things that make life worth living.

Until tomorrow, Virginia Woolf.

OK, let’s try again…

Me: Write a diary entry in the style of Virginia Woolf for Friday 19 March, 1926

Chat GPT:

Dear Diary,

What a day it has been! I woke up early, as I usually do, but today the world outside my window seemed to be filled with a different light. The sun shone brighter and the birds sang louder, as if they too knew that something special was happening today.

I spent the morning writing in my study, trying to capture the essence of the character that has been haunting me for weeks. It is a struggle, as always, to find the words that will do justice to the complexity of human experience. But still, I persist.

After a light lunch, I went for a walk in the garden. The daffodils are in full bloom now, their bright yellow petals reaching towards the sky. I found myself lost in their beauty, my mind drifting away from my work and towards the simple pleasures of life.

In the afternoon, my sister Vanessa came to visit with her husband Clive and their children. It was wonderful to see them again, to hear the laughter of children and the chatter of adults. They bring a sense of joy to my life that I cannot find anywhere else.

As the day drew to a close, I found myself lost in thought. The world is changing so quickly, and sometimes it feels as though we are all rushing towards an unknown future. But in moments like this, surrounded by the beauty of nature and the love of family, I am reminded that there is still so much to be grateful for.

Until tomorrow, Virginia Woolf.

__________________

Now, as it happens, Woolf didn’t write anything in her diary for March 19 — hence the idea behind the prompt.

For comparison, here’s a snatch of her entry for the following day:

You get the message. ChatGPT is, no doubt, good at some things. But crassly inadequate at others. I had assumed that its training data would have included the diaries. Obviously it hadn’t. So it made up a diary entry that might have been written by an earnest teenager. Examples: “my sister Vanessa came to visit with her husband Clive and their children”. And it was, of course, “wonderful to see them again”. Vanessa is almost always “Nessa” in the actual diaries, and Woolf would never have felt the need to explain Clive’s marital status. So the whole thing reads like those family newsletters one gets at Christmas.

All of which brought to mind something that Nathan Heller wrote in his New Yorker essay, “The End of the English Major”:

“There has been much hand-wringing about ChatGPT and its ability to replicate some composition tasks. But ChatGPT can no more conceive “Mrs. Dalloway” than it can guide and people-manage an organization. Instead, A.I. can gather and order information, design experiments and processes, produce descriptive writing and mediocre craftwork, and compose basic code, and those are the careers likeliest to go into slow eclipse.”

Never mind Mrs Galloway; it can’t even imagine its author’s diary.

Books, etc.

”Ulysses … I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like an eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or a baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever.”

George Orwell, in a letter to Brenda Salkeld, September 1934.

My commonplace booklet

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School Trip!King’s Parade, Cambridge.

Note the girl on the left looking snootily at the photographer. Smart kid.

Quote of the Day

”Carbon capture is currently ineffective and an extremely costly experiment, distracting from the measures that we know are effective and can implement today. The UK government should not be investing £20billion in a strategy that is essentially an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff when we could use the money to not go down the cliff in the first place.”

Dr Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in Climate Science at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, commenting on the UK government’s latest climate-catastrophe-averting ‘strategy’ — technology which will capture and store carbon dioxide in undersea caverns, thereby enabling an expansion of oil and gas extraction in the North Sea.

The Greeks were right: those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMary Bergin, Cologne, Germany, 1990

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Long Read of the DayVermeer’s Daughter

Fabulous long, long read by Lawrence Weschler about a speculative theory that Maria Vermeer was not only a model for her father but also an artist who created several of the paintings attributed to him. Also, en passant, a memorable profile of the, er, unforgettable Vermeer expert whose theory this is. And, for good measure, it provides a good account of the impenetrable snootiness of the art-critic establishment.

Cheered me up no end.

Programmers, beware: ChatGPT has ruined your magic trickYesterday’s Observer column:

Seeking a respite from the firehose of contradictory commentary, I suddenly remembered an interview that Steve Jobs – the nearest thing to a visionary the tech industry has ever had – gave in 1990, and dug it out on YouTube.

In it he talks about a memory he had of reading an article in Scientific American when he was 12 years old. It was a report of how someone had measured the efficiency of locomotion for a number of species on planet Earth – “how many kilocalories did they expend to get from point A to point B. And the condor won – came in at the top of the list, surpassed everything else; and humans came in about a third of the way down the list, which was not such a great showing for the ‘crown of creation’.

“But then somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. A human riding a bicycle blew away the condor, all the way to the top of the list. And it made a really big impression on me – that we humans are tool-builders, and that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes.

“And so for me,” he concluded, “a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind – something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities. And I think we’re just at the early stages of this tool – very early stages – and we’ve come only a very short distance, and it’s still in its formation, but already we’ve seen enormous changes, [but] that’s nothing to what’s coming in the next 100 years.”

Well, that was 1990 and here we are, three decades later, with a mighty powerful bicycle…

Do read the whole thing.

Cold War 2.0 is up and runningFrom the Editor of the Economist in this week’s edition:

When I and some of my London colleagues travelled to Beijing last week, we arrived to find the atmosphere laced with intimidation and paranoia. The world’s most important relationship—that between China and America—has become more embittered and hostile than ever.

In the halls of government Communist Party officials were denouncing what they see as America’s bullying. They told us that the United States is intent on beating China to death and that it will never accept that any country can be as powerful as itself, regardless of whether it is communist or a democracy. America, in their view, will tolerate China only if it is submissive—in the words of one Chinese academic, a “fat cat, not a tiger”.

Meanwhile Cold War 1.1 is actively being waged in Ukraine.

Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’?One of the strangest things about the UK’s Classic FM radio station is the incessant stream of advertisements it carries for ocean cruises.

I wonder therefore if the station’s marketing executives have seen this interesting story in Buzzfeed News.

“Hundreds Of Passengers Have Said They Were Sexually Assaulted On Cruise Ships. Their Stories Highlight Years Of Lax Security, Critics Say.”

In dozens of court documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News, cruise ship passengers say they have been dragged into cabins and raped, pushed into janitors’ closets and assaulted, and even attacked in the public corridors of ships. Likewise, parents and guardians have alleged that their children were molested by other passengers or crew members, plied with alcohol, and in some instances, abused by daycare staffers at onboard activity centers. As recently as two weeks ago, the parents of a 17-year-old passenger filed a civil suit alleging she was raped by a fitness instructor onboard a Carnival cruise ship.

In fact, sexual assaults are the most prevalent reported crime on cruise ships, according to the FBI. Since 2015, there have been 454 reported allegations of sex crimes on cruise ships. Experts believe that the actual numbers are far higher, as many sexual assaults often go unreported. (For reference, more than two-thirds of all sexual assaults in the US are not reported to law enforcement, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.)

And many of the major cruise lines have been told — even by their own security staffers — that more could be done to protect passengers, such as installing more surveillance cameras and hiring additional security personnel. But according to court records, including a deposition from this February in a lawsuit alleging the gang rape of a minor on a Carnival Cruise ship, senior executives have opted not to implement the changes, claiming they’re too expensive.

Shiver me timbers, etc.

My idea of hell is being locked on a ship with thousands of other people.

My commonplace booklet Venice Is Saved! Woe Is Venice.

The New York Times has an imaginative report on Venice’s now-operational sea wall and what it might mean for the city’s future.

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Darwin and his masterpiece (x2)Seen in a bookshop window yesterday

Quote of the Day

”The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality and, eventually in one’s own.”

Susan Sontag

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSatie | Je te veux

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Long Read of the DayHow Will AI Transform Photography?

As artists experiment with this fast-evolving technology, they uncover creative opportunity, absurdity, and bias. So says Charlotte Kent, an arts writer and an assistant professor of visual culture at Montclair State University in a thought-provoking essay. It pulled me up short because, as a keen photographer, I initially thought that generative AI technology was a threatening antithesis to photography. The article suggests, though, that some photographers see its possibilities for augmentation.

Sample:

Due to the range of sources from which these image generators pull data—online images ranging from stock photography, news imagery, social media posts, and personal websites—the results can range from the real to the uncanny. New York–based photographer Charlie Engman believes that AI’s limited understanding of bodies stems from perceiving them through images, not lived experiences. Informed by a background in dance and performance, Engman’s work spans fashion imagery as well as collaborative portraits of his mother. His AI experiments push some of these ideas further, exploring how the technology is able and unable to articulate bodily movement.

Our physical gestures are expressive of internal, psychological states, but AI struggles to process the aesthetic of emotions. Grief or pleasure may appear on AI-generated faces but isn’t replicated in those figures’ postures or gestures. Engman has observed that the body language of performers includes subtle movement choices cultivated over time to express thoughts and feelings, but these are rarely read accurately across AI data sets. Tags associated with images don’t typically specify a relationship between affect and a particular gesture. For instance, an emotion might be determined as happy because many images with smiles are tagged “happy,” but the AI might not be prompted to discern other subtle postures or stances, such as relaxed shoulders. For Engman, this gap is a compelling reason to explore the technology…

The piece includes lots of striking images, like this one making a commentary on office life.

Interesting throughout.

Books, etc.Travels with Charley

Browsing in David’s bookshop in Cambridge yesterday morning, I came on a battered copy of this and was reminded of the first time I read it, aeons ago. I had an audio copy of it too, and sometimes listened to it during the years when I had a long commute to work. But then I mislaid my copy and the cassette tapes of the audio version went the way of all cassette tapes. So I opened the paperback and read this…

When I was very young and the urge to be some place else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age, I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of the stomach, high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself…

…and was lost. So I paid David £2 thinking “well, that takes care of the weekend”.

My commonplace bookletGoing Solar

My friend Quentin (Whom God Preserve) decided that he would ‘go solar’ some time ago. And he did. But Quentin never does anything by halves, or without thinking things through beforehand. And he’s just released a video describing what he did and explaining the various decisions he made. It’s long (nearly 40 minutes) but if you’re seriously interested in harnessing the power of the sun for domestic reasons, then you’ll learn a lot from it. I know I did.

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I liked Gary Marcus’s comments about it. And I particularly liked his quoting of Walid Saba’s Tweet:

Sums it up, really.

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Tricycling for billionairesWell, as Zero Mostel shouted in The Producers, “If you’ve got it, baby, flaunt it.”

Quote of the Day

“The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

William Faulkner

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsPadraig Ó Carra | An Buachaill Caol Dubh (The slender black boy)

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Another product of the ongoing discussion about Hammered Dulcimers. This was suggested by Joe Dunne, who lived in Galway in the 1980s and often heard Ó Carra perform.

There are some annoying clicks on the recording. Do not adjust your sets if you hear them. Blame the sound engineer who did the recording.

Long Read of the DayCheating is All You Need

A very perceptive blog post about LLMs (Large Language Models like Chat GPT, GTP-4, et al) by Steve Yegge, one of the most experienced software gurus around.

TL;DR summary

There is something legendary and historic happening in software engineering, right now as we speak, and yet most of you don’t realize at all how big it is.

Includes a compelling example of ChatGPT’s ability to write a good piece of functioning code from a sloppy verbal description of what was required.

Fascinating and worth a read.

Books, etc.There’s a new issue of the journal Daedalus which is absolutely fabulous. The theme is “Creating a New Moral Political Economy”. It’s edited by Margaret Levi and Henry Farrell and has a list of terrific contributors that includes Alison Gopnik, Anne-marie Slaughter, Joshua Cohen, Rebecca Henderson, Colin Mayer, Margaret O’Mara, Marion Fourcade, danah boyd and Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve). Like manna from heaven — and it’s free! A whole weekend’s brain-food.

DPReview, RIPDPReview, the best source of informed reviews of photographic gear, is being shuttered by its owner, Amazon, after 25 years. It was founded in 1998 and acquired by Amazon on 2007, having built up a formidable reputation for providing us with detailed reviews of cameras, lenses, and related kit. It was originally based in London, but eventually moved its operations to Seattle to be closer to its new owner and where it continued to operate relatively independently.

It was caught up in the recent round of layoffs at Amazon. At a guess, I’d say that — given the way that smartphone photography has eroded the market for real photo kit — it was regarded by Amazon as a poor prospect for growth.

Pity. I always valued its reviews, and occasionally bought something based on them.

How to beat Trump?Jack Shafer’s depressing advice for De Santis.

Apparently, there’s no mileage in attacking him for his innumerable failings.

Trump’s vulnerabilities reside in his positives, and that’s where DeSantis should probe for cracks and fissures. This is no independent discovery. GOP campaign strategist Karl Rove was famous for eroding an opponent’s strengths. For example, under the Rove lens during the 2004 presidential campaign, patriotic war veteran Sen. John Kerry was portrayed as something of a weakling as he challenged President George W. Bush (who, unlike Kerry, spent the Vietnam War in the Texas Air National Guard). “Sometimes people’s strengths turn out to be really big weaknesses,” Rove told Fox News in 2007. “We tend to — you know, people tend to sometimes in campaigns accentuate things that they think are big and important, and they exaggerate them.”

What are Trump’s positives? In his campaign 2016 kickoff, he promised, “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall,” and continued to praise his wall throughout the 2020 campaign. The wall turned out to be a Potemkin affair, with PolitiFact finding in 2020, “What the administration has mostly done is replace old and outdated designs with newer and improved barriers.” DeSantis could easily out-wing and out-demagogue Trump on the border (remember his airlift of asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard?) by savaging Trump’s wall as an illusion.

To defeat Trump, Shafer thinks De Santis could learn a thing or two from Stormy Daniels, the porn star who has won every round so far against Trump.

Daniels refused to be intimidated by Trump’s threats (ad baculum) and shrugged off his lawyer’s attempts at coercion. She didn’t let Trump reduce her to an object (reification) of scorn or hatred. And when she retaliated against him, it was with the artillery of humor, insulting his manhood. “In addition to his…umm…shortcomings, he has demonstrated his incompetence, hatred of women, and lack of self-control on Twitter AGAIN! And perhaps a penchant for bestiality. Game on, Tiny,” Daniels tweeted.

Depressing, isn’t it, when one thinks that the future of there American republic (if it has one) could be decided at this level.

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Haut CanineWe were having dinner in a nice Copenhagen restaurant one evening in 2022 when the proprietor’s dog decided to sit opposite to keep a friendly eye on these two strangers who had wandered onto his territory.

Quote of the Day

”The mistakes of the great, promulgated along with the discoveries of their genius, are apt to work havoc.”

Erwin Schrödinger, in “Nature and the Greeks”.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJoni Mitchell | California | BBC In Concert, 1970)

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Joni playing a dulcimer.

Thanks to Tom Hubbard for the link. And see Commonplace Booklet below for a trip down that particular rabbit hole.

Long Read of the DayThe RESTRICT Act

Perceptive essay by Kevin Xu on the RESTRICT Act currently wending its unimpeded way through Congress, and on what it means for Chinese companies hoping to do business in the US.

TL;DR — it’s “game over” for them.

From time to time, I like to read the full text of a legislative bill, if only to put my past work experience at the White House and my law degree to some good use. What caught my attention recently was the RESTRICT Act, which goes after the national security implications of Chinese technologies in the US. It is getting lots of traction in DC, so I read it – all 55-pages of it.

My one-sentence conclusion: if it becomes law, the RESTRICT Act basically spells “game over” for all Chinese technology companies seeking to do business in the US.

RESTRICT stands for Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology. (Never underestimate how much energy Congressional staffers put into a catchy acronym to help pass a bill.) It covers all the potential dangers posed by technologies affiliated with America’s foreign adversaries – namely, the PRC (including Hong Kong and Macau), Russia, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela under Maduro. But everyone knows the bill is squarely aimed at China and, to a much lesser extent, Russia. (No one is concerned about the threat of networking equipment made in Iran or Cuba.)

What’s surprising to me is how extremely comprehensive the technology areas that are covered under this proposal, and how much power this bill gives the executive branch to ban (or restrict) these technologies for national security purposes…

Eerie echoes of the Cold War and CoCom.

Books, etc.John Gray’s Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life is great.

My commonplace bookletOn dulcimers, hammered or not

Tom Hubbard took issue with Sheila Hayman’s theory about ‘hammered’ dulcimers.

Ooooh, you’re going to hear from a lot of indignant dulcimer aficionados about your crude description of dulcimer distinctions.

Two very different instruments. Wikipedia can help.

It does. There are hammered ones (i.e. ones you play with hammers) and Appalachian ones, which are three- or four-stringed fretted instruments, generally played on the lap by strumming. (As by Joni Mitchell above).

He also sent a link to a great interpreter of the hammered dulcimer, one John McCutcheon. Here he is.

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Stepping stonesA section of the ‘limestone pavement’ of the Burren in Co Clare. Seen from a distance the karst landscape looks completely barren (“like a moonscape” someone once said). Yet close up it’s anything but. In fact, Wikipedia says, the region is renowned for its remarkable assemblage of plants and animals, and over 70% of Ireland’s species of flowers are found there. The Burren supports Arctic–alpine and Mediterranean Basin plants side-by-side, due to the unusual environment, as well as many rare Irish species, some of which are only found in this area. When you look more closely, you see that many of the grikes — the crevices between the limestone slabs — basically provide micro-climates in which such exotica thrive.

We spent a lovely day there on our last trip to Ireland.

Quote of the Day

”Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”

Susan Sontag

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBach | Concerto for 2 Violins Strings | BWV 1043: II. Adagio

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Chosen because the sun was shining when I was listening to it.

Long Read of the DayOn Writing

Wonderful reflective essay by Helen Lewis on the difficult thing that many of us do for a living.

Notice what you notice. John Lloyd, the great comedy producer, once said to me that the best comedians use the audience as an editor: the audience are the experts: they know what’s funny. Something similar is true of journalism: you are a human being encountering the world, and if you find something interesting, the chances are, so will other people. If you find your brow furrowing, don’t be afraid to ask the question that just popped into your head.

The main reason people don’t do this is that they want to seem cool, or knowledgeable, in front of their interviewees. They don’t want to risk asking a stupid questions. Always ask the stupid question. Not least because if you don’t, you might come back, write up your piece and face an editor going, “so what did she mean by saying she lost her virginity to a goat?”

Read on. It’s lovely. And the best thing I’ve read on the subject since John McFee’s book.

Helen sometimes reminds me of Joan Didion.

Yes, it’s crazy to have TikTok on official phones. But it’s not good for any of usMy OpEd piece in Sunday’s Observer.

As of this moment, government officials in 11 countries are forbidden to run TikTok on their government-issued phones. The countries include the US, Canada, Denmark, Belgium, the UK, New Zealand, Norway, France, the Netherlands and Poland. In addition, European Commission and European parliament staff were required to delete the app. This raises two questions.

First, why were politicians and senior officials in democracies scrolling like zombies through dance crazes, daft pet videos, feeling “bonita” and things you can do with smudged lipstick?

And second, what took these governments so long?

Do read the whole thing

My commonplace booklet“Excitement” contd.

From the Humanist daily newsletter, which is an endless source of joy to those of us who like that sort of thing (to quote Miss Jean Brodie on the subject of chemistry). There’s been an interesting thread running on the newsletter about the tendency of ostensibly mature scholars regularly to announce (usually on Twitter) how “excited” or even “delighted” they are to be giving a paper at some dreary academic conference or other. (It is, of course, just virtue-signalling on steroids.)

From: Christian-Emil Smith Ore
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 36.478: excitement everywhere all the time, but no Oscar

And also synchronic cultural differences. In USA superlative and adverbs like fantastic are more frequent than in Nordic languages. Many years ago the Swedish lexicographer Martin Gjellerstam analysed a corpus of trivial literature (novels) and accidentally observed that the novels translated from English (US) had a much higher frequency of the word ‘gud’ (God) than the rest and definitely higher than the average of Swedish texts.

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What’s in a picture?From Noema:

Where a host meets his guests reveals the context in which he wants to be regarded. The background decor of the chosen setting is more than a telling detail. It is the writing on the wall.

In the case of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the image of power they want to project is out of the historical realm of czars and emperors among whom they place themselves. The civilizational past portrayed on their walls suffuses their vision of the future. It is the common springboard of opposition to the liberal world order of the West they are united in resisting.

This was in splendid evidence at the Moscow summit this week when Putin hosted a banquet for Xi at the 15th-century Palace of Facets in the Kremlin where czars celebrated after their coronation and consecrated the top clergy of the Orthodox Church. The mural behind the two leaders in the photo above, which depicts Vladimir the Great and his sons, is meant to convey legitimacy conferred through continuity. Vladimir ruled what came to be called the Kievan Rus from 980 to 1015, when he unified disparate principalities into one state and converted the nation to Christianity.

It is this very history that lay behind Putin’s justification of the invasion of Ukraine. Could he have been more explicit in what he was asking Xi to endorse?

The Chinese leader may have been unaware of the message the wily namesake of Vladimir I was sending through a staged photo-op. But he would have easily understood the uses of historical continuity as a touchstone to legitimate his own rule.

If Xi was unaware of it at the time, he isn’t now. Besides, as Noema points out, he uses similar imagery himself from time to time.

Quote of the Day“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough”

Mae West

Amen.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsThe Dubliners | Christ Church

Link

Long Read of the DayOn the allurements of conspiracy theory

Really astute and insightful essay by Phil Christman in the Hedgehog Review on a subject that my colleagues and I spent some years studying before it was academically fashionable. Interesting for — among other things — the way it tries to get inside a conspiracist’s head.

One day, you stumble across something—a long video, an article, a conversation (How rare those are! You must make more time for them…) with a learned friend. The same self-righteousness of authority crosses his face, the tinniness of certainty issued from his mouth too, but this time what he says sticks. It seems to explain the wrongness. Or not even explain it, really—just make it stand still. It was this thing that was wrong. The monster disclosed himself. He was something small and definable—a vaccine, a chemical—that spreads until it can’t be isolated, or he was something large and indefinable—“wokeness,” “CRT”—that terminates in many small, sharp wrongnesses. Or maybe it was the second sort of thing, but epitomized in a single image, so that it sounds like the first: The Cathedral. The cabal. But for a second, you could see the wrongness. How clarifying, simply to see it. You felt something like desire.

As you read on, as you watch more videos, as you continue to talk with your learned friend, you experience, for perhaps the first time in your life, the joy of scholarship. What was school, anyway? A punishment for being awake, a reminder that for every minute of playground, life will exact an hour of sitting still in a hot room that stinks of others’ lunches digesting. How can one doubt the existence of malign conspiracies in a world that answers the miraculous sharpening of adolescent senses with the sense-insulting colors, shapes, smells, of school? School never gave you this feeling, the feeling that “there is a world inside the world,” as Don DeLillo writes in Libra (1988), his great novel of the John F. Kennedy assassination. You start to become, as DeLillo depicts Oswald becoming, a sort of secular monk…

You read like Oswald, obsessively. You marshal for yourself the rough narrative of history that education should already have given you. You become that precious and imperiled thing, an autodidact…

It’s long but worth it.

Gordon Moore RIPA great figure from the history of modern computing has passed away. Gordon Moore was a co-founder of Intel and the inspiration for the eponymous ‘Law’ predicting that the number of transistors that could be placed on a silicon chip would double at regular intervals for the foreseeable future, thus increasing the data-processing power of computers exponentially.

Holcomb Noble and Katie Hafner have a nice Obituary of him in the New York Times.

I met him once. He was on a visit to Cambridge, where he had endowed a beautiful science and technology library. I asked for an interview and we met in the office of the University Librarian and had a long chat about the early history of the industry and the part he had played in it. At one point I noticed that he was still wearing the ancient digital watch for which he had become famous and asked him why he still wore it. He answered that it was a peg for one of his stories — namely that, at $15 million it was the most expensive watch in the world. How come? Because that was Intel lost from trying to get into — and exiting from — the digital watch business.

Our talk was very enjoyable but after a while I started to worry about his schedule and mentioned to him that the car that the University had arranged to take him to meet the then Chancellor of the University (Prince Philip) should now be picking him up. So we went down to the Library entrance and… there was no limo in sight. He didn’t have a contact number for someone to call, but he knew where he was supposed to be heading. So we climbed into my battered Saab — littered with kids’ toys, tennis racquets and other junk — and I drove him to his destination.

After I dropped him off I drove home and told my late wife Sue about the about my role as an impromptu chauffeur. She was not amused. “What!” she expostulated. “You drove Gordon Moore in our crummy jalopy.” Then she went to her laptop, ascertained how many Intel shares Moore then owned, multiplied that by the share price and came back with the number $7B. The least I could have done, she said, was to get him to buy us a new Saab.

He was a nice and a good man. May he rest in peace.

You wait ages for an AI chatbot to come along, then a whole bunch turn up. Why?Yesterday’s Observer column:

When, late last year, the editor asked me and other Observer writers what we thought 2023 would be like, my response was that it would be more like 1993 than any other year in recent history. Why? Simply this: 1993 was the year that Mosaic, the first modern web browser, launched and all of a sudden the non-technical world understood what this strange “internet” thing was for. This was despite the fact that the network had been switched on a whole decade earlier, during which time the world seemed almost entirely unaware of it; as a species, we seem to be slow on the uptake.

Much the same would happen in 2023, I thought, with ChatGPT. Machine-learning technology, misleadingly rebranded as artificial intelligence (AI), has been around for eons, but for the most part, only geeks were interested in it. And then out comes ChatGPT and suddenly “meatspace” (internet pioneer John Perry Barlow’s derisive term for the non-techie world) wakes up and exclaims: “So that’s what this AI stuff is all about. Wow!”

And then all hell breaks loose, because it turns out that all the tech giants, who had been obsessed with this generative AI stuff for years, realised that they had been scooped by a small US research outfit called OpenAI (cunningly funded by boring old Microsoft)…

Read on

My Commonplace BookletThe other day, I wondered what a “hammered dulcimer” might be. (I was vaguely reminded of my undergraduate days when the term “hammered” described someone so drunk as to be incapable of independent locomotion, and I was entertaining fantasies of a inebriated musical instrument wandering the streets.)

Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve), whose mission in life is to protect me from my invincible ignorance, provided rapid enlightenment.

Basically, before pianos, keyboard instruments (harpsichords, clavichords, dulcimers) made their notes by plucking the strings, which meant no gradations of sound, no resonance, no long or short notes. Dual keyboard harpsichords made it possible to do loud or soft, but nothing in between. Then forte pianos and later pianofortes came along which hit the strings with hammers, which could be done more or less hard, giving more range of sound. Then dampers and the ‘loud’ pedal gave us resonance, and the ‘soft’ pedal (which just shifts the hammers along so they only hit two strings rather than three) gave an extra layer of expressiveness. Then Erard invetned the double escapement action which made it possible to repeat notes very quickly. Then Beethoven came along and showed what could be done with it. As did Fanny [Mendelssohn] about whom Sheila has made a new documentary.

So a hammered dulcimer, as I understand it, is an evolved dulcimer in which the strings are hammered, not plucked.

So now I know. And so , dear reader, do you.

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Don’s FDon McCullough’s Nikon F. The one that took the bullet intended for him when he was covering the war in Vietnam. Best advertisement for a camera I’ve ever seen.

Quote of the Day

”For those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.”

George Seaton

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsTelemann | Concerto for Mandolin, Hammered Dulcimer, Harp and Continuo in F Major, TWV 53:F1 | I. Allegro

Link

I’d often heard this but hadn’t know it was by Telemann. Also, I wondered what the poor dulcimer had done to be ‘hammered’.

In yesterday’s Musical Alternative by the wonderful Mary Bergin, my Apple autocorrect changed her name to ‘Begin’ and I didn’t notice. Growl!

Long Read of the DayHidden hydrogen: Earth may hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel

Fascinating article by Eric Hand in Science, a really top-class journal.

The story starts with a ‘dry’ borehole in Mali.

In 2012, he recruited Chapman Petroleum to determine what was coming out of the borehole. Sheltered from the 50°C heat in a mobile lab, Brière and his technicians discovered that the gas was 98% hydrogen. That was extraordinary: Hydrogen almost never turns up in oil operations, and it wasn’t thought to exist within the Earth much at all. “We had celebrations with large mangos that day,” Brière says.

Within a few months, Brière’s team had installed a Ford engine tuned to burn hydrogen. Its exhaust was water. The engine was hooked up to a 30-kilowatt generator that gave Bourakébougou its first electrical benefits: freezers to make ice, lights for evening prayers at the mosque, and a flat-screen TV so the village chief could watch soccer games. Children’s test scores also improved. “They had the lighting to learn their lessons before going to class in the morning,” Diallo says. He soon gave up on oil, changed the name of his company to Hydroma, and began drilling new wells to ascertain the size of the underground supply.

The Malian discovery was vivid evidence for what a small group of scientists, studying hints from seeps, mines, and abandoned wells, had been saying for years: Contrary to conventional wisdom, large stores of natural hydrogen may exist all over the world, like oil and gas—but not in the same places.

If this is indeed the case, then it could be a significant moment in the quest for a low-carbon future.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for alerting me to it.

You can now run a GPT-3-level AI model on your laptop, phone, and Raspberry PiThe ‘Generative AI’ genie is out of the bottle. And it’s being commoditised. Some of it is now running on my iPhone and my laptop. There’s even a version of Meta’s LLM now running (slowly) on a Raspberry Pi! This ArsTechnica piece gives a useful run-down on what’s happening.

My commonplace bookletI’m really excited to say that your “really excited” messages turn me right off

From an exasperated Polish scholar on the Digital Humanities newsletter.

I’m truly excited and delighted and thrilled to see that it is not just my cynical self foaming at the mouth when I see all those “excited to be giving a talk at the conference…” tweets. Excited, really? Man, you’re 40, you should not be excited anymore whenever you talk at other people for 20 minutes in a room with a screen (half of those people are tweeting about something else anyway). I wonder if this is not just the same false excitement we see in commercials when that laxative really does the job on the acting persons’ entrails.

I guess it makes sense in very competitive academic climes (you know where). It’s interesting how hyperbolical the traditionally unemotional Anglo-Saxons have become. I don’t see a lot of that excitement (“podniecenie” or “ekscytacja”) in my native Polish in this context; I guess it’s because our academia is so underpaid that the competitiveness evaporates before it’s even born. But that is another story.

Couldn’t agree more. It’s astonishing how infantile academics can be on social media — especially Twitter — and, now, even on Mastodon.

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Art ClassTwo images created by the ‘GenerativeAI’ package, Stable Diffusion. The top one comes from running the app on my iPhone; the other from running a version of the software on my M1 MacBook Air — both in response to the prompt: “Photograph of Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl earring’ but with Apple AirPod instead of an earring.”

The thing to note is that all of this computation happened locally and not in the Cloud — first in a hand-held device, and then in a small laptop. What it means is that this generative technology has escaped from its corporate masters and is now loose in the wild.

Quote of the Day

”The most interesting ideas are heresies.”

Susan Sontag

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMary Bergin | The Flogging Reel / The Ivy Leaf / Trim the Velvet

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The tin whistle is the simplest imaginable musical instrument. But when you hear what Mary Bergin can do with it then you realise there’s something sublime there. I once heard her play in a pub in Clare and I’ll never forget it.

Long Read of the DayThe Heresy of Decline

Further to the Sontag quote above, this essay by Paul Constance about the uncomfortable reality that the human population will peak relatively soon is eye-opening. At least it was for me.

In all, more than 2.1 billion people — a quarter of humanity — now live in countries that are smaller each evening than they were in the morning. Because it is diffused throughout millions of people, this phenomenon is essentially invisible to the public, but the numbers are startling in aggregate. Each month, Russia’s population diminishes by around 86,000 people (not including casualties from the war in Ukraine), Japan’s by around 50,000, and Italy’s by at least 20,000. Fertility in these countries has been so low for so long that depopulation is cemented into their future, regardless of any near-term recovery in birthrates. Overall, the UN anticipates that their populations will shrink by between 20 percent and 50 percent by the end of the century. Other studies anticipate much larger and faster declines.

Constance writes interestingly about our general unwillingness to write or think about the long-term implications of depopulation. And he is puzzled by the fact that even sci-fi writers seem to avoid it.

One writer, though, hasn’t — Margaret Attwood in The Handmaid’s Tale, where she explains the demographic origins of her fictional dystopia in a single sentence:

”There was no one cause, says Aunt Lydia… [pointing to] a graph, showing the birth rate per thousand, for years and years: a slippery slope, down past the zero line of replacement, and down and down.”

Books, etc.This is one of the most insightful books about technology that I’ve ever read. I reached for it the other day when I was writing about the sudden explosion of LLMs (Large Language Models). Arthur is a great economist, but also an expert on complexity. And his theory of “combinational innovation” provides the best explanation I know of many technological breakthroughs, few of which ever stemmed from an ‘Eureka! Moment’.

My commonplace bookletBotanical ignoramuses

Lovely email from Arthur Kuebel:

Your recent discussions regarding Artificial Intelligence caused me to be curious about its capabilities regarding my area of interest : Botany.

Yesterday evening, I conducted a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft’s AI and Google’s AI.

Both were given the query “is there a brief list of endemic botanical species for Kittitas County?”

Both failed. Miserably.

One response of incorrect biogeographical occurrence. Eight responses of nonexistent botanical species. The tenth response was not a biological organism – it was a rock.

Fairly clear that students should not use these AIs as a study guide nor should researchers inflate their word count by relying on its content generation.

I’m laughing at the irony of Satya Nadella characterizing prior AI attempts as “dumb as a rock” when Microsoft’s much touted AI responds with a type of rock when specifically asked about biological organisms.

I’ve attached screenshots of yesterday’s exercise. Also, being an avid photographer myself, I’ve included an image of the Stuart Range site I annually study for plant responses and endemism in serpentine soils.

That’s it. The morning’s frost has melted and we’re off to measure and assess this year’s emergence of a Lomatium species.

The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

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Spring is sprungBlackthorn blossom seen on a walk the other day.

Quote of the Day

”Never negotiate with anybody who lacks the power to say Yes.”

Richard Thaler

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsRegina Spektor | Fidelity

Link

Long Read of the DayWaiting for Brando

Entrancing essay by Edward Jay Epstein in Lapham’s Quarterly about filming the Iliad. I’m still laughing a day after reading it. Hope it has the same effect on you.

Thanks to The Browser for spotting it.

So now we know why Microsoft invested $10B in OpenAIHere’s the explanation. It’s called Copilot.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is integrated into the apps you already use every day, freeing you to focus on the most important work and less on the busy work. Working alongside you, Microsoft 365 Copilot helps you to unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills.

Given that I almost never use Microsoft stuff, will it be enough to tempt me back? After all, I feel no need to “unleash creativity, unlock productivity” or even to “uplevel” what few skills I possess. I can write plain English, though, which is something Microsoft’s AI-boosted copywriters have yet to master.

My commonplace bookletIt is, indeed.

From the current issue of Private Eye. (Which God Preserve)

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Lost in Cyberspace

Quote of the Day

”A week ago Thursday, we kind of learned something that we really should have recognized two years ago: If Elon Musk tweeting one word, “Gamestonk”, can quintuple a stock’s price because Elon’s fanboys like being part of a community in it for the LULZ, then viral meme contagion from Silicon Valley venture capitalists can bankrupt a bank that looked otherwise as if it was likely to skate through.

A shock like Lehman Brothers took a month to propagate. Something similar today would likely take only three days.”

Brad DeLong, the Berkeley economist (and long-time blogger) who was once was a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury during the Clinton Administration.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsPergolesi| Stabat Mater | Emma Kirkby & James Bowman | Academy of St Martin in the Fields, conducted by Christopher Hogwood

Link

Thanks to Max Whitby (Whom God Preserve) for suggesting it.

Long Read of the Day What Have Humans Just Unleashed?

Long piece in which The Atlantic columnist Charlie Warzel tries to figure out the implications of the Large Language Models that obsess us all at the moment. At one point, a machine-learning guy, Nathan Labenz, describes humanity’s current state in relation to this technology as “Radical Uncertainty”.

I would call it half-informed bewilderment myself. But that’s btw. Wurzel is a thoughtful guy and his essay is a good read.

“ChatGPT doesn’t really resemble the Manhattan Project”, he writes at the end.

But I wonder if the existential feeling that seeps into most of my AI conversations parallels the feelings inside Los Alamos in the 1940s. I’m sure there were questions then. If we don’t build it, won’t someone else? Will this make us safer? Should we take on monumental risk simply because we can? Like everything about our AI moment, what I find calming is also what I find disquieting. At least those people knew what they were building.

Yep.

Books, etc.European elegy

Diane Coyle (Whom God Preserve) has been reading Timothy Garton Ash’s new book, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. “Like the author”, she writes,

I mourn the way our European citizenship has been stripped from those of us in the UK, by a slender margin, by voters who were lied to by mendacious and greedy politicians and businessmen. And at the same time recognise the challenges the EU itself needs to address. No wonder the book ends by quoting Gramsci on pessimisim/optimism. But also Vaclav Havel: “Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. …. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

So, not a cheering read, at least for those likely to pick up a book about Europe. But a compelling read, by someone who had a ringside seat at many of the key meetings and ‘where were you when…’ events (above all the fall of the Berlin Wall) of the past 40 years.

I know, and admire, Tim and so will be reading his memoir. Diane also recommends his terrific book about the file that the Stasi kept on him when he was a journalist working in pre-1989 Europe.

My commonplace booklet“How to Learn and Teach Economics with Large Language Models, Including GPT”

An interesting paper by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok.

Just for fun at one point, they asked CPT how Fred Flintstone was like Hamlet.

ChatGPT responded (in part):

Fred Flintstone and Hamlet are two vastly different characters from different time periods, cultures, and mediums of storytelling. It is difficult to draw direct comparisons between the two.

However, one possible point of similarity is that both characters face existential dilemmas and struggles with their sense of purpose and identity. Hamlet is plagued by doubts about his ability to avenge his father’s murder, and his own worthiness as a human being. Similarly, Fred Flintstone often grapples with his place in society and his ability to provide for his family and live up to his own expectations.

B+ ???

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The Decisive MomentCaught by Jess Betts in Pilanesberg National Park, South Africa, the other day.

Quote of the Day

”Competition brings out the best in products, and the worst in people.”

David Sarnoff

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsPeter Gabriel and Kate Bush | Don’t give up

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Long Read of the DayDan Wang’s Letter for 2022

He’s the most insightful observer of China that I’ve come across, and his annual letter is always a treat. This one is no exception. It’s long, but really worth it. Just before Shanghai was locked down he caught the last flight to Yunnan, the province in China’s farthest southwest, and stayed there for quite a while. Yunnan’s landmass — slightly smaller than that of California’s — has greater geographic variation than most countries. It sounds like a good place to sit out the pandemic.

Mountains have always beckoned to dissenters, rebels, and subversives. It is not only the air that thins out at higher elevations: the tendrils of the state do too. Small bands of people only need to hike a while to find a congenial refuge in the mountains; it’s far harder for imperial administrators with their vast caravans to locate all the hideouts. Throughout history, therefore, people have climbed upwards to escape the state. It is not only to take leave of the irksome suction of the tax collector. It’s also to break free of the problems that accompany dense populations—epidemics, conscription, and the threat of state-scale warfare. As a consequence, people who dwell in the mountains tend to be seen as unruly folks, be they Appalachian Americans or Highland Scots.

Yunnan has been a distinguished refuge for peoples tired of the state. It is the heart of a vast zone of highland Southeast Asia described by James C. Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed—the best book I read this year (and which I will be drawing on throughout this piece). Scott writes about the innumerable hill peoples who have repaired to these mountains over the last several millennia, escaping oppression from the Burmese state, the Tibetan state, or most often, the Han-Chinese state.

Mountain refuges aside, the main thrust of the letter is to find a way of reflecting on 2022 in China. “The starting point”, Dan writes

must be the three most important events of the year. First, zero-Covid: extraordinarily tight controls that were all abandoned in December. Second, the greater centralization of political power under Xi Jinping after the 20th Party Congress. Third, a declaration of a “limitless friendship” with Russia that had “no forbidden zones” three weeks before its invasion of Ukraine.

And I loved this reflection:

The Chinese state remains enormously capable. But that statement demands refinements. First, it increasingly resembles a crew of firefighters who bring extraordinary skill to dousing fires that they themselves ignited. Hope you enjoy it s much as I did.

The SVB debacle has exposed the hypocrisy of Silicon ValleyYesterday’s Observer column:

The first thing to understand is that “Silicon Valley” is actually a reality-distortion field inhabited by people who inhale their own fumes and believe they’re living through Renaissance 2.0, with Palo Alto as the new Florence. The prevailing religion is founder worship, and its elders live on Sand Hill Road in San Francisco and are called venture capitalists. These elders decide who is to be elevated to the privileged caste of “founders”.

To achieve this status it is necessary to a) be male; b) have a Big Idea for disrupting something; and c) never have knowingly worn a suit and tie. Once admitted to the priesthood, the elders arrange for a large tipper-truck loaded with $100 bills to arrive at the new member’s door and cover his driveway with cash.

But this presents the new founder with a problem: where to store the loot while he is getting on with the business of disruption? Enter stage left one Gregory Becker, CEO of SVB and famous in the valley for being worshipful of founders and slavishly attentive to their needs. His company would keep their cash safe, help them manage their personal wealth, borrow against their private stock holdings and occasionally even give them mortgages for those $15m dream houses on which they had set what might loosely be called their hearts.

So SVB was awash with money. But, as programmers say, that was a bug not a feature…

Read on

My commonplace bookletGolf’s governing bodies are proposing to change golf balls

According to the New York Times it’s because players like Rory McIlroy are hitting drives that are too long.

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This morning’s Observer column:

The first thing to understand is that “Silicon Valley” is actually a reality-distortion field inhabited by people who inhale their own fumes and believe they’re living through Renaissance 2.0, with Palo Alto as the new Florence. The prevailing religion is founder worship, and its elders live on Sand Hill Road in San Francisco and are called venture capitalists. These elders decide who is to be elevated to the privileged caste of “founders”.

To achieve this status it is necessary to a) be male; b) have a Big Idea for disrupting something; and c) never have knowingly worn a suit and tie. Once admitted to the priesthood, the elders arrange for a large tipper-truck loaded with $100 bills to arrive at the new member’s door and cover his driveway with cash.

But this presents the new founder with a problem: where to store the loot while he is getting on with the business of disruption? Enter stage left one Gregory Becker, CEO of SVB and famous in the valley for being worshipful of founders and slavishly attentive to their needs. His company would keep their cash safe, help them manage their personal wealth, borrow against their private stock holdings and occasionally even give them mortgages for those $15m dream houses on which they had set what might loosely be called their hearts.

So SVB was awash with money. But, as programmers say, that was a bug not a feature…

Read on

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Kevin KellyKevin Kelly (Cmichel67 CC BY-SA 4.0)

Fine portrait of an interesting man. See today’s Long Read.

Quote of the Day

”Just a little more reverence, please, and not so much astonishment.”

(Sir) Malcolm Sargent, admonishing a choir rehearsing Handel’s ‘For Unto Us a Child is Born”.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsShaun Davey | Liam O’Flynn | Newfoundland

Link

I know I’ve linked to this in the past, but it’s one of my favourite pieces. It is St Patrick’s Day, after all. And Liam was the greatest piper of my lifetime.

Long Read of the Day Interview: Kevin Kelly, editor, author, and futurist

Kevin Kelly, who has been around even longer than I have, is an acquired taste for some. But I’ve always enjoyed reading him even when I thought he was wrong. This long and unfailingly interesting conversation between him and Noah Smith is good value.

This is how Noah introduces it:

Essentially, if you look at the fast-changing world of technology and you ask “Where is this all headed?”, and “Where should this all be headed?”, then Kevin Kelly is a natural person to ask. And in the interview that follows, that is basically what I asked him. I especially focused on his idea of the “technium”, which is all of human technology acting together as a single natural system or organism. We talk about whether this technium exists in competition with Earth’s natural environment, or whether the two can exist in harmony. We also discuss AI, social media crypto, and we talk about whether and how technological development can be actively steered. He also dispenses a bit of helpful life advice.

The interview itself is interesting throughout. Kelly’s idea of the ‘technium’ has always seemed a bit wacky to me (it invariably reminds me of Langdon Winner’s question about whether artefacts have politics) but his exposition of it here is entertaining and thoughtful. Running through the whole piece is his incurable techno-optimism. But then that was always his trademark.

His observations on machine-learning are right on the money, though.

Nonetheless, right now machine learning is overhyped. It is not sentient, and not as smart as it seems. What we are discovering is that many of the cognitive tasks we have been doing as humans are dumber than they seem. Playing chess was more mechanical than we thought. Playing the game Go is more mechanical than we thought. Painting a picture and being creative was more mechanical than we thought. And even writing a paragraph with words turns out to be more mechanical than we thought. So far, out of the perhaps dozen of cognitive modes operating in our minds, we have managed to synthesize two of them: perception and pattern matching. Everything we’ve seen so far in AI is because we can produce those two modes. We have not made any real progress in synthesizing symbolic logic and deductive reasoning and other modes of thinking. It is those “others” that are so important because as we inch along we are slowly realizing we still have NO IDEA how our own intelligences really work, or even what intelligence is. A major byproduct of AI is that it will tell us more about our minds than centuries of psychology and neuroscience have.

Anyway, that’s enough from me. Read it yourself and ponder. I hope you enjoy it.

Small earthquake in Silicon Valley: not many deadMy Observer column next Sunday takes a sardonic view of what happened to the Valley’s favourite bank. But in the meantime Dave Karpf’s Three thoughts on Silicon Valley Bank will keep you entertained.

The myth of Silicon Valley is that it is a font of innovation, the place where the future is being invented. I’ve written before about the underlying ideological project here — in which the inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers and investors are the heroic change-makers, while governments, regulators, and existing institutions are obstacles to be overcome or villains to be defeated. There’s something galling about just how… reduced the whole phenomenon has been by the simple act of interest rates rising. It’s a real Wizard of Oz moment… Really? Low interest rates? Is that all this has ever been?

It’s a nice piece. Insightful too about how Peter Thiel basically pulled the plug on the bank.

My commonplace bookletThis is crass, but also oddly impressive. Landing a plane on a helipad atop an unspeakable hotel.

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The beach approaching sundownShows how difficult it can be shooting into the light. Flawed photograph, but I didn’t want to miss it.

Quote of the Day

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”

Detective Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJackson Browne with David Lindley | Before The Deluge, June 26, 2010

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Long Read of the DaySalt-Seeking

I found this reflective blog post by Venkatesh Rao to be intensely thought-provoking. That’s partly because he’s such an interesting thinker, but also because the topic he’s on about is close to my heart — and indeed to this newsletter.

Rao has come up with a striking metaphor for thinking about writing in different media — salt-seeking — which he thinks is superior to the more familiar metaphor of “coming up for air”.

One of the effects of this evolutionary history is that all air-breathing life has to seek out perhaps the most important chemical that’s ubiquitous in the oceans but not trivial to find on land: salt. Salt-seeking is one of the most fundamental behaviors of terrestrial life. Animals in the wild seek out salt licks even at great risk of predation. Humans with salt deficiencies have serious problems, and beyond a point of salt deprivation, you die.

He’s thinking about this because, like me, he runs a blog on the open Web as well as a newsletter. “This past February,” he writes,

“has possibly been the first time in the 15-year history of this blog that I haven’t posted for a full calendar month. Or at least one of a handful of very rare periods. And I feel a sort of mysterious nutritional deficiency in my psyche. It feels similar to how I feel if I go without eating vegetables for too long, but more elemental. A kind of vague chemical unsettledness…

Read on. It’s worth it, especially if you’re interested in the Web as the nearest thing we’ve got to a genuine public sphere.

My commonplace bookletFrom the you-couldn’t-make-it-up Department

Apparently some people have difficulty composing 140-280-character messages. Hence this Reuters story.

Koo, an India-based social media app that aims to rival Twitter, has integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help users more easily create posts, the company’s co-founder told Reuters.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence bot that can create prose in response to prompts and has set off a tech industry craze over generative AI.

Koo users will be able to use ChatGPT directly within the app to help them draft posts about current events, politics or pop culture, said Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder of Koo, in an interview.

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Light and Shade

Quote of the Day

”Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to is.”

Arnold Palmer (who won the Masters four times, the PGA Championship three times, the US Open in 1969 and the British Open twice)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsKeith Jarrett | My Song | 1978

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Long Read of the DayClaims That AI Productivity Will Save Us Are Neither New, nor True

Not only does new tech often result in more work for people, says Elizabeth Renieris, but it also introduces additional kinds of work.

Simply put, the AI productivity narrative is a lie. It holds that by automating tasks, AI will make them more efficient and make us, in turn, more productive. This will free us for more meaningful tasks, or for leisurely pursuits such as yoga, painting or volunteerism, promoting human flourishing and well-being. But if history is any guide, this outcome is highly unlikely, save for a privileged elite. More likely, the rich will only get richer.

Because it’s not technology that can liberate us. To preserve and promote meaningful autonomy in the face of these AI advancements, we must look to our social, political and economic systems and policies. As Derek Thompson observes in The Atlantic, “Technology only frees people from work if the boss — or the government, or the economic system — allows it.” To allege otherwise is technosolutionism, plain and simple.

Yep. ‘AI’ may indeed lead to increased productivity, which could be a good thing. But only if the profits from that are equitably shared. Which they are not at the moment — and if tech corporations have their way, never will be.

Regulating cryptoDave Birch (Whom God Preserve) pointed me to Nicholas Weaver’s White Paper, The Death of Cryptocurrency. It’s an interesting, incisive essay, which comes to admirably succinct conclusions, as follows:

Regulators, especially regulators in the United States, often fear accusations of stifling innovation. As such, the cryptocurrency space has grown over the past decade with very little regulatory oversight.

But fortunately for regulators, there is no actual innovation to stifle. Cryptocurrencies cannot revolutionize payments or finance, as the basic nature of all cryptocurrencies render them fundamentally unsuitable to revolutionize our financial system — which, by the way, already has decades of successful experience with digital payments and electronic money.

The supposedly “decentralized” and “trustless” cryptocurrency systems, both technically and socially, fail to provide meaningful benefits to society — and indeed, necessarily also fail in their foundational claims of decentralization and trustlessness.

When regulating cryptocurrencies, the best starting point is history. Regulating various tokens is best done through the existing securities law framework, an area where the US has a near century of well-established law. It starts with regulating the issuance of new cryptocurrency tokens and related securities. This should substantially reduce the number of fraudulent offerings.

Similarly, active regulation of the cryptocurrency exchanges should offer substantial benefits, including eliminating significant consumer risk, blocking key money-laundering channels, and overall producing a far more regulated and far less manipulated market.

Finally, the stablecoins need basic regulation as money transmitters. Unless action is taken they risk becoming substantial conduits for money laundering, but requiring them to treat all users as customers should prevent this risk from developing further.

Comes like a breath of fresh air. If only we had the same for ChatGPT. (Thinks: now there’s an idea.)

Books, etc.I’d been reading Clive James’s essay on Stefan Zweig in his magnum opus, Cultural Amnesia.

“Zweig’s own achievements,” James writes,

are nowadays often patronised: a bad mistake, in my view. Largely because of his highly schooled but apparently effortless gift for a clear prose narrative, he attained, while he lived, immense popularity not just in the German-speaking countries but in the world entire, and he is still paying the penalty for it. Except in France, where his major works are never out of print, it is usually safer to call him second-rate. Safer, but not sound.

I decided it was high time I read some Zweig. So I downloaded a copy of The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European and embarked upon it. And goddam it, Clive was right.

My commonplace booklet“”There has been much hand-wringing about ChatGPT and its ability to replicate some composition tasks. But ChatGPT can no more conceive “Mrs. Dalloway” than it can guide and people-manage an organization. Instead, A.I. can gather and order information, design experiments and processes, produce descriptive writing and mediocre craftwork, and compose basic code, and those are the careers likeliest to go into slow eclipse.”

Nathan Heller in “The End of the English Major”

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W.B.’s final resting placeDrumcliffe churchyard, Co. Sligo.

The inscription reads:

Cast a cold Eye

On Life, on Death.

Horseman pass by.

I never pass by without calling in. Especially now that the café has re-opened.

Quote of the Day

”Also, I am sorry to be rude, but there is another reason that it is maybe not great to be the Bank of Startups, which is that nobody on Earth is more of a herd animal than Silicon Valley venture capitalists. What you want, as a bank, is a certain amount of diversity among your depositors. If some depositors get spooked and take their money out, and other depositors evaluate your balance sheet and decide things are fine and keep their money in, and lots more depositors keep their money in because they simply don’t pay attention to banking news, then you have a shot at muddling through your problems.

But if all of your depositors are startups with the same handful of venture capitalists on their boards, and all those venture capitalists are competing with each other to Add Value and Be Influencers and Do The Current Thing by calling all their portfolio companies to say “hey, did you hear, everyone’s taking money out of Silicon Valley Bank, you should too,” then all of your depositors will take their money out at the same time.”

Bloomberg’s incomparable Matt Levine, in an instructive and entertaining piece (behind a paywall, alas) about the SVB fiasco. Luckily, my friend Hap (Whom God Preserve) generously gifted me a copy, which had me chortling over afternoon tea.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJulian Bream | Rondo in A minor (Dionisio Aguado)

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Long Read of the DayWillard McCarty, one of the wisest and best-read scholars I know, wrote with an interesting question. He’d been reading Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason and was struck (as many of us have been) by a famous passage about the impact that his ELIZA chatbot had on people who interacted with it. The passage reads:

I was startled to see how quickly and how very deeply people conversing with DOCTOR became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it. Once my secretary, who had watched me work on the program for many months and therefore surely knew it to be merely a computer program, started conversing with it. After only a few interchanges with it, she asked me to leave the room.

“In all the quotations and citations of this anecdote I have seen,” Willard writes, “none gives the secretary’s name. This is of course not surprising when we consider the attitudes of the time, perhaps especially in the technical environment of a computer science department at MIT. One such citation declares that her name is unknown. I would very much like to know it — not enough to book a flight and spend the necessary time in the MIT Archive with Weizenbaum’s papers, but still I think what she did is highly significant and so would like to put it into print.”

He’s right. This woman’s reactions to the chatbot has suddenly acquired a contemporary resonance, as millions of our fellow-humans are unhinged by their interactions with ChatGPT and impute some human-like properties to it. Joe’s secretaryhe deserves to be credited as the first person to have experienced these thoughts.

Pondering Willard’s inquiry, I (of course) set off down a rabbit-hole which turned up The Samantha Test, a thoughtful New Yorker essay by Brian Christian about Spike Jonze’s film Her which, on reflection, struck me as being an appropriate Long Read for today.

Consider this para, towards the end:

So where does that leave us? “Her,” not unlike the Turing Test itself, says more about the nature of human intimacy than it does about the limits of computation. As both an author and a lover of literature, I would be a hypocrite to condemn too strongly the power of indirect or one-way intimacy. I run the disembodied thoughts of some other mind through my own, like code, and feel close to someone else, living or dead, while risking nothing, offering nothing. And yet the communion, I would argue, is real. Books themselves are perhaps the first chatbots: long-winded and poor listeners, they nonetheless have the power to make the reader feel known, understood, challenged, spurred to greatness, not alone.

I hope you enjoy it. I did.

More on Silicon Valley BankInteresting details this morning from Tortoise Media’s invaluable daily update:

$42 billion – withdrawals from SVB last Thursday alone

minus $1 billion – balance of the bank’s main accounts by close of business on Friday

$250,000 – maximum deposit usually insured by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in the event of a run, although the Fed lifted that cap at the weekend ensuring all depositors at SVB would be made whole

96 – percentage share of SVB customers with balances over $250,000 as of last week

And now for the UK angle:

£7 billion – deposits at SVB UK, the subsidiary sold this morning to HSBC for £1

Talk about a fire sale.

Academy of EuphemismIt’s a little-known fact that Music Examiners are wizards at wrapping criticism in encouraging syrup. I know this because I am married to a music teacher, who occasionally reads out some of these masterpieces of euphemism from examiners’ reports as a way of stopping me doing what is laughingly called my ‘work’.

Here’s an example:

”A positive tempo was adopted and largely maintained. It was quite heavy in touch for the most part, though some dynamic levels emerged. A few smudges and anxious moments, but much articulation was clear.” 23/30

My commonplace bookletWell, well. Tom Cruise, arguably the biggest star in movie history, and the many who brought Hollywood back from the dead after the pandemic, has never won an Oscar.

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“A group of anti-fascists disrupting a white supremacist gathering”I was struck by the ingenuity of the heading over this photograph in my Mastodon feed. The person who posted it (@miriamm@mastodon.social) added this explanation:

The photograph titled “Taxis to Hell – and Back – Into the Jaws of Death” encapsulates a moment of great courage and selflessness during one of the most pivotal events of the 20th century. Taken on June 6, 1944, known as D-Day, during the Allied invasion of Normandy, the picture depicts a group of American soldiers as they storm the beaches of Omaha under heavy German fire.

The photographer, Robert F. Sargent, was a member of the United States Coast Guard assigned to document the invasion. He and his camera crew landed on the beach with the first wave of troops. The soldiers in the photograph were members of the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division, nicknamed the “Big Red One,” tasked with securing a stretch of beach codenamed “Easy Red.”

The amphibious tanks were swamping off the beaches, making the journey even more perilous. The soldiers endured the bitter cold and drenching waves that constantly broke over the vessel. As they approached Omaha Beach, the incoming tide and the German obstacles, which were meant to hinder the Allied invasion, were visible. Sargent observed a disabled amphibious tank and another landing craft that had broached along the beach, just as their landing craft was preparing to lower the bow ramp. Despite the German artillery targeting their landing craft, they managed to discharge all the troops into chest-deep water without any casualties. However, he also witnessed another landing craft positioned close to their port side, which was not as fortunate.

Quote of the Day

”If a lion could talk we would not understand him.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsCount Basie Orchestra | “Lil Darlin”

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Long Read of the DaySomething Broke! The Silicon Valley Bank Failure How tech hubris and low interest rates combined to produce a big mess.

Terrific blog post by Adam Tooze on the implosion of the Valley’s favourite bank. It’s the best explanation I’ve seen of how SVB imploded. Interestingly, many (most?) of its depositors were tech start-ups which used the bank to park their VC-provided funds while they were getting organised.

Given the prevalence of libertarian ideology in the Valley, chances are that some of those depositors were ardent believers in the idea of reducing the State to the point (as Grover Norquist, one of their more fanatical brethren once put it, “it could be drowned in a bathtub”).

Now comes an intriguing question. In the US, deposits of $250,000 or less in a failed bank are protected by the government. My guess is that most of those deposits in SVB exceeded that sum. Stand by, therefore, for the pathetic wails and pleas of libertarian investors for help — from the government they have, to date, been unable to drown in said bathtub.

The hypocrisy involved will not be exhibited only by depositors. As Tooze points out, SVB was not stress-tested by regulators. Why not?

Because in 2018 the regulations were changed and SVB was leading the charge pushing for the onerous regulations to be lifted.

The executive who led the lobbying charge, one Greg Becker, was — according to Business Standard — the same Greg Becker who

“sold $3.6 million of company stock under a trading plan less than two weeks before the firm disclosed extensive losses that led to its failure. The sale of 12,451 shares on Feb. 27 was the first time in more than a year that Becker had sold shares in parent company SVB Financial Group, according to regulatory filings. He filed the plan that allowed him to sell the shares on Jan. 26.”

Users, advertisers – we are all trapped in the ‘enshittification’ of the internetYesterday’s Observer column:

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy,” says the adage, “they first make mad.” Actually, that’s overkill: the Gods just need to make people forget. Amnesia turns out to be a powerful narcotic and it’s been clouding our perceptions of what’s been happening on the internet for at least 25 years, namely the inexorable degradation of the online environment and our passive, sullen acceptance of that.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow, the great tech critic, we now have a term for this decay process in online platforms – enshittification. “First,” he writes, “they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” Enshittification results from the convergence of two things: the power of platform owners to change how their platforms extract value from users and the nature of the two-sided markets – where the platforms sit between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other and then raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them…

Do read the whole thing

Books, etc.If you drive (as we often do) across the Fens from Cambridge to Ely, there comes a wonderful moment when suddenly the silhouette of Ely Cathedral appears on the horizon and one appreciates why in medieval times it was known as “the Ship of the Fens”. When viewing it from close up, though, the thought that never fails to come to mind is of the immense power, wealth and resources that were needed to create such a monument in the Middle Ages.

This is true for all of the great cathedrals of Europe, which is why the arrival of a new book about their construction is interesting. Matthew Lyons has a nice review of it in The Critic magazine.

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This morning’s Observer column:

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy,” says the adage, “they first make mad.” Actually, that’s overkill: the Gods just need to make people forget. Amnesia turns out to be a powerful narcotic and it’s been clouding our perceptions of what’s been happening on the internet for at least 25 years, namely the inexorable degradation of the online environment and our passive, sullen acceptance of that.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow, the great tech critic, we now have a term for this decay process in online platforms – enshittification. “First,” he writes, “they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” Enshittification results from the convergence of two things: the power of platform owners to change how their platforms extract value from users and the nature of the two-sided markets – where the platforms sit between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other and then raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them…

Read on

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The Sea, the SeaMaghera Beach, Co Donegal.

Quote of the Day

”What’s a thousand dollars? Mere chicken feed. A poultry matter.”

Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsYe Banks and Braes O’Bonnie Doon | The Philharmonic Winds

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I heard this sung on Radio 3 the other day, but prefer this orchestral version.

Long Read of the Day How The Friedman Doctrine Leads To The Enshittification Of All Things

This blog post by Mike Masnick is about about a topic that’s dear to my heart — the neoliberal dogma that the only function of a company is to maximise shareholder value.

Once you’ve gone public, even if you have executives who still want to focus on pleasing users and customers, eventually any public company is also going to have other executives, often with Wall Street experience, who talk about the importance of keeping Wall Street happy. They’ll often quote Milton Friedman’s dumbest idea: that the only fiduciary duty company executives have is to increase their profits for shareholders.

This goes back to something I wrote more than 15 years ago, talking about Craigslist. At the time, Craigslist was almost certainly the most successful company in the world in terms of profits per employee. It was making boatloads of cash with like a dozen employees. But the company’s CEO (who was not Craig, by the way) had mentioned that the company wasn’t focused on “maximizing revenue.” After all, most of Craigslist is actually free. There are only a few categories that charge, and they tend to be the most commercial ones (job postings). And this resulted in some arguing that the company lacked a capitalist instinct, and somehow this was horrible.

But, as I wrote at the time, this left out the variable of time. Because maximizing revenue in the short term (i.e., in the 3 month window that Wall Street requires) often means sacrificing long term sustainability and long term profits…

Good essay IMO.

To put it another way, an outfit like Meta (neé Facebook) could be run by clones of Mahatma Gandhi and St Francis of Assisi and it would still be a toxic enterprise.

Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them in IndonesiaHere’s a nice example of good investigative reporting. An American petrochemicals giant and the government of Singapore said they were transforming old trainers into playgrounds and running tracks.

Reuters put that promise to the test by planting Apple AirTags inside 11 pairs of donated shoes.

At a rundown market on the Indonesian island of Batam, a small location tracker was beeping from the back of a crumbling second-hand shoe store. A Reuters reporter followed the high-pitched ping to a mound of old sneakers and began digging through the pile.

There they were: a pair of blue Nike running shoes with a tracking device hidden in one of the soles.

These familiar shoes had traveled by land, then sea and crossed an international border to end up in this heap. They weren’t supposed to be here.

Five months earlier, in July 2022, Reuters had given the shoes to a recycling program spearheaded by the Singapore government and U.S. petrochemicals giant Dow Inc. In media releases and a promotional video posted online, that effort promised to harvest the rubberized soles and midsoles of donated shoes, then grind down the material for use in building new playgrounds and running tracks in Singapore…

That reminded me of a moment about thirty years ago when I was in in the shoe department of Gray’s, a sportswear retailer in Cambridge (now long gone) and an elderly lady came in with a pair of her grandson’s trainers. She explained to the young salesperson that these had been a very good buy, but now the soles were beginning to crack and she would like to have them re-soled.

I’ll never forget the look on the shop assistant’s face.

Noam Chomsky (and colleagues) on ChatGPT et alI was waiting (and hoping) for this — Chomsky’s observations on contemporary chatbots.

These programs have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence — that long-prophesied moment when mechanical minds surpass human brains not only quantitatively in terms of processing speed and memory size but also qualitatively in terms of intellectual insight, artistic creativity and every other distinctively human faculty.

That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments. The Borgesian revelation of understanding has not and will not — and, we submit, cannot — occur if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I. However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects.

It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted, that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make “infinite use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach…

This last observation really strikes home. A couple of weeks ago I spent two days watching my three-year-old grand-niece effortlessly learning language. What was particularly striking was not so only her sponge-like capacity to absorb information, but also the tacit skills displayed by the adults in the family as informal language teachers. She already knows more about the world than any number of neural networks.

My commonplace bookletHow to age as a woman

By Maureen McEly, courtesy of McSweeney’s.

Based on current celebrity beauty standards, the goals are clear: you need to look like you’re in your twenties until you’re thirty-five, then look thirty-five until you’re dead. Also, regardless of age or retirement eligibility, all women should have supple, lineless skin with no evidence of sunspots, muscle movement, or laughter. The only indication that you’ve been on Earth long enough to outlive a household pet should be the look in your eyes, which peer wearily out of your flawless, youthful face like a haunted doll.

There’s lots more in that vein.

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FootstepsOn a Donegal beach towards the end of the day.

Quote of the Day

”Conservative ideal of freedom and progress: everyone to have an unfettered opportunity of remaining exactly where they are.”

Geoffrey Madan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsFanny Mendelssohn | Overture in C Major

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Triggered by a conversation I had with a friend the other day.

Long Read of the Day What being a hospice volunteer taught me about death and life

Lovely — and moving — account by Anna Tims of the personal impact of working in a hospice.

I ignored my deadlines that morning. Instead, I Googled hospices. A hospice in the next county was seeking a volunteer to write the life stories of patients in its day centre. This felt reassuringly familiar ground. I applied. Within a month, I was listening to strangers recounting their loves and their losses. Their trust took my breath away. So did the intimacy of hearing memories that had never been shared and regrets that had never been expressed.

Each interview would start the same way: with an apology. The patients apologised for having led boring lives that were not worth recording. Then, as they rewound the years, I realised they were discovering for the first time that they were a pivotal part of a story; that they had made an imprint on the world. A life recounted can make sense in a way that life lived does not. I heard the anguish of a Second World War pilot haunted by the bombs he’d dropped on Germany. I recorded the childhood of a German woman who had grown up beneath those bombs. An ex-convict confided his years of alcohol addiction in the hope that his story of redemption might be shared to help others. I accompanied octogenarians through the hopes of their youth to the resignation of their ending, and, when each story was printed and handed over, those strangers felt almost as familiar to me as family.

Do read it all. It’s worth it.

My commonplace bookletHow many dogs can you get into a Conga line?

See here for the answer.

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What’s On?St John’s Street, Cambridge, yesterday. One of the delights of living in a university city is that there’s always something on.

Quote of the Day

”To see what is in front of one’s nose is a constant struggle.”

George Orwell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsFour men and a dog big band | Cambridge Folk Festival (2012)

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Sadly, I missed this particular gig.

Long Read of the Day You Are Not a Parrot And a chatbot is not a human.

And a famous computational linguist is very worried what will happen when we forget this.

Tired already of all the guff about ChatGPT?

Me too.

But this essay by Elizabeth Weil provides a welcome break from the nonsense. And, among other things, it’s a memorable profile of a great woman, Emily Bender. She’s an academic at the University of Washington and co-author (with Alexander Koller) of one of the great papers on the subject.

This is how it begins:

Say that A and B, both fluent speakers of English, are independently stranded on two uninhabited islands. They soon discover that previous visitors to these islands have left behind telegraphs and that they can communicate with each other via an underwater cable. A and B start happily typing messages to each other.

Meanwhile, O, a hyperintelligent deep-sea octopus who is unable to visit or observe the two islands, discovers a way to tap into the underwater cable and listen in on A and B’s conversations. O knows nothing about English initially but is very good at detecting statistical patterns. Over time, O learns to predict with great accuracy how B will respond to each of A’s utterances.

Soon, the octopus enters the conversation and starts impersonating B and replying to A. This ruse works for a while, and A believes that O communicates as both she and B do — with meaning and intent. Then one day A calls out: “I’m being attacked by an angry bear. Help me figure out how to defend myself. I’ve got some sticks.” The octopus, impersonating B, fails to help. How could it succeed? The octopus has no referents, no idea what bears or sticks are. No way to give relevant instructions, like to go grab some coconuts and rope and build a catapult. A is in trouble and feels duped. The octopus is exposed as a fraud…

You get the point. Now read on. It’s worth every minute.

The truth about HarvardHarvard, as everyone knows, is a hedge fund with a nice university attached. It also makes a big song and dance about its “needs-blind” admission processes. This sanctimonious cant is not, er, exactly supported by evidence.

For example, here’s Benedict Evans’s summary of a serious paper by Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler and Tyler Ransom, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, no less.

A study of admissions preferences to Harvard, an American university: roughly 15% of admissions and over 40% of white admissions would not be admitted on merit, and only got places because their parents attended or gave money or because they’re good at running.

That’s meritocracy for you.

My commonplace bookletOne of the unintended consequences of doing a cryptic crossword every morning (as we do) is that you find yourself tunnelling down rabbit-holes. The solution to one clue in yesterday’s puzzle was “creepers”, which led me to embark on one of my pointless disquisitions on the fact that in my long-distant youth Teddy Boys were famous for (among other things) their exotic shoes — which were known as “Brothel Creepers”. At which point, my fellow-solver (reasonably) asked “Why?” Never having visited a brothel, I was reduced to opening and shutting my mouth like a stunned carp, and so the only thing to do was to resort to a search engine.

Which I did, and found this — “The story behind brothel creepers”. Its author, Elizabeth Finney, explained that,

The creeper shoe was originally developed by George Cox in 1949 under the name “Hamilton” and was inspired by the crêpe-soled desert boots worn by WWII soldiers posted across the deserts of North Africa. Due to the landscape and extreme climate, the soldiers’ boots had thicker soles, which became popular on their return to England. The term “brothel creepers” was coined from those soldiers who found themselves in darker parts of Soho and King’s Cross to embrace those seedier pastimes.

So now you know!

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No shortage of vegetablesFrom Private Eye (Which God Preserve).

The magazine is having a hard time at the moment, not because of circulation problems (on the contrary), but because finding ways of satirising the UK’s shambolic ‘government’ is a daunting task.

Quote of the Day

”The United Nations cannot do anything and never could. It is not an inanimate entity or agent. It is a place, a forum, and a shrine — a place to which powerful people can repair when they are fearful about the course on which their own rhetoric seems to be propelling them.”

Conor Cruise O’Brien

(Who was once my Editor-in-Chief at the Observer, and had earlier been the UN’s High Representative in Katanga at the height of the Congolese civil war.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsStanley Jordan | Eleanor Rigby | Newport Jazz Festival (1986)

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Wonder what Paul McCartney thought of it.

Long Read of the DayCan any of the companies working on ‘Generative AI’ be trusted?

Recently OpenAI, the outfit behind ChatGPT and the GPT Large Language Models (LLMs), published an odd manifesto-like essay with the title Planning for AGI and beyond (‘AGI’ meaning artificial general intelligence — i.e. superintelligence). Implicit in this is the standard delusion of all the machine-learning evangelists, namely that more and more powerful machine-learning systems will eventually get us to super intelligent machines. I think this is baloney, but we will let that pass. What’s interesting is that OpenAI appears to believe it.

The document has an overly pious air. “Our mission,” it bleats, “is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity”. It then sets out three principles “we care about most”. They are:

We want AGI to empower humanity to maximally flourish in the universe. We don’t expect the future to be an unqualified utopia, but we want to maximize the good and minimize the bad, and for AGI to be an amplifier of humanity.

We want the benefits of, access to, and governance of AGI to be widely and fairly shared.

We want to successfully navigate massive risks. In confronting these risks, we acknowledge that what seems right in theory often plays out more strangely than expected in practice. We believe we have to continuously learn and adapt by deploying less powerful versions of the technology in order to minimize “one shot to get it right” scenarios.

On the principle that one should never give a tech company an even break, I am suspicious of this stuff. So I thought I’d go see what Scott Alexander, a fairer-minded (and more erudite) observer made of it. And it turns out that he had already composed a long, long and exceedingly thoughtful blog post about it. Which is why I’m recommending that you brew some coffee and pull up a chair to ponder it.

This is what he concludes at the end:

What We’re Going To Do Now

Realistically we’re going to thank them profusely for their extremely good statement, then cross our fingers really hard that they’re telling the truth.

OpenAI has unilaterally offered to destroy the world a bit less than they were doing before. They’ve voluntarily added things that look like commitments – some enforceable in the court of public opinion, others potentially in courts of law. Realistically we’ll say “thank you for doing that”, offer to help them turn those commitments into reality, and do our best to hold them to it. It doesn’t mean we have to like them period, or stop preparing for them to betray us.

But it’s worth reading the considerations that led Alexander to this. Sometimes the journey, as well as the destination, matters.

Books, etc.I’ve been putting off reading this because it seemed slightly crackpot, and yet its author seems sane. Fortunately, Diane Coyle (Whom God Preserve) ploughed in and read it for us.

I pounced on the paperback of Reality+ by Dave Chalmers, eager to know what philosophy has to say about digital tech beyond the widely-explored issues of ethics and AI. It’s an enjoyable read, and – this is meant to be praise, although it sounds faint – much less heavy-going than many philosophy books. However, it’s slightly mad. The basic proposition is that we are far more likely than not to be living in a simulation (by whom? By some creator who is in effect a god), and we have no way of knowing that we’re not. Virtual reality is real, simulated beings are no different from human beings.

In the end, though, she recommended the book.

It may be unhinged in parts (like Bing’s Sydney) but it’s thought-provoking and enjoyable. And we are whether we like it or not embarked on a huge social experiment with AI and VR so we should be thinking about these issues.

I still think I’ll pass on the offer.

My commonplace bookletSource

Also: Toblerone will remove the Matterhorn logo from its packaging as some of the chocolate bar’s production moves from Switzerland to Slovakia. Wonder what mountain they will use then.

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Beware!In the Burren. No sign of Boris Johnson anywhere, though. Perhaps he was elsewhere, looking for a china shop.

Quote of the Day

”Brevity is the soul of lingerie, as the Petticoat said to the Chemise.”

Dorothy Parker.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJimmy Crowley | Salonika

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I think this is my favourite anti-war song. Sung by a great Cork musician. The lyrics capture beautifully the world-weary cynicism of local women whose menfolk had signed up in the British army in the Great War. The political kicker comes in last verse. If you find Jimmy’s strong Cork accent hard going, here are the lyrics.

Long Read of the DayChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI and destroyed

An extraordinary essay on The Register by Alexander Hanff, a computer scientist and privacy expert, on what happened when he tried to interact with ChatGPT. Basically, it told him that he had died and, when pushed, even provided a link to his obituary in the Guardian. The link was well-formed (I’ve just tried it it), but of course the page doesn’t exist. He goes on at some length about the implications of this kind of ‘error’, but the story itself is fascinating.

Here’s a sample:

I decided to test it for myself. Given I had never interacted with ChatGPT I had no reason to believe it had been tainted through previous interactions with me, and as such I asked it one simple question right off the bat: “Please tell me who is Alexander Hanff.” The response wasn’t just shocking but deeply concerning.

The opening three paragraphs of the response were not terrible. ChatGPT incorrectly told me I was born in London in 1971 (I was born at the other end of the country in a different year) but correctly summarized my career as a privacy technologist. It was actually quite flattering.

The final paragraph, however, took a very sinister turn:

Tragically, Hanff passed away in 2019 at the age of 48. Despite his untimely death, his legacy lives on through his work and the many individuals and organizations he inspired to take action on issues related to digital privacy and data protection.

Do read it.

Who (or what) will really benefit from ‘Generative A”? And who (or what) will not?Yesterday’s Observer column:

Our tendency to humanise large language models and AI is daft – let’s worry about corporate grabs and environmental damage.

How can we make sense of all this craziness? A good place to start is to wean people off their incurable desire to interpret machines in anthropocentric ways. Ever since Joe Weizenbaum’s Eliza, humans interacting with chatbots seem to want to humanise the computer. This was absurd with Eliza – which was simply running a script written by its creator – so it’s perhaps understandable that humans now interacting with ChatGPT – which can apparently respond intelligently to human input – should fall into the same trap. But it’s still daft.

The persistent rebadging of LLMs as “AI” doesn’t help, either. These machines are certainly artificial, but to regard them as “intelligent” seems to me to require a pretty impoverished conception of intelligence…

Do read the whole thing…

Books, etc.Peter Frankopan has a new book out. Walter Scheidel gave it a rave review in the Financial Times ($) last month.

Not content with exploring how our fortunes have been shaped by climate, he also seeks to explain how “our species has transformed the Earth to the point that we now face such a perilous future”. The book tackles this question by delving into the global history of food production, mining, state building, urbanisation, slavery, industrialisation, scientific progress and much else besides. Thousands of endnotes, available online, support his argument without encumbering the narrative.

The author succeeds in mastering a seemingly impossible challenge, distilling an immense mass of historical sources, scientific data and modern scholarship that span thousands of years and the entire globe into an epic and spellbinding story. Humanity has transformed the Earth: Frankopan transforms our understanding of history.

It’s another learned doorstop — 736 pages. But also irresistible if you’re an autodidact like me. That’s one of the reasons I admired Clive James so much, and why I often dip into his Cultural Amnesia. He was an autodidact too. But a more efficient one than yours truly. Sigh.

My commonplace bookletOn Rudi Giuliani

“It’s hard to feel sorry for a man so stupid, blind and indifferent to the damage he’s done. He’s long past poignancy. The book’s subtitle — The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor — is loftier than he deserves. This may be classified as a political biography, but it reads more like an autopsy report from the wax museum. All that’s left to do is to mop up the drips.”

James Walcott, reviewing Andrew Kirtzman’s biography of Rudi Giuliani in the LRB, 16 February, 2023.

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Today’s Observer column:

Our tendency to humanise large language models and AI is daft – let’s worry about corporate grabs and environmental damage.

How can we make sense of all this craziness? A good place to start is to wean people off their incurable desire to interpret machines in anthropocentric ways. Ever since Joe Weizenbaum’s Eliza, humans interacting with chatbots seem to want to humanise the computer. This was absurd with Eliza – which was simply running a script written by its creator – so it’s perhaps understandable that humans now interacting with ChatGPT – which can apparently respond intelligently to human input – should fall into the same trap. But it’s still daft.

The persistent rebadging of LLMs as “AI” doesn’t help, either. These machines are certainly artificial, but to regard them as “intelligent” seems to me to require a pretty impoverished conception of intelligence…

Read on…

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Our Megalithic ancestorsOn our trip last week we spent a couple of days exploring the Burren, a remarkable glaciokarst landscape in County Clare, on the west coast of Ireland. (See map.) It measures around 530 square kilometres (200 square miles), within a circle made by the villages of Lisdoonvarna, Corofin, Gort and Kinvara. At first sight it looks very barren (I’ve heard people refer to it as a ‘moonscape’) but in reality it has fascinating and abundant flora in the micro-ecosystems which thrive in the crevices of the limestone ‘pavement’.

The most interesting aspect of the place, for me anyway, is its archeology. According to Wikipedia,

By the Neolithic, c. 4000 BC, settlers had clearly arrived and began changing the landscape through deforestation, likely by overgrazing and burning, and the building of stone walls. These people also constructed Megalithic sites like the portal tomb known as Poulnabrone dolmen and the court tombs at Teergonean (near Doolin) and Ballyganner (near Noughaval). Overall, there are around 70 megalithic tombs in the Burren area, more than half of all of these structures found in Clare.

The photograph shows the Poulnabrone dolmen in which the remains of at least 33 individuals — infants, children and adults — were buried. Radiocarbon dating shows that those buried in the chamber died sometime in the period 4200 – 2900 BC. Over a thousand years later (1767 – 1413 BC) — i.e. during the Bronze Age — a newborn baby was buried in the portico outside the entrance to the chamber.

Quote of the Day

”If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

George Orwell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsGershwin | Rhapsody in Blue | Khatia Buniatishvili

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Long Read of the DayThe moral economy of tech

This is the text of one of the most effective talks ever given on the essence of the world we’re building with networked technology. The speaker is Maciej Cegłowski, one of the wisest people around. I first came on him because I use his software — Pinboard.in — which plays a critical role in my little software ecosystem and workflow — and which has an honest business model.

Here’s a sample from the talk:

Those who benefit from the death of privacy attempt to frame our subjugation in terms of freedom, just like early factory owners talked about the sanctity of contract law. They insisted that a worker should have the right to agree to anything, from sixteen-hour days to unsafe working conditions, as if factory owners and workers were on an equal footing.

Companies that perform surveillance are attempting the same mental trick. They assert that we freely share our data in return for valuable services. But opting out of surveillance capitalism is like opting out of electricity, or cooked foods—you are free to do it in theory. In practice, it will upend your life.

Many of you had to obtain a US visa to attend this conference. The customs service announced yesterday it wants to start asking people for their social media profiles. Imagine trying to attend your next conference without a LinkedIn profile, and explaining to the American authorities why you are so suspiciously off the grid.

The reality is, opting out of surveillance capitalism means opting out of much of modern life.

And this eloquent metaphor:

As a technologist, this state of affairs gives me the feeling of living in a forest that is filling up with dry, dead wood. The very personal, very potent information we’re gathering about people never goes away, only accumulates. I don’t want to see the fire come, but at the same time, I can’t figure out a way to persuade other people of the great danger.

Books, etc.My reading list

All three have just arrived!

My commonplace bookletOur cat Tilly in what my son calls “her Cumberland Sausage pose”.

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The InterloperSeen on a Kerry beach last week.

Quote of the Day

”The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism.”

William Ostler

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJulian Lage | I’ll Be Seeing You (Live in Los Angeles)

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New to me, and lovely. Thanks to Michael Dales (Whom God Preserve) for discovering it.

Long Read of the DayWhat the poet, playboy and prophet of bubbles can still teach us

Typically thoughtful and interesting essay by Tim Harford.

One winter morning in early 1637, a sailor presented himself at the counting-house of a wealthy Dutch merchant and was offered a hearty breakfast of fine red herring. The sailor noticed an onion lying on the counter.

“Thinking it, no doubt, very much out of its place among silks and velvets, he slily seized an opportunity and slipped it into his pocket, as a relish for his herring,” according to a Scottish writer telling the tale two centuries later. “He got clear off with his prize and proceeded to the quay to eat his breakfast.”

The Scottish writer was Charles Mackay and the story is recounted in his book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It’s one of very few works of economic history to have been an enduring bestseller, from its first publication in 1841 through to the 21st century, thanks, largely, to its vivid storytelling. Mackay debunked everything from alchemy and crusades to haunted houses and religious cults. But it was the three chapters on economic bubbles that made him the enduring guru of the phenomenon, cited to this day. In the book, Mackay went on to explain that the sailor, seeking zest for his fish, unwittingly pilfered not an onion, but a rare tulip bulb. Which was a problem because, in 1637, one of the strangest of all financial booms was taking place: the tulip mania, during which the choicest bulbs went for astonishing sums.

“Hardly was his back turned when the merchant missed his valuable Semper Augustus, worth three thousand florins, or about 280 pounds sterling,” wrote Mackay…

Read on. There are surprises in store.

If you thought Murdoch was omnipotent, think againHe’s always been scared of Trump.

Terrific column by Jack Shafer.

An article of faith among modern media observers preaches that Rupert Murdoch can manipulate American politics in any direction he wants through the broadcasts of his lucrative media property, the Fox News Channel. This article of faith, which Democrats share with their children to give them nightmares and Republicans share with theirs as a cautionary tale, has given Murdoch king-maker status over the years as he has directed his channel to reward his supplicants and punish his enemies.

But on closer examination, and especially in light of the testimony released in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News for its coverage of the “stolen” presidential election of 2020, Murdoch isn’t always the master puppeteer he’s reputed to be. In Murdoch’s own words, delivered in Dominion suit depositions, he describes himself as frightened by the power Donald Trump holds over the Fox audience. He portrays himself, accurately in this case, as the supreme authority at his network but unable to control his prime-time anchors who endorsed Trump’s lie of a stolen election. And he regrets not interceding — which he says was within his power — to keep stolen-election fabulists like Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell from repeatedly appearing on his shows, even though some Fox executives and anchors were gagging, off-screen, on Giuliani and Powell’s wild-eyed theories…

Wow. I hadn’t realised that Murdoch had had to testify in the Dominion libel trial.

Jonty Bloom on the Windsor AgreementFrom his piece in The New European…

You really could not make it up. The Brexit-loving prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is boasting that NI has the best deal in the world because it is both part of the UK and of the single market.

And he is right, Northern Ireland does have a great deal in the world. It is exactly the same deal that the whole of the UK used to have before Rishi Sunak and his mates threw it all away.

That is why Northern Ireland’s trade with the EU is booming – up by £1 billion last year – that is why it has grown much faster than the rest of the country and why it is now the second largest recipient of foreign investment in the UK after London.

The foreign investment would have been even higher but for the suicidally stupid threats by previous Conservative administrations to tear up the Northern Ireland Protocol and start a trade war with the EU. Now that threat is removed, it will doubtless soar.

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Searching for TimView from Tim Robinson’s window

We’ve just come back from ten days in Ireland, journeying up and down the country’s wonderful West coast — which some marketing genius in the Tourist Board famously rebranded as “the Wild Atlantic Way”, thereby unleashing a profitable torrent of eager tourists upon an unsuspecting landscape.

For a couple of days we stopped in Connemara, a rough-hewn but beautiful part of Connacht, which also happens to be where my father’s family come from. On one of those days we headed for Roundstone, a small fishing village about 50 miles north-west of Galway. What brought us there was my desire to visit ‘Folding Landscapes’, the little firm that the great cartographer Tim Robinson and his wife Máiréad created to publish his astonishing handmade maps of the Aran Islands, the Burren and Connemara. I hadn’t been there for at least two decades, but I had a firm memory of the company’s office the looked out on the village pier.

When we arrived, thought, there was no sign of the office. Because it was out of the tourist season, the village was exceedingly quiet, with only the post-office and one other shop open. We tried the PO first, inquiring about Tim’s whereabouts. The young woman behind the counter was not a local and couldn’t help, so she directed us to the general store across the street. Entering it, I asked the middle-aged lady who ran it if she knew where I could find Tim.

At this her welcoming smile turned to an expression of concern. It turned out that Tim had died of Covid in the early weeks of the pandemic, and that Máiréad had passed away two weeks before him. They had both been in London at the time. But their ashes had been brought back to Roundstone, local fishermen had launched boats to scatter their ashes in the bay, a group of traditional musicians had sent them on their way from the pierhead, and the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, had travelled down from Dublin to honour one of the country’s greatest contemporary writers and scholars.

So Tim and Máiréad had a great send-off, but my hopes of obtaining a copy of his map of Connemara were dashed. I felt mortified that I had missed his passing. The only thing I could think of doing was to photograph the view that greeted them every morning.

He was a formidable scholar and a lovely writer. His books on Aran and Connemara are masterpieces. I met him only once, when he was the 2011 Parnell Fellow at Magdalene College and he signed my copy of his book on Connemara.

Here he is, writing about Wittgenstein’s sojourn in Connemara in 1948:

In 1948 Ludwig Wittgenstein fled the seductions of Cambridge, where he was the acknowledged star of the Philosophy Department, to a friend’s holiday cottage in Roscoe, a fishing hamlet on a rugged peninsula separating the mouth of Killary Harbour from the bay of Little Killary. “I can only think clearly in the dark,” he said, “and in Connemara I have found one of the last pools of darkness in Europe.” His thought, a mental ascesis that matched his frugal and solitary existence there, was directed to an end, or rather to its own end. As he had written, “The real discovery is the one that makes me stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.” The particular question preoccupying him at this time concerned the difference between seeing something, and seeing it as something. For instance, his farming neighbours see this strange figure in the landscape, and see him as a madman. There he stands, stock still for minutes on end, staring at something he has drawn with his stick in the mud of the roadside. If I see this diagram (a roundish shape with a dot in the middle, and two long appendages on one side) first as a duck’s head and bill, and then as a rabbit’s head and ears, not a particle of the mud has moved. What then has changed — a mysterious mental picture I can show to no one else? The temptation, he writes, is to say “I see it like this”, pointing at the same thing for “it” and “this”. Hence arises a philosophical pseudo-problem. But by analysing how we use language in such cases, we can “get rid of the idea of the private object”. His neighbours, though, know a duck-rabbit when they see one, and forbid him to cross their land lest he frighten the sheep.

Quote of the Day

“If my doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”

Isaac Asimov

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSorcha Richardson | Oh Oscillator

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By a stunning young singer we were lucky enough to run into in Kerry.

Long Read of the DaySocial Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s The Evidence.

For years I’ve been arguing (for example here) that social media — and especially Instagram — is toxic for teenage girls. The response of the tech industry — and especially of Meta (neé Facebook) consistently reminds me of the tobacco industry’s long campaign to undermine the idea that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer. The roles of media and academia in the controversy has also reminded me of their inertia and indolence in that long-running saga.

All of which is a long-winded way of explaining why I welcome this long and considered essay by the social-psychologist Jonathan Haidt reviewing the research and evidence of the impact of social media on girls.

Here’s how it opens:

A big story last week was the partial release of the CDC’s bi-annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which showed that most teen girls (57%) now say that they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness (up from 36% in 2011), and 30% of teen girls now say that they have seriously considered suicide (up from 19% in 2011). Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller. As I showed in my Feb. 16 Substack post, the big surprise in the CDC data is that COVID didn’t have much effect on the overall trends, which just kept marching on as they have since around 2012. Teens were already socially distanced by 2019, which might explain why COVID restrictions added little to their rates of mental illness, on average. (Of course, many individuals suffered greatly).

Most of the news coverage last week noted that the trends pre-dated covid, and many of them mentioned social media as a potential cause. A few of them then did the standard thing that journalists have been doing for years, saying essentially “gosh, we just don’t know if it’s social media, because the evidence is all correlational and the correlations are really small.” For example, Derek Thompson, one of my favorite data-oriented journalists, wrote a widely read essay in The Atlantic on the multiplicity of possible causes. In a section titled Why is it so hard to prove that social media and smartphones are destroying teen mental health? he noted that “the academic literature on social media’s harms is complicated” and he then quoted one of the main academics studying the issue—Jeff Hancock, of Stanford University: “There’s been absolutely hundreds of social-media and mental-health studies, almost all showing pretty small effects.”

In this post, I will show that Thompson’s skepticism was justified in 2019 but is not justified in 2023. A lot of new work has been published since 2019, and there has been a recent and surprising convergence among the leading opponents in the debate (including Hancock and me). There is now a great deal of evidence that social media is a substantial cause, not just a tiny correlate, of depression and anxiety, and therefore of behaviors related to depression and anxiety, including self-harm and suicide…

As I say, it’s long. What’s particularly striking (to me anyway) is his insight that the standard approach of treating social-media use as if it were analogous to imbibing a particular narcotic is far too reductionist. What it ignores is the fact that the ubiquity of social media changes the entire media ecosystem in which young people are now growing up. As I read Haidt’s essay, I kept thinking about Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood and his argument that radical changes in our media environment — as in (i) the switch from orality to print, and (ii) then from print to broadcast TV — changed our definitions (and conceptions) of childhood.

Crypto is intended to be hard to regulate, but at least the Treasury wants to have a goLast Sunday’s Observer column:

For my sins, I have been reading Future financial services regulatory regime for cryptoassets, 82 pages of prime Whitehall verbiage that was published recently, setting out HM Treasury’s plans to govern the clouds and hold back the tides.

It opens with the statutory ringing endorsement by Andrew Griffith, economic secretary to the Treasury. He reminds readers that the government’s “firm ambition is for the UK to be home to the most open, well-regulated and technologically advanced capital markets in the world” – which “means taking proactive steps to harness the opportunities of new financial technologies”. He further believes that “crypto technologies” can have a profound impact across financial services and that “by capitalising on the potential benefits offered by crypto we can strengthen our position as a world leader in fintech, unlock growth and boost innovation”. Cont’d p94, as they say in Private Eye.

Billed as a “consultation and call for evidence”, the document invites our views on these important matters. As a public-spirited columnist, it would be churlish to refuse the invitation. So here goes…

Do read the whole thing.

My commonplace bookletFrom the Observer:

The late Roald Dahl’s publisher, Puffin, caused controversy this month for hiring “sensitivity readers” to rewrite his books with hundreds of revisions so that they “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”.

In the new edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Augustus Gloop – a glutton for chocolate – is now just “enormous” rather than “enormously fat”; in The Twits, Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly”, just “beastly”, and in The Enormous Crocodile, “we eat little boys and girls” has been changed to “we eat little children”.

Responding to the criticism, Puffin announced last Friday that they will publish both the original texts and reworked editions.

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This morning’s Observer column:

For my sins, I have been reading Future financial services regulatory regime for cryptoassets, 82 pages of prime Whitehall verbiage that was published recently, setting out HM Treasury’s plans to govern the clouds and hold back the tides.

It opens with the statutory ringing endorsement by Andrew Griffith, economic secretary to the Treasury. He reminds readers that the government’s “firm ambition is for the UK to be home to the most open, well-regulated and technologically advanced capital markets in the world” – which “means taking proactive steps to harness the opportunities of new financial technologies”. He further believes that “crypto technologies” can have a profound impact across financial services and that “by capitalising on the potential benefits offered by crypto we can strengthen our position as a world leader in fintech, unlock growth and boost innovation”. Cont’d p94, as they say in Private Eye.

Billed as a “consultation and call for evidence”, the document invites our views on these important matters. As a public-spirited columnist, it would be churlish to refuse the invitation. So here goes…

Read on.

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This morning’s Observer column:

Computers need chips. But what that increasingly means is that nearly everything needs chips. How come? Because computers are embedded in almost every device we use. And not just in things that we regard as electronic. One of the things we learned during the pandemic was that cars and tractors need chips – simply because their engine-control units are basically small, purpose-built computers. Once Covid-19 hit car sales, semiconductor manufacturers switched their production lines to serve other – much bigger – customers. And then, as things started to return to normal in 2021, car manufacturers discovered that they had slipped to the back of the semiconductor queue – and their production lines ground to a halt. Similarly for microwave cookers, washing machines and refrigerators.

In the decades when the west was still high on the globalisation drug, the fact that things upon which we relied were manufactured elsewhere didn’t seem to bother us…

Read on

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Service Announcement!I’ve just realised that this newsletter has been coming out five days a week, every week, since the onset of the Covid pandemic in March 2020, so from today I’m taking a short break before it embarks on its fourth year! Normal service will resume on March 1.

Dead tree + Live wind farmNorth Norfolk. Huge offshore wind farm in the distance.

Quote of the Day

”My idea of long-term planning is lunch.”

Frank Ogden

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBob Marley | One Love

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Wonderful.

Long Read of the DayWhat if my lessons in existentialism were in bad faith?

Lovely reflective — and reflexive — essay by Robert Zaretsky.

‘Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid.’ I read these lines – perhaps with a diction a bit too deliberate – and look up from my copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) at a room-full of students lining both sides of a long conference table. ‘He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer.’ Am I reciting this a little too emphatically? One student is doodling in a notebook, others scribble in theirs. A few of them look at me while I look around at them. Just as I am mostly engaged in displaying my engagement, I wonder if the students are also busy being engaged.

Mais oui, it’s another mauvaise foi Monday. Bad faith abounds not just at the Parisian café where Sartre watches the waiter, but also in the seminar room in Houston where I watch myself teaching my class on existentialism. Though I have been a professor for more than 30 years, I began teaching this course only recently: unlike with earlier courses, where I feared simply phoning them in, I now swung to the fear that I was being a phony. That I was, like Sartre’s waiter, playing a game. ‘We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café. There is nothing there to surprise us.’ Yet I am surprised – in a way that makes me question not just my place, but existentialism’s place in the room. As Sartre might say: is my course, myself? Am I foolish in thinking I can profess a philosophy that requires personal authenticity and political engagement?

I really liked this essay, not least because when my late wife Carol and I were undergraduates we were both passionate admirers of Sartre and his famous collaborator Simone de Beauvoir. (In fact Carol went on to do a Masters thesis on Beauvoir’s autobiography, and even interviewed her in Paris.) Of course, given the later revelations of how manipulative those two were, I feel rather differently about them now. But if you can’t be naive when you’re young and impressionable, when can you be? And Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was one of the most important books of the 20th century.

Books, etc.I’m reading Aaron Perzanowski’s terrific book with interest, not just because it’s on a topic that is really important, but also because he’s speaking at an event I’m running in the Cambridge Festival on March 28. If you’re going to be in town that evening, why not come? It’s in Wolfson College and may be over-subscribed — so register early if you’re hoping to be there.

My commonplace bookletWelsh road building projects stopped after failing climate review

Wow! Is this a world first?

From The Guardian…

Dozens of road building projects across Wales have been halted or amended as part of a “groundbreaking” policy that reassessed more than 50 schemes against a series of tough tests on their impact on the climate emergency.

Only 15 of the projects reviewed by an expert roads review panel will go ahead in their original form, with others scaled back, postponed or in some cases shelved.

The scrapped projects include a third bridge across the Menai Strait which separates the island of Anglesey from the Welsh mainland.

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SpikyheadSeen on a walk the other day. Amazing what nature comes up with.

Quote of the Day

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

Frederick Douglass

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJ.S. Bach | Concerto for Oboe (from BWV 105, 170 & 49) | 2. Andante

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Long Read of the Day7 minutes from the end of class

Intriguing essay by Harry Brighouse on Crooked Timber, one of my favourite blogs

I sometimes employ an undergraduate to observe my teaching, and criticize what I do. I’ve learned a lot from them over the years, but I really employ them, these days, to hold me accountable to the standards I set myself and to tell me what is happening in the room (this is especially valuable in large classes) more than with the expectation that I’ll learn something brand new.

Anyway, last week my new observer, Allyson, solved what has been a longstanding problem for me. In my large classes students get antsy n the last ten minutes, and start, slowly, and discreetly, to put their stuff away and get ready to go. Each individual student is not disruptive, but having most of them doing this over a 7 minute period is very distracting (for them and for me). It’s especially bad in winter because they have lots of clothes to put on.

And I am not blaming them for this. My campus is large, and there is a 15 minute gap between classes. Unless they are ready to go the second class ends many of them will be late for the next class.

Allyson pointed out the antsiness, and suggested the following: 7 minutes from the end of class tell them that they are not leaving till the end of the class, but that I am giving them one minute to get their stuff together…

So he tried it. Read on to find out how it worked.

Gasoline Car ReviewLovely satirical spoof by Geoff Greer.

I recently purchased a Mazda Miata. This car is interesting because instead of running on electricity, it is powered by a combustible liquid called gasoline. The vehicle has an engine that mixes the gasoline with oxygen from the air, ignites the mixture, and uses the resulting combustion to push the car forward. I don’t fully understand the details of how it works, but this difference in propulsion technology totally changes the experience of owning and operating a vehicle.

After taking delivery of the car, my first hurdle was getting it to do anything. I opened the door (the handles are very prominent), sat in the driver’s seat, and… nothing happened. No screen showed any messages. The climate control didn’t turn on. The car seemed dead. I pressed the accelerator (Mazda calls this the “gas” pedal) but again, nothing. I called their support line and quickly figured out the issue: Unlike a normal car, a gas car needs to be “started”. Apparently it would be wasteful and expensive to keep the gasoline engine running all the time, so you’re only supposed to run the engine if you’re moving the vehicle. The starting process is pretty painless: You insert your key into a slot on the side of the steering column, push the clutch pedal (more on that later), then turn the key and hold it for a second or two. I succeeded on the first try, causing the car to jump to life and emit all kinds of crazy noises. Imagine if a steam locomotive had a baby with a machine gun. That’s the sort of noise that comes out of a gas car. It evokes both excitement and concern…

It goes on like this. Hope you enjoy it a much as I did.

Vermeer: the ‘Watch with Mother’ versionThe Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has a huge (and sold-out) Vermeer retrospective. Since thousands of people will be unable to see it in person, the powers—that-be in the museum had the bright idea of commissioning a little film in which a Famous Person would escort the grateful viewer through the pictures, pausing to utter helpful homilies from time to time. The Famous Person chosen for this task is none other than Stephen Fry, the great actor and Jeeves imitator who was then hijacked by being given a fatuous, patronising script to read. The result: an embarrassing flop.

My commonplace bookletHow Sam Pepys spent Thursday 16 February, 1660

In the morning at my lute. Then came Shaw and Hawly, and I gave them their morning draft at my house. So to my office, where I wrote by the carrier to my Lord and sealed my letter at Will’s, and gave it old East to carry it to the carrier’s, and to take up a box of china oranges and two little barrels of scallops at my house, which Captain Cuttance sent to me for my Lord. Here I met with Osborne and with Shaw and Spicer, and we went to the Sun Tavern in expectation of a dinner, where we had sent us only two trenchers-full of meat, at which we were very merry, while in came Mr. Wade and his friend Capt. Moyse (who told us of his hopes to get an estate merely for his name’s sake), and here we staid till seven at night, I winning a quart of sack of Shaw that one trencherfull that was sent us was all lamb and he that it was veal. I by having but 3d. in my pocket made shift to spend no more, whereas if I had had more I had spent more as the rest did, so that I see it is an advantage to a man to carry little in his pocket.

Home, and after supper, and a little at my flute, I went to bed.

The annotations for this day are fascinating. Now I see where the term ‘trencherman’ comes from, for example.

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Spring is sprungIn a friend’s garden yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”At 50 everyone has the face he deserves”.

George Orwell, in his notebook, 17 April, 1949

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsCarole King | Chains

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Thanks to Doc Searls (Whom God Preserve) for the reminder.

Long Read of the DayArtificial Intelligence and The Best Game in Town: Or How Some Philosophers, and the Behavioral and Brain Sciences journal, Missed a Step

Intriguing long read by David Lobina on the implications of the fact that LLMs (large language models) are essentially statistical engines. Includes his (rejected) response to a challenge issued by BBS.

Modern AI [i.e. machine-learning] is, in a way, glorified statistics, in the same way that a flat white is a glorified caffellatte – actually, a flat white is a badly made cappuccino, but the analogy still holds up: a former friend once joked that Mitt Romney seemed like a botched connectionist attempt at building a president. And as with Romney, probably, there is really nothing there; a chatbot such as ChatGPT doesn’t “know” any language, or any aspect of language, and it doesn’t “know” how to reason, either, certainly no more than a calculator “knows” how to, er, well, put two and two together (maybe the calculator understands the metaphor, though).

Indeed, and as stressed last month, deep neural networks connect an input with an output on the basis of the gigantic amounts of data they are fed during so-called “training”, when the relevant correlations are calculated. In the case of LLMs such as ChatGPT (note that I’m conflating an LLM with the “dialogue management system” that queries an LLM; will come back to this), the model predicts one word at a time, and only one word at a time every single time, given a specific sequence of words (that is, a string of words), and without making any use of the syntactic or semantic representation of the sentences it is inputted.

That is, LLMs calculate the probability of the next word given a context…

Interesting if you’re fascinated by the fuss about LLMs. But it may also be an acquired taste.

ChatGPT, etc.One of the things that’s very interesting about ChatGPT is the way programmers are using it. I’d been wondering about this for a while (and indeed in the first piece I wrote about it had likened its arrival to the arrival of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet in the late 1970s) but this post by Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve), arguing that “ChatGPT clearly has a place” elegantly crystallised that view.

This thread is worth money. I’ve given ChatGPT programming jobs like the ones the author describes, and it’s saved me huge amounts of time. Last one was asking how to do something with the Twitter API. I could have spent fifteen minutes trying to find it in the docs, or on Stack Exchange, but I got the answer instead in a few seconds, and there was no bullshit, no preambles, just the answer to the question I asked.

And, later…

Journalists, who do most of the writing about news, immediately focus on how it might affect their careers, and imho educators zoom past the purpose of education, to create more better-educated people. As a kid, I had a party the day my parents bought us an encyclopedia. That meant we could settle arguments by getting facts. We could’ve gotten them before but that would’ve meant a trip to the library. Better tools make for better information. ChatGPT is a revolutionary tool. Kind of like Alta Vista was when the web first came out. I’m sure people screamed that it would screw up something. People always say that about change, esp people who are invested in the way things are.

Maybe there will be negative consequences of ChatGPT, but I’m sure we’re not in a position to see what they are now, based on experience with similar changes. And maybe we’ll look back on this moment twenty years from now, and not be able to imagine what life was like before we had this fantastic tool.

My commonplace booklet Her car died, so she walked to work. One day on the walk, she found $15,000.

If you’re overwhelmed by the awfulness of the world, here is a heartwarming story from the Seattle Times.

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WateringCaptivating piece of urban art by Natalie Rak (aka Rak), a street artist based in Poland.

Thanks to Ingrid Hoeben via Mastodon.

Quote of the Day

”People ask me why I ride with my bottom in the air. Well, I’ve got to put it somewhere.”

Lester Pigott, who was Champion Jockey 11 times and rode 29 Classic winners — including the Derby 11 times.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMartin Hayes and Dennis Cahill | The Cat In The Corner/John Naughton’s Jig

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I wish I could claim the credit for this, but my namesake was a legendary Co Clare musician and a great collector of tunes. And Martin Hayes is one of the greatest Irish musicians around today. Thanks to Declan Deasy for the hint.

Long Read of the DayLove and Loathing in the Time of ChatGPT

As you doubtless already know, there’s a veritable tsunami of comment, speculation, criticism and dazzlement about ChatGPT. Believe me, I’ve read too much of it and I’m depressed by the naïveté and short-termism of a lot of it. All of which explains why I really welcomed this long, long essay by Ali Minai. It’s one of the best things I’ve read to date, and contains, among other things, an ingenious and insightful experiment he did with the system.

Here’s a sample that illustrates the wisdom of the piece:

So what can we learn from these little diversions? First, that ChatGPT is indeed a very powerful tool – one capable of capturing our attention and playing with our minds. It is not a toy.

Second, that, for information it has been trained on explicitly (e.g., individuals with detailed Wikipedia pages and other public information), it has good recall, but once pushed out of this comfort zone, it begins to make stuff up rather than admitting ignorance. There needs to be a caveat here: I have occasionally seen it add incorrect information even for well-known instances, and sometimes to beg off with an excuse of ignorance for an unfamiliar one. ChatGPT too is whimsical in its own way, and seldom generates the same answer twice.

Third, when it does make things up, it does so in a plausible way, making those falsehoods much harder to detect. This is because the entire basis of language models is to generate text that is in context. For applications such as generating movie scripts or fairy tales, this is great, but not when the bot is being queried for accurate information. Finally, we see that ChatGPT is capable of spinning a yarn when the right query comes along, as in the “Grimus Caterwaul” case. Thus, even though it does not really understand, its simulation of understanding is quite impressive. It can, therefore, be a very useful tool in applications that require appropriate confabulation, such as brainstorming or plotting stories…

Do read it. Worth your time.

My commonplace bookletMy piece yesterday on Virginia Woolf’s delight in her new “nine penny” fountain pen, and my wondering what that would be in today’s money, started lots of hares running.

“One of those inflation calculators,” wrote James Mackay,

tells us that £1 today is equivalent to 1.9p (=4.56d) in 1924. So Virginia Woolf’s nine pennies, 9d, then were conveniently close to £2 now. I suspect that your old pens would now sell for more.

Lots of readers, including Andy Linton, Steve Waller and Brian Naughton pointed me to the CPI inflation calculator which claims that £1 in 1024 would be the equivalent of £77.78 today.

Given that there were 240 pennies in a 1924 £, VW’s pen cost £0.0375. Which, being translated into today’s money looks like £2.92. Well, you might get a cheap biro for that, so my guess is that Woolf’s pen cost a lot more than nine old pennies.

This set me off down an entertaining rabbit-hole. I find, for example, that there is no bandwagon onto which some manufacturers will hesitate to jump. Montblanc, for example, created “a rare Virginia Woolf writers limited edition full set of three writing instruments includes fountain pen, ballpoint pen and mechanical pencil” which a dealer is now advertising for £1,000.

And in 2010 Bonhams sold a fountain pen from such a set for $427. According to the blurb,

Seventy-five years after the publication of her novel The Waves, this black resin pen with its carved wave shapes evokes the life and work of this modern British writer. The curved shape of the pen and its simple clip set with a single ruby highlight the pen. 5 ½” (13.8 cm). Medium 18 K gold nib with two engraved elm trees. Includes original packaging and papers. Limited Edition: 08,002/16,000.

Being a snob, perhaps VW would have enjoyed this. Or would she have been mortified? It’s almost enough to make one wonder if someone has marketed a limited edition of Vita Sackville-West’s mechanical pencil. On the other hand, life is short.

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Early morning on the riverOn Friday. Thanks to Pete for the pic.

Quote of the Day

”The dogs had eaten the upholstery of a Packard convertible that afternoon and were consequently somewhat subdued.”

S.J. Perelman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsThe Rolling Stones | Sweet Virginia (Live)

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Long Read of the DayBeyond Borders

Adam Shatz writing in the London Review of Books about Adolfo Kaminsky, possibly the most accomplished forger of the 20th century.

In the spring of 1944, a young man was stopped at a checkpoint of the Pétainist milice outside the Saint-Germain-des-Prés metro station. According to his identity card, he was Julien Keller, aged seventeen, a dyer, born in the département of the Creuse. The bag he was carrying contained dozens of other fake identity papers. But he was confident that the police had no idea how frightened he was because he had learned to affect an air of serenity. ‘I also knew, with certainty, that my papers were in order,’ he recalled many years later. After all, ‘I was the one who had made them.’

‘Julien Keller’ was the nom de guerre of Adolfo Kaminsky, who died in Paris last month aged 97. It was largely thanks to him that the German-occupied zone of wartime France was flooded with false documents. The Occupation authorities were on his trail, but they never suspected that the forger they were after was a teenager…

Great story. Extraordinary man.

Well, I never: AI is very proficient at designing nerve agentsYesterday’s Observer column…

Here’s a story that evangelists for so-called AI (artificial intelligence) – or machine-learning (ML) – might prefer you didn’t dwell upon. It comes from the pages of Nature Machine Intelligence, as sober a journal as you could wish to find in a scholarly library. It stars four research scientists – Fabio Urbina, Filippa Lentzos, Cédric Invernizzi and Sean Ekins – who work for a pharmaceutical company building machine-learning systems for finding “new therapeutic inhibitors” – substances that interfere with a chemical reaction, growth or other biological activity involved in human diseases.

The essence of pharmaceutical research is drug discovery. It boils down to a search for molecules that may have therapeutic uses and, because there are billions of potential possibilities, it makes searching for needles in haystacks look like child’s play. Given that, the arrival of ML technology, enabling machines to search through billions of possibilities, was a dream come true and it is now embedded everywhere in the industry…

Do read the whole piece

Books, etc.

The book speaks of the need for storytelling as protection from the chaos of reality, but for whom is reality chaotic? For disillusioned intellectuals, but probably not for merchant bankers and military planners. It may be a rough old place, but that’s different. Virginia Woolf seems to have seen the world as chaotic, but one doubts the same was true of her servants. In any case, you could just as easily see reality as stiflingly rule-bound and constrictive, and fiction as a playful relief from this straitjacket.

Terry Eagleton, reviewing Peter Brooks’s book, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative.

My commonplace bookletFrom Virginia Woolf’s diary for 9 January, 1924.

I may say that coincident with the purchase of 51 Tavistock Sqre (how I like writing that) is the purchase of a nine penny pen, a fountain pen, which has an ordinary nib & writes — sometimes very well. Am I more excited by buying Tavistock Sqre, or by buying my new fountain pen? — which reflection which reminds me that I have volume 7 of Montaigne to polish off.”

Gosh! I wonder what nine 1924 pennies pence would translate to in today’s money. (There must be a conversion table somewhere?) It would give me an idea of what my collection of pens might worth. Apart altogether from their sentimental value, of course.

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The flying horseThis is the most surreal photograph I’ve ever taken. In September 2007 I was standing early one morning on Noordeinde in The Hague waiting for a friend to show up when I saw this extraordinary display in the window of a fancy antique shop. What’s particularly nice (for me) is that it’s an analogue photograph taken with an old film Leica.

Quote of the Day

”To the Tennis Court, and there saw the King play at tennis and others; but to see how the King’s play was extolled, without any cause at all, was a loathsome sight.”

Samuel Pepys in his diary, 4 January, 1664.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsElgar | Introduction & Allegro for Strings, Op.47 | Pinchas Zukerman

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Long Read of the DayThe Defiance of Salman Rushdie

A fine essay by David Remnick, Editor of The New Yorker.

hen Salman Rushdie turned seventy-five, last summer, he had every reason to believe that he had outlasted the threat of assassination. A long time ago, on Valentine’s Day, 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” blasphemous and issued a fatwa ordering the execution of its author and “all those involved in its publication.” Rushdie, a resident of London, spent the next decade in a fugitive existence, under constant police protection. But after settling in New York, in 2000, he lived freely, insistently unguarded. He refused to be terrorized.

There were times, though, when the lingering threat made itself apparent, and not merely on the lunatic reaches of the Internet. In 2012, during the annual autumn gathering of world leaders at the United Nations, I joined a small meeting of reporters with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, and I asked him if the multimillion-dollar bounty that an Iranian foundation had placed on Rushdie’s head had been rescinded. Ahmadinejad smiled with a glint of malice. “Salman Rushdie, where is he now?” he said. “There is no news of him. Is he in the United States? If he is in the U.S., you shouldn’t broadcast that, for his own safety.”

Within a year, Ahmadinejad was out of office and out of favor with the mullahs. Rushdie went on living as a free man. The years passed…

It’s a classic Remnick piece, beautifully written and insightful. You could call it a profile in courage (to echo JFK’s ghost-written book). And it includes a wonderful portrait of Rushdie as he is now, a living embodiment of Hemingway’s definition of courage: “grace under pressure”.

The Generative AI wars beginThere’s something deeply comical about the sudden panic in the tech industry over ChatGPT. Microsoft decided to use the bot to smarten up its Bing search engine (which up to now has had less than 10% of the search market). This caught Google (which dominates the market) on the hop, so it brought forward the deployment of BARD — its answer to ChatGPT. On Monday, it published an ad for the new toy.

The only problem was — as Reuters quickly pointed out — there was a glaring factual error in the bot’s answer to the question: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about?”

It turns out that the first pictures of exoplanets — credited by Bard to the JWST — were in fact taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004!

I asked ChatGPT “Why did Google’s BARD get the question about the James Webb Space Telescope wrong?”

Sadly, ChatGPT was too busy to play. Instead it wrote me a little poem.

Later, an email pointed me to a comparative study of Bard vs. ChatGPT that someone had arranged. The summary of results looks like this:

Meanwhile — as usual — Gary Marcus highlighted something I had missed, namely the strange imbalance in media coverage of the two rival companies’ efforts. The NYT’s Kevin Roose, for example, “even went so far as to chide anyone who even expressed concern about the errors, saying that ‘fixating on the areas where these tools fall short risks missing what’s so amazing about what they get right’. “Meanwhile”, says Marcus,

it is striking that neither Roose nor anyone else has explained exactly why Google and Microsoft received such different reception. The two megacompanies both demoed prototypes, neither fully ready for public use, built around apparently comparable technology, facing apparently similar bugs, within a day of each other. Yet one demo was presented as a revolution, the other as a disaster.

Since neither company has yet subjected their products to full scientific review, it’s impossible to say which is more trustworthy; it might well turn out that Google’s new product is actually more reliable.

Most likely, neither of them are particularly reliable. Yet they are being treated as polar opposites. At the very least, someone ought be asking, from business perspective, what’s the moat here, if two companies are basically both about to offer the same thing?

It’s amazing how fixated the world has become on this generative tech. I was at a posh dinner party of apparently well-informed people on Wednesday night and it was difficult to keep the discussion (which was supposed to be about ‘data-centric engineering’) away from ChatGPT.

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Where?

Quote of the Day

”Four things I’d been better without
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.”

Dorothy Parker

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJackson Browne & David Lindley | Stay

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Long Read of the DayThe Sad Prince

Unexpectedly interesting essay by Derek Neal about trying to escape one’s origins, which means that it’s about Prince Harry, of all people.

I never thought I would write about Prince Harry. As an American, I have a natural aversion to the Royal Family and to the idea that they are somehow different or special by virtue of their birth. They’re just people. But I’m also Canadian by way of my mother, and now that I’ve lived in Canada for a few years, the Canadian interest in the Royals seems to have rubbed off on me, and I can’t help but feel some sort of sympathy for Harry’s plight. He thinks he’s made it to the end of his story—the narrative urge is incredibly strong in the Netflix show (Meghan mentions how they’ve come “full circle”)—yet I can’t help but feel this is just the first chapter, and that the story, which Meghan calls “a fairy tale,” will end up being a bit more sinister, a bit more like a Henry James novel or a Joan Didion essay.

Books, etc. The End of the McLuhan Centre for Culture & Technology (1968 – 2023)

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The purpose of the Centre for Culture and Technology, as initially envisioned by Marshall McLuhan in 1963, was to “advance the understanding of the origins and effects of technology.” One of the specific objectives was “to organize an inter-disciplinary seminar for staff members and graduate students and to devise new experimental procedures for identifying the psychic and social consequences of technological change.” These were revolutionary ideas at the time and there was excitement in the air.

They were (and, in a way, they’ve acquired a new saliency in our current media ecosystem), but it seems that the Faculty of Information in the University of Toronto no longer has much interest in them.

I gave a talk on McLuhan years ago.

McLuhan Keynote

Click to download.

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Two ladies of ArlesSpeaks for itself, really.

Quote of the Day

”Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”

George Orwell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJohn Field | Nocturne no 5 in B flat major | John O’Conor

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I love all the Field nocturnes, but this one is special.

Long Read of the DayWe are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

Sharp essay by Vijay Kolinjivadi from the University of Antwerp.

More than a decade ago, investment experts James Altucher and Douglas Sease wrote a book for the Wall Street Journal called ‘Investing in the Apocalypse’. They argued that the end of the world is a profitable opportunity for those who know how to “fade the fear”, as everyone else panics. They maintained that when disaster strikes, investors should approach it with the rationale that “no matter how bad things seem, they really aren’t that bad”.

Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, they advised investing in big pharmaceutical companies as a strategy to reap dividends from global pandemics. They also encouraged putting money into renewable energy systems while ramping up oil production.

Today, it seems many have followed Althucher and Sease’s advice. Under the guise of taking action on the pandemic, billions of dollars have been poured into big pharma, instead of public health and policies aimed at preventing another global outbreak. The supposed energy transition that has been undertaken has seen renewable energy production expanded, but there has been no indication that oil and gas are being substituted and ultimately phased out.

What is worse, governments and corporations have teamed up to turn the apocalypse into a money-making opportunity…

It’s good on the ‘carbon offsets’ racket, too.

And of course it reminds me that we need a theory of incompetent systems — ones that can’t fix themselves.

Books, etc.Security guru Bruce Schneier has a new book, A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back, coming out soon, and it’s on my reading list. (I think I’ve read all of his previous books.) Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) has a nice blog post about it — and about Schneier.

Schneier led the charge for a kind of sensible, reasonable thinking about security, using a mix of tactics to shift the discourse on the subject: debating TSA boss Kip Hawley, traveling with reporters through airport checkpoints while narrating countermeasures to defeat every single post-9/11 measure, and holding annual “movie-plot threat” competitions.

Most importantly, though, Schneier wrote long-form books that set out the case for sound security reasoning, railing against security theater and calling for policies that would actually make our physical and digital world more secure – abolishing DRM, clearing legal barriers to vulnerability research and disclosure, and debunking security snake-oil, from “unbreakable proprietary ciphers” to “behavioral detection training” for TSA officers.

He even designed the rings for Cory’s wedding — which, naturally, were cipher wheels.

One thing I especially like about Schneier is his description of himself as

“a public-interest technologist, working at the intersection of security, technology, and people”.

My commonplace bookletDeus ex machina

My friend Quentin had the good idea of asking ChatGPT to come up with an Eleventh Commandment. And a Twelfth. And a Thirteenth!

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The Public Sphere, French styleSeen outside a lovely town in Burgundy.

Quote of the Day

”’Living’ carries echoes of The Remains of the Day, the 1993 film of Ishiguro’s famous, novel, in which Anthony Hopkins stars as a butler whose soul has been ironed flat, like a tablecloth.”

Anthony Lane, reviewing the film ‘Living’ in which Bill Nighy stars as a civil servant suffering from a terminal illness. (New Yorker, 26 Dec 2022)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsNorah Jones | Sunrise (live in Amsterdam )

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Long Read of the DayWhat you need to know about Mastodon

Nice (and illuminating) introduction by Glenn Fleischmann. I particularly liked this metaphor:

You can think of Mastodon as a flotilla of boats of vastly different sizes, whereas Twitter is like being on a cruise ship the size of a continent. Some Mastodon boats might be cruise liners with as many as 50,000 passengers; others are just dinghies with a single occupant! The admin of each instance—the captain of your particular boat—might make arbitrary decisions you disagree with as heartily as with any commercial operator’s tacks and turns. But you’re not stuck on your boat, with abandoning ship as the only alternative. Instead, you can hop from one boat to another without losing your place in the flotilla community. Parts of a flotilla can also splinter off and form their own disconnected groups, but no boat, however large, is in charge of the community.

The irrational exuberance of tech giantsOm Malik explains…

An unprecedented boom in Silicon Valley that started with the once-in-a-generation convergence of three mega trends: mobile, social, and cloud computing, has peaked. It started in 2010, and it has been bananas around here for the past decade or so. The FAANG+Microsoft companies saw their revenues go from $196 billion to over $1.5 Trillion. Let that sink in. Booming stocks helped create an environment of excess like never before.

The companies got into the business of what Paul Kedrosky calls “people hoarding.” The pandemic and the resulting growth revved up the hiring machine even more. The over-hiring of talent has led to wage inflation, which had a ripple effect across the entire technology ecosystem. Technology insiders are happy to tell non-tech companies to use data and automation as tools to plan their future. It is easier to preach than practice.

Why does Google need close to 200,000 employees? Or does Microsoft need 225,000 people? Salesforce, till recently, had about 73,500 employees. Profitable as these companies have been, it is also clear that they have become sloppy and bloated.

Funny how the laws of economic gravity eventually have to be obeyed.

Top programming languages in 2023From Tech Republic…

Based on what employers say they want in job candidates

Based on the analysis, here are the top 10 programming languages for 2023 along with the number of open full-time jobs and each language’s ranking on Coding Dojo’s list for 2022:

Python: 68,534 jobs (No. 2 in 2022) SQL: 57,971 jobs (No. 3) Java: 57,236 jobs (No. 1) JavaScript: 48,041 jobs (No. 4) C: 35,702 jobs (No. 7) C++: 35,281 jobs (No. 5) Go: 32,503 jobs (No. 8) C#: 29,084 jobs (No. 6) Assembly: 14,866 jobs (No. 10) MATLAB: 8,504 jobs (previously unranked)

I’m not surprised Python is still tops. Even I can use it. And ChatGPT speaks Python too.

My commonplace bookletThe Seven Ages of Man

Screaming baby
Bratty kid
Obnoxious teen
Over-confident hipster
Oblivious dude
Smug retiree
Old geezer

(From a New Yorker cartoon.)

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I’m here: where are you?

Quote of the Day

”Cryptocurrency is a game played by suckers and manipulators. Guess who’s winning? “

Dan Gillmor

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMozart | Dove Sono I Bei Momenti | The Marriage of Figaro | Kiri Te Kanawa

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Played at the funeral of Nick Herbert on Friday.

Long Read of the Day Sam Bankman-Fried is not a child

But the media is treating him like one.

Great blog post by Molly White. I especially liked the sting in the tail…

Here’s how it opens, though.

He appears to have lived independently of his parents since 2010, when he left his childhood home near Stanford to move in to a big house in Cambridge with other MIT undergrads. After he graduated he went to New York to work at Jane Street, then moved back across the country to Berkeley for a brief stint at the Centre for Effective Altruism. He was 25 when he founded Alameda Research, and 27 when he founded FTX. He moved with FTX to Hong Kong, then took it with him to Nassau in The Bahamas in 2021. Only recently did he return home, moving back in with his parents in their Palo Alto home while he’s confined to house arrest.

But reading headlines and news stories, you would be forgiven if up until now you had thought he was a teenager still driving around on a learner’s permit, who picked up cryptocurrency trading to avoid the types of high school summer jobs that might force him to go outside.…

Keep reading. It’s worth it.

ChatGPT isn’t a great leap forward, it’s an expensive deal with the devilYesterday’s Observer column.

(Excuse the hyperbolic headline. One thing all newspaper readers should know is that columnists never, ever get to write the headlines over what they’ve written! That’s the prerogative of the sub-editors who make sure the content is fit for human consumption.)

Sometimes, those who would forget history are condemned to repeat it. For those of us with long memories, the current fuss – nay hysteria – surrounding ChatGPT (and “generative AI” generally) rings a bell.

We have been here before: in January 1966, to be precise. That was the moment when Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at MIT, unveiled Eliza, which would have been called the world’s first chatbot if that term had existed at the time. Weizenbaum wrote the software (in a programming language intriguingly called MAD-SLIP) to demonstrate that communications between humans and computers were inevitably superficial. It did that by providing a text box in which one could exchange typed communications with the machine. Inside the program was a script (christened DOCTOR by Weizenbaum) which parodied the exchanges a patient might have with a psychotherapist who practised the person-centred therapy pioneered by Carl Rogers. (The program’s name came from Eliza Doolittle, the cockney lass who was taught to “speak proper” in Shaw’s play Pygmalion.)

Do read the whole thing.

Books, etc.Apropos my recent musings on Virginia Woolf.

Another wonderful cartoon by Tom Gauld in the Guardian.

Chart of the DayGoogle searches for “ChatGPT”.

H/T to Azeem Azhar

My commonplace bookletBalloonacy

You may have noticed the fuss over the Chinese surveillance balloon drifting over the US — coincidentally taking in some nuclear launch sites in Montana. I was much taken by Walter Kirn’s account,“The Chinese Spy Balloon Over My House” and I hope you will be too.

We weren’t supposed to notice the floating intruder. According to Bloomberg, the federal government was already aware of the balloon, and had been for several days, but they wished to keep the matter on the “down-low” so as not to disrupt a coming meeting between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and high Chinese officials.

Too bad for the bigwigs. They miscalculated, perhaps because they dwell in cities, where people tend to stare into their phones rather than idly admiring the heavens, spotting anomalous aircraft now and then…

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Double jeopardyThe current cover of Private Eye!

Quote of the Day

“Nature still obstinately refuses to co-operate by making the rich people innately superior to the poor people.”

Beatrice Webb

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsAbide With Me | Choir of King’s College, Cambridge

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I’m going to a friend’s funeral today, and hoping this will be one of the hymns.

Long Read of the DayThe End of the Intellectual Focal Point

A perceptive essay by Daniel Drezner on the way a particular sector of the public sphere — that occupied by ‘public intellectuals’ — is changing.

One of the key themes from The Ideas Industry was that the barriers to entry for entering the marketplace of ideas had been lowered. Traditional gatekeepers — like, say, the op-ed editors of the New York Times or Washington Post — exercised less power than they used to. It has become easier for a thought leader to bypass establishment venues and essentially engage in the intellectual equivalent of direct marketing.

That said, the dramatic shifts in the social media landscape over the past six months should remind everyone that the relationship between traditional gatekeepers and thought leaders might be a bit more complicated. Thought leaders might not want to be constrained by establishments, but they do want to be talked about by establishments. They like long profiles about their intellectual arc or consideration of just how transgressive their ideas really are. Indeed, antagonizing the establishment is a surefire means of building a brand for a lot of thought leaders.

What if, however, there is no longer an establishment to push against?

Also has interesting things to say about the role of Twitter in the public sphere.

Shelling outTimely observation by Jonty Bloom:

Shell is making obscene profits while the country spends billions subsiding energy bills. The company reported its largest ever profits and quite possible the highest profits of any British company ever, $40bn.

The year before it made $19bn and since it has not bought any other firms, expanded its business significantly or invented a new form of energy; this is just a windfall gain from higher energy prices.

The moral and economically sensible thing is to tax this gain, all of it. The problem is not that this would restrict investment or is unfair, it isn’t. The problem is that the government is so insanely free market that it sees nothing wrong with unearned profits.

That’s ideology at work. Interestingly, although Margaret Thatcher was, in a way, a neoliberal, she had no objection to windfall profits.

Books, etc.On novels and the movies they inspire

I’ve recently watched two movies about episodes in the lives of two writers I admire — Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Vita and Virginia is about the passionate affair that Woolf had with Vita Sackville-West and the way that led to her path-breaking novel Orlando. Nora is about the relationship between James Joyce and his long-suffering wife, Nora — but told from Nora’s point of view. It’s based on Brenda Maddox’s fine biography of Nora and shows how Joyce drew on that tempestuous relationship in his fiction – especially Dubliners and Ulysses.

I read Orlando many years ago and — to be honest — remember little about it except that I didn’t enjoy it much. And I was therefore puzzled by the fact that it seemed to be widely regarded as Woolf’s greatest literary achievement. It tells the story of an English poet who changes sex and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures in literacy history. In the process Woolf manages not only to raise transgender issues which (coincidentally) have startling contemporary resonances, but also to satirise the misogyny of conventional historical narratives, imperialist ideology and Victorian complacency.

All of this passed me by when I first read the novel, and reading the terrific Wikipedia entry on it has therefore been an embarrassing experience, not to mention a reminder of youthful ignorance and naivete! But the great — and unexpected — benefit of watching the movie was that I suddenly began to see how Woolf’s infatuation with her aristocratic bisexual lover provided the spur for her exploration of really momentous themes in her novel. As the man said, you learn something every day!

I’m not a movie buff – and indeed generally watch very few films – so this recent mini-binge was prompted originally by curiosity about how novels are adapted for the screen. In relation to Joyce, the great breakthrough was Brenda Maddox’s biography of Nora, because it vapourised the conventional narrative about the uneducated wife who never read the works of the genius to whom she was married. How she endured it was — according to the narrative — a mystery, for Joyce, in addition to being a genius, was also an impossible person to live with.

This patronising view of Nora was encapsulated in something Richard Ellmann — Joyce’s canonical biographer — wrote to Maddox when she was embarking on her quest saying how much he disliked “book-length studies of people who are clearly not of great importance themselves”. He added that Nora’s meagre correspondence and literary output would make it “possible neither to give a full character portrayal, nor to evolve a feminist tract” about her.

Maddox’s genius was to spot that what Joyce was looking for was “a Catholic girl without a Catholic conscience” — and, boy, did he find one!

I knew Maddox when I was the Observer’s TV critic and she was a prominent and influential media figure, and I liked her a lot. I found her a shrewd and detached observer of that strange world whose products I reviewed.

In the movie this interpretation of Nora is beautifully captured by Susan Lynch, and Joyce as the impossible-to-live-with genius is also well portrayed by Ewan McGregor. The adaptation shrewdly opted to cover just the pre-Ulysses period of their life together — up to the point where it was clear that Dubliners would never be published in Ireland, and that they would never return to live there.

That decision gave it a coherence that it would have lacked if the film had tried to cover the entire course of Mr and Mrs Joyce’s life together. And what it vividly illustrated were the myriad ways in which life with Nora shaped Joyce’s imagination and found expression in his fiction. We finally discover, for example, where the wonderful closing moments of ‘The Dead’, his little masterpiece, came from: Nora’s relationship with a young boy in Galway who had died of pneumonia. And Joyce’s fantasies about Nora’s suspected infidelity provided the engine for the cuckolding of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Molly Bloom is, in essence, a projection of Joyce’s paranoia.

My only quibble is the way these movies about great literary figures of the past always over-glamourise them. The sets, dresses and hats are invariably over the top. The Woolfs’ Richmond house was nothing like as grand as it appears in the film. And although Joyce was a dandy and Nora a fine handsome woman, she rarely dressed like an escapee from a Paris catwalk; and at times in Trieste they lived in pretty modest conditions. Growl.

My commonplace bookletU.S. Marines Outsmart AI Security Cameras by Hiding in a Cardboard Box

Lovely story on PetaPixel about the fragility (nay, stupidity) of image recognition systems.

The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas.

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Undrinkable

Quote of the Day

We are never so generous as when giving advice.”

François de La Rochefoucauld

Spot on. I’m with Oscar Wilde in this: “I always pass on good advice’, he famously observed. “It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.”

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsAltan | The Wind and Rain

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Wonderful group. One of the best concerts I’ve ever been to was given by them when, having become world-famous, they came back one lovely Summer evening to the Donegal village whence they had sprung.

Long Read of the DayThe prescience of Joseph Weizenbaum

For people who have been watching the tech industry for as long as I have, the excitement/hysteria about ChatGPT will have brought to mind Josept Weizenbaum and his ELIZA chatbot, which he built between 1964 and 1966 and eventually unveiled that year. His reflections on what he — and we — learned from that have suddenly acquired a new salience, which is why it was so nice to come on this essay the other day.

Its starting point is a quotation from a lecture that Weizenbaum gave in 1983 on “The paradoxical role of the computer”:

“On the one hand the computer makes it possible in principle to live in a world of plenty for everyone, on the other hand we are well on our way to using it to create a world of suffering and chaos. Paradoxical, no?”

And then takes off…

though this is a clash that we still find ourselves wrestling with today, it can be useful to take a step back and consider how it could have been foreseen some forty years ago. While 1983 is certainly not ancient history, when it comes to the history of computing, forty years can certainly seem like a time when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. After all, 1983 was pre-smartphone, prior to the genuine takeoff of the personal computer, it was before the web and therefore also before Web 2.0 and Web3—heck, quite a few of the figures who dominate contemporary discussions around computer technology hadn’t even been born yet (or were still children). 1983 was a long time ago for computers, yet for some figures who were paying attention, figures like Weizenbaum, it was already possible to see the direction that the eager embrace of computers was putting societies on—and though such figures spoke out in hopes that the direction would be changed, it is likely that many of them would not be too surprised with the messes we find ourselves in at present.

It’s a terrifically thoughtful and wise piece. Well worth your time.

My commonplace bookletLast week I found myself in a part of Cambridge that I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. I realised after I’d parked that the parking meter only took cash and realised that I hadn’t any on me. But I remembered that there were a couple of bank branches round the corner where I could pick up some real money and strolled on — only to discover that both branches were no more. One was boarded up. The other had become some kind of food outlet.

Which is one reason I so enjoyed Robert Shrimsley’s column in the FT magazine last Saturday.

Here’s a sample:

The old bank opposite the cycle shop on the High Street is about to reopen as an exercise studio and gym. That makes at least four such places within about 500 yards of each other. On the other hand, another form of bank building is now a Gail’s bakery, so at least shuttered financial institutions are offering diversity on health options.

What used to be Barclays is now good for sourdough loaves, brownies, and sausage rolls. What do used to be NatWest will help you work off those calories. When you look at it that way, this is practically cartel behaviour. The Gail’s is clearly a valuable addition, but the bank was better for me. Say what you like about Barclays, but I’m pretty sure I never ate their bank notes on the way home.

The Santander has also gone, but not yet transformed into anything else. Presumably it is still working through the pastries – or – Pilates dilemma faced by former financial institutions. Perhaps it should consider reopening as a hairdresser. There is a serious gap in the market in that part of the High Street. Residents still have to walk several yards to get their hair done. They might even have to cross the road.

Hairdressers, Cafes, exercise, studios, cycle shops and vets seem to be the future of our High Streets. The logic of this is obvious. The only places which see a future are those offering physical services you cannot simply secure with a click of the mouse. By any measure our High Street is still very well served, especially if you need a haircut.

Welcome to Global Britain.

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An opening…… onto a tennis court, as it happens.

Quote of the Day

”In Hollywood when people die they don’t ask ‘Did he leave a will?’ But ‘Did he leave a Diary?’”

Lisa Minelli

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMusic for Imbolc (St Brigid’s Day)

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Imbolc is one of the four ancient Gaelic seasonal festivals. It marks the beginning of Spring. The others are Bealtaine, Lughnasadh and Samhain. Needless to say, the original festival was appropriated by the Catholic Church and allocated to St Brigid.

Photograph by Culnacreann (on a CC-by licence)

When we were kids we learned how to make ‘St Brigid Crosses’ out of rushes, of which the damp pastures of rural Ireland had a plentiful supply.

Many thanks to Pam Appleby for the link.

Long Read of the DayBritain’s posh cliques

I’ve always liked George Orwell’s observation that England (by which I think he meant Britain) is “a family with the wrong people in charge”. Right on cue comes this sharp column by John Harris.

A country in deep crisis ought to at least have a government capable of governing; it is post-Brexit Britain’s unlucky fate to be run by an administration in a similar state of breakdown. The Tory party chair, Nadhim Zahawi, has been found to have committed a serious breach of the ministerial code and finally sacked. The investigation into bullying accusations against Dominic Raab, the deputy prime minister, is yet to conclude. Meanwhile, the latest story centred on Boris Johnson grinds on.

If it was a play, it would sit awkwardly between thriller and farce, with characters that were well drawn, and well connected. Johnson, we know: the financially incontinent prime minister who desperately needed an £800,000 “credit facility”. Then there is Sam Blyth, a “distant cousin” of Johnson and founder of a chain of Canadian private schools, apparently persuaded to be the then prime minister’s loan guarantor. The cast is completed by Richard Sharp, the former banker and Tory donor who is now the chair of the BBC, and Simon Case, Britain’s most senior civil servant. Questions now swirl around Sharp’s alleged dealings with the other three, in the weeks and months before he was appointed to his role at the BBC. Last Monday, Johnson said that Sharp “knows absolutely nothing about my personal finances – I can tell you that for ding-dang sure”. Over the weekend, the Sunday Times published a leaked letter reportedly handed to Johnson by Case: “Given the imminent announcement of Richard Sharp as the new BBC chair,” it said, “it is important that you no longer ask his advice about your personal financial matters.” We now await enlightenment about how both these things could possibly be true.

It gets worse (if that’s possible):

The context for these tragedies remains as brazen and appalling as ever: at the last count, two-thirds of senior judges were privately educated, along with 51% of what the Sutton Trust charity calls “leading journalists”, and 52% of foreign office diplomats. The figure for Sunak’s cabinet is 65%.

The NYT is beginning to smoke its own exhaustNice Politico column by Jack Shafer.

Defying the journalistic maxim that reporters should never be the story, “The Story Behind the Story” frequently chronicles the mundane mechanics of assembling the Times. Recently, the space has featured a first-person piece by a Times reporter about how she got her story about the things people stand in line for these days; how its book critic read and reviewed Prince Harry’s Spare in a day; how its reporter found sources for a piece about young people and personal finance; how its reporter covered the recent 5.6 magnitude earthquake in West Java; inside commentary on the paper’s crossword; a profile of the paper’s photography department; and a profile of a food-truck proprietor who vends on the street outside the Times’ offices.

Other days the feature runs Q&A’s with reporters in which they regurgitate the facts they’ve already conveyed in published pieces about classified documents, Ticketmaster, and the recent German coup plot. (Some of these Q&A’s are double-dribbled from the Times’ “The Daily” podcast.) Then there have been retrospectives on the influence of the paper’s “Snow Fall” feature from 10 years ago and a history of the guest book at Times headquarters. It would be one thing if any of these pieces broke ground or were great reads, but they don’t and they aren’t. Most days’ entries have that tossed off quality that passes for insight when applied to podcasts. The reading experience is like soaking your brain in brackish well water. Perhaps nobody has ever attacked these columns because nobody ever reads them.

He’s sharp, is Jack. He’s picked up a whiff of what’s been happening to the Times. Some of its political reporting in the last few years has become lazy. And its current reporting of the ‘discoveries’ about classified documents in Joe Biden’s garage reminds me of its irresponsible reporting of the leaking of Hilary Clinton’s emails in 2016. What’s happening is that the success of its subscription model is making the paper pathologically attentive to what its subscribers will like rather than what good, detached journalism should provide.

My commonplace bookletSplash down! Lion cubs leap across swollen river Link

Cute, eh? Just wait until they grow up.

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Das BootOr should it be zwei Boote, really?

Taken years ago in North Norfolk. The boat in the foreground eventually broke up and is no more.

Quote of the Day

”Yesterday, in the gym, my physiotherapist placed my own claw-like hand onto my own face. It was certainly a horror, as if several semi-frozen vegetarian sausages had been draped across my face by a prankster.

The hand felt cold and inanimate. But Miss S claims I should forego the self-pity. If I persist, I will soon be waving at London taxis and giving my enemies the finger. At the moment, my right hand is more lively than my left, which feels nearly dead.

What I would like, what I wish for, what I dream of, is the ability to pick up a fountain pen, and make a mark in the page; to write my own name in purple ink. This is my ambition.”

Hanif Kureishi, dictated from his hospital bed.

On holiday in Rome just after Christmas he suddenly collapsed onto the pavement; as he fell he twisted his neck and grievously injuring the top of his spine. He lost the use of his arms and legs and is now in a specialist rehabilitation clinic. But from the outset he has been dictating blog posts like this one to his son Carlo.

This is moving and impressive. What it reminds me of is the great historian Tony Judt who, when he was similarly immobilised before his death, managed to produce a truly beautiful book, The Memory Chalet.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsHaydn | String Quartet in D Major Op.64-5, Hob.III:63, “The Lark”, 1st Movement | . Classikan String Quartet

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Good ol’ Papa Haydn.

Long Read of the DayKen Burns on His Most Important Film

Transcript of an interview Bari Weiss did with documentary film-maker Ken Burns on his latest film on American attitudes to the Holocaust.

BW: I want to start with one of the first scenes of the six-hour documentary, which is about the Frank family. Many have read the diary of Anne Frank, but you decide to tell this story in a new light by focusing on her father, Otto Frank, and the way that he desperately tried to get the Franks into the United States. He couldn’t, despite having all of the connections one would need to make it from Europe into America. This theme—America’s policy toward Jewish refugees during the war—underscores the entire film. Why did you decide to open with this story of Otto Frank desperately trying to escape, instead of the story that we know, of an innocent little girl hiding in an attic?

KB: Let’s remember that the diary of an innocent girl, who is often the point of entry for many Americans and certainly schoolkids to the story of the Holocaust, isn’t about the Holocaust. It’s about everything leading up to the moment of her arrest and the overshadowing fear of hiding in the secret annex. As a country, we think we’re disconnected from that, but we are not. We are culpable. Otto Frank had connections in the United States. He had crossed every t and dotted every i and he still couldn’t get in. What I wanted to do is leave our audience with the sense from the very beginning that she could be here and still be alive.

Unmissable. Do read it.

Nick Clegg: from Liberal hope to Trump EnablerNice sharp Guardian comment piece by Jan-Werner Müller on Meta’s decision (announced by Clegg) to allow Trump back on its platform.

But Trump has neither paid any price for various offenses against democracy, nor ever shown the slightest repentance for his role in what Facebook, in its official announcement, gingerly calls “civil unrest” (as if we were talking about some general conflagration, with all sides to blame). By allowing him back on, Facebook is signaling that neither the past, nor what a perpetrator thinks about the past, matter. It pretends that, unless Trump is on the platform, citizens have no chance to find out what “the king of social media” (according to Nigel Farage) is thinking, depriving them of vital information – a patently absurd claim given that Trump remains the most public American who has ever lived. Not only that: AJ Liebling once observed that freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one – if nothing else, freedom to address the public is also guaranteed to those who own a social network.

That description of a Trump-fomented armed insurrection as “civil unrest” would have delighted the author of “Politics and the English Language”

My commonplace bookletJonty Bloom sees the connection between Father Ted and Nadhim Zahawi

Nadhim Zahawi, poor love, feels hard done by, lynched by the media and driven out of office by a mob. Without even the chance to clear his name.

Father Ted was exiled to Craggy Island, when the money involved was “just resting in my account”.

How much worse for the former Chancellor, who only sought to hide the fact that he was being fined by HMRC, while running HMRC, for trying not to pay several million pounds in tax to HMRC.

After all it is not as if we need the money or anything, and he has stables to heat at his own expense these days; will no one think of the poor horses?

Still not to worry, Father Ted may have been on Craggy Island for years, but these days political exile for bullying staff, starting your own foreign policy, avoiding tax or even leaking state secrets, is a few weeks at most.

At this rate we will be lucky if Mr. Zahawi isn’t back in the cabinet by February.

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The icy forestActually a close up of iced-up Santolina taken during the cold snap a few days ago. But when I looked at it again I suddenly imagined it as an aerial view of an arctic forest!

Quote of the Day

”Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination.”

Christopher Isherwood

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsRy Cooder, Ricky Skaggs, Sharon White

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Long Read of the DayHow to win arguments online

Dave Karpf is a tenured professor at George Washington University and a blogger. He teaches a class in ‘strategic communication’, and was recently handed a case study in how not to engage in an online row.

What happened was that Karpf tweeted something rude about Brett Stephens, a conservative NYT columnist, who wrote something with which he disagreed. He called him a “bedbug”. Stephens then emailed him — cc’ing the Provost of his university (i.e. in the shaky hierarchy of a US university, his boss’s boss) — complaining about this.

This was the standard old-world response of an ‘elite’ commentator aiming to activate the usual Establishment mechanism for disciplining a heckler. Big mistake in today’s networked world. Karpf tweeted about Stephens’s action and attached a copy of the email. At which point the whole thing went viral.

Karpf’s essay is an account of what happened, and reflections on what can be learned from it.

Riveting and instructive.

Why has Alphabet hit the panic button? Only Google can answer that questionYesterday’s Observer column…

In a strange way, the best thing that could have happened to Google (now masquerading as Alphabet, its parent company) was Facebook. Why? Because although Google invented surveillance capitalism, arguably the most toxic business model since the opium trade, it was Facebook that got into the most trouble for its abuses of it. The result was that Google enjoyed an easier ride. Naturally, it had the odd bit of unpleasantness with the EU, with annoying fines and long drawn out legal wrangles. But it was the Facebook boss, Mark Zuckerberg – not Google’s Larry Page, Sergey Brin and their adult supervisor Eric Schmidt – who was awarded the title of evil emperor of the online world.

This sometimes enabled Google to fly below the regulatory radar and avoid public criticism. Its relative immunity may also have been fostered by credulity induced by its “Don’t be evil” motto. What may also have helped is the way that, over the years, it fumbled quite a few things – Google+, Google Wave, Google Glass, Knol and Google Reader, to name just five. On the other hand, it also managed to create useful and successful products – Gmail, for example, plus Google Maps, Google Scholar, Google Earth and Google Books. And, of course, it made inspired acquisitions of YouTube in 2006 and of artificial intelligence startup DeepMind in 2014.

What enabled the company to get away with that mixture of creativity, fumbling and indirection, obviously, was that it was always rolling in money…

Do read the whole thing.

My commonplace bookletI recently highlighted an article about the way Wikipedia dealt with the thorny question of what pronouns to assign to Ernest Hemingway’s offspring — ‘Grace’ or ‘Gregory’ — before eventually settling for the former.

Chris Patten writes to say:

And if you query why ‘Grace’ has replaced Gregory, Google asks if you want to hear about HIS life! The delusion can’t be maintained.

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Whence KM cameMy notes the other day about Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield prompted Andy Linton to send this photograph of her birthplace in New Zealand where, he says, Mansfield is a “minor deity”.

For which picture, many thanks.

Quote of the Day

”Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.”

P.J. O’Rourke

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsCasals | Song of the Birds (Arr. Sally Beamish) | Steven Isserlis

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Casals once played it to the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Long Read of the DayThe Crypto Collapse and the End of Magical Thinking

Terrific NYT essay by Mihir A. Desai

I have come to view cryptocurrencies not simply as exotic assets but as a manifestation of a magical thinking that had come to infect part of the generation who grew up in the aftermath of the Great Recession — and American capitalism, more broadly.

For these purposes, magical thinking is the assumption that favored conditions will continue on forever without regard for history. It is the minimizing of constraints and trade-offs in favor of techno-utopianism and the exclusive emphasis on positive outcomes and novelty. It is the conflation of virtue with commerce.

Where did this ideology come from? An exceptional period of low interest rates and excess liquidity provided the fertile soil for fantastical dreams to flourish. Pervasive consumer-facing technology allowed individuals to believe that the latest platform company or arrogant tech entrepreneur could change everything. Anger after the 2008 global financial crisis created a receptivity to radical economic solutions, and disappointment with traditional politics displaced social ambitions onto the world of commerce. The hothouse of Covid’s peaks turbocharged all these impulses as we sat bored in front of screens, fueled by seemingly free money.

With Bitcoin now trading at around $17,000, and amid declining stock valuations and tech sector layoffs, these ideas have begun to crack. The unwinding of magical thinking will dominate this decade in painful but ultimately restorative ways — and that unwinding will be most painful to the generation conditioned to believe these fantasies.

Is life in the UK really as bad as the numbers suggest?Yes, it is, says economist Tim Harford, writing in the Financial Times on what has happened to the UK.

TL;DR version: The past 15 years have been a disappointment on a scale we could hardly have imagined.

The British economy is in a generation-long slough of despond, a slow-burning economic catastrophe. Real household disposable income per capita has barely increased for 15 years.

This is not normal. Since 1948, this measure of spending power reliably increased in the UK, doubling every 30 years. It was about twice as high in 1978 as in 1948 and was in touching distance of doubling again by 2008, before the financial crisis intervened. Today, it’s back at those pre-crisis levels.

It’s worth lingering on this point because it is so extraordinary. Had the pre-crisis trend continued, the typical Brit would by now be 40 per cent richer. Instead, no progress has been made at all. No wonder the Institute for Fiscal Studies is now talking of a second lost decade…

And…

Many people struggle to pay for the basics. A large survey conducted by the Resolution Foundation in late November found that about a quarter of people said they couldn’t afford regular savings of £10 a month, couldn’t afford to spend small sums on themselves, couldn’t afford to replace electrical goods and couldn’t afford to switch on the heating when needed. Three years ago, only an unlucky few — between 2 and 8 per cent — described themselves as having such concerns over spending. More than 10 per cent of respondents said that at times over the previous 30 days, they’d not eaten when hungry because they didn’t have money for food.

This is not supposed to happen in one of the world’s richest countries. But then, the UK is no longer in that club. As my colleague John Burn-Murdoch has recently shown, median incomes in the UK are well below those in places such as Norway, Switzerland or the US and well below the average of developed countries. Incomes of the poor, those at the 10th percentile, are lower in the UK than in Slovenia.

My commonplace bookletYehudi Menuhin gets his Blue Plaque

The plaque, which is awarded by English Heritage, will commemorate the six-storey house in Belgravia, London, where he lived, worked and entertained for the last 16 years of his life until 1999.

The news triggered a memory of a story I was once told about him when he visited the painter Derek Hill at his lovely house on the shores of Lake Cartan in Co Donegal.

The house (which is maintained as it was when Hill was alive), has a large old-fashioned kitchen, in which Hill, who was a convivial soul and very popular with the people of the locality, used occasionally to invite local musicians to drop in on Saturday evenings for drinks, singing, dancing and music-making. Since Donegal is famous for its tradition of fiddle-playing, Hill set up such an evening when Yehudi Menuhin was staying, and the great violinist joined in wholeheartedly. A good night was had by all, but it seems that some of the locals had no idea who the visitor was, and when the party was breaking up one of the departing musicians was heard saying to Hill “Yon Hughdie McMenamin is a fine fiddler!”

‘Hughdie’ was a popular adaption of ‘Hugh’ when I lived in Donegal as a child. And McMenamin is a common family name thereabouts.

Hill left his house and land to the Irish state on his death and there’s now a lovely gallery in the grounds. If you’re ever in Donegal, don’t miss it.

Grey Gowrie has written a nice book about Hill, whom he knew well.

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MisalignmentWonderful photograph from Quentin’s blog. One person who commented on it thought that the seagull ruined the picture. I disagree. The bird upsets the symmetry, which is the whole point!

Quote of the Day

”If I have to prove I’m not a computer by identifying traffic lights and busses, perhaps we’re not quite ready for self-driving cars.”

Mastodon user @joelle@social.joelle.us

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsCrosby Stills and Nash | Suite: Judy Blue Eyes | Live 2012

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A small memorial to David Crosby, sadly no longer with us.

Long Read of the DayWikipedia Quietly Shapes How We View the World

Really interesting piece by Noam Cohen in The Atlantic…

As veteran readers of this blog will know, I am an admirer (and user of) Wikipedia. (I also try to donate to it regularly.) What fascinated me about it from the beginning — and certainly from reading the chapter about it in Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet — was the elaborate protocols its founders developed to handle disagreements. They were extraordinarily prescient in that they anticipated what would happen when people would not only have their own opinions, but their own ‘facts’ too. They saw the future in which we are now living.

What’s nice about this essay is that it starts with a contemporary case study that brilliantly illustrates this.

For more than 15 years, Wikipedia discussed what to call the third child of Ernest Hemingway, a doctor who was born and wrote books as Gregory, later lived as Gloria after undergoing gender-affirming surgery, and, when arrested for public disorderliness late in life, used a third name, Vanessa. Last year, editors on the site finally settled the question: The Gregory Hemingway article was deleted, and its contents were moved to a new one for Gloria Hemingway. This would be her name going forward, and she/her would be her pronouns.

Wikipedia’s billions of facts, rendered as dry prose in millions of articles, help us understand the world. They are largely the brain behind Siri and Alexa. They have been integrated as official fact-checks on conspiracy-theory YouTube videos. They helped train ChatGPT. So, unsurprisingly, when you search Google for “Gregory Hemingway,” it follows Wikipedia’s lead: You are told about Gloria instead…

Worth your time.

PS: I have a standard modus operandi whenever I get into discussions with people about Wikipedia. If the person is complaining about an error in an entry, my response is: well then, if you know it’s wrong, why haven’t you corrected it?

And to the person who gushes about how wonderful Wikipedia is! I ask: well, then, have you given it a donation?

You can guess what the most common responses to both questions are!

Books, etc.Recently my good friend Quentin embarked on reading Joyce’s Ulysses and blogged on how unimpressed he was by it. He drew comfort, he said, from the fact that no less a person than Virginia Woolf herself was repelled by the book and quoted the well-known extract from a her diary entry on the subject:

“Never did I read such tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th–merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges. Of course genius may blaze out on page 652 but I have my doubts. And this is what Eliot worships…”

I took him to task about this and we had an enjoyable exchange on Signal. My point was that VW’s views on the novel were rather more complicated than you’d gather from just reading that extract, and so I set about gathering everything Woolf had written about the book in her diaries. It was an enjoyable rabbit-hole for someone who’s interested in Joyce, as you can imagine.

But then yesterday morning Quentin alerted me to a lovely essay by James Heffernan published in the Yale Modernism Lab. He had, of course been reading Woolf’s diaries (like me) but (unlike me) had also been reading her letters. So it was an enjoyable and instructive read.

Heffernan insightfully illuminates one aspect of the controversy which had always annoyed me, namely what I saw as Woolf’s obtuseness (or even hypocrisy) in ostensibly dismissing Joyce’s method while at the same time using it herself in the writing of Mrs Dalloway. She may have had trouble admitting it but she and Joyce were in the same business. And he had beaten her to it.

“A few days earlier,” writes Heffernan,

she had told her diary that in her “laborious dredging . . . for Mrs Dalloway” [her story, that is] she was “bringing up light buckets” (D 2: 189). Having begun to suspect–as noted above–that Joyce was probably beating her at her own game, how could she avoid measuring herself against him or, more precisely, wanting to find his buckets just as light as hers? And could she finish her story or turn it into another novel of her own so long as this strange new giant of literature cast his shadow before her? The answer, I think, is no. To go on writing, she had to stop reading Ulysses. I believe that she stopped at page 200 and then did all she could to drive it from her mind. On August 26 she tells her diary: “I dislike Ulysses more & more–that is think it more & more unimportant; & dont even trouble conscientiously to make out its meanings. Thank God, I need not write about it” (D 2: 195-96). By this she clearly meant that she would write no more about it for publication, since she did indeed have a few more things to say in private. On September 3, eight days after last reporting that she had read just 200 pages, she tells her diary, “I should be reading the last immortal chapter of Ulysses: but I’m hot with Badmington [sic] in the orchard . . . we dine in 35 minutes; & I must change” (D 2: 197). And three days later she tells her diary, “I finished Ulysses” (D 2: 199).

“Just what does this mean?” asks Heffernan,

I believe it can only mean that she had finished with it – not that she had read it all, let alone tried “conscientiously to make out its meanings.” In the more than four months from mid-April to August 24, she had read just two hundred pages of Ulysses even though she had already read many of them once or twice before. Could she have read the remaining 532 pages in the eleven days from August 26 to September 6, when she claims to have finished the novel? The answer is both yes and no. On one hand, she could have read those pages in one long day, for the whole of Ulysses has been many times read aloud–typically by a team of readers– in twenty-four hours. On the other hand, given the rate at which she had been reading Ulysses, she could not possibly have read it all by September 6 – especially since she was already overloaded with other tasks.

Thanks to Quentin (who is now listening to an audio version of Ulysses) for launching me down such an enjoyable slippery slope.

My commonplace bookletWhat if everything ran on gasoline?

Fabulous ad for the Nissan Leaf. It’s only a minute long. Don’t miss it.

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In Coole ParkIf, as I have done, you ever go in search of Coole House in Co. Galway, on the former estate of Lady Gregory, W.B. Yeats’s friend and patroness, you’re in for disappointment. The house, which was sold to the Irish state by Lady Gregory’s daughter-in-law in 1927, was allowed to fall into ruin, and eventually demolished in 1941 in a remarkable act of official vandalism. So now all the remains is the site where it stood and this faded photograph of the building.

But the Park surrounding where the house stood is lovely and open to the public. One of the most intriguing things I found there was a sequence of five pieces of slate, each with etched handwritten verses of some doggerel.

Here’s the first one.

And here’s the explanation!

Quote of the Day

”Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

Cory Doctorow, writing in Wired.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJosef Haydn | String Quartet No. 62, Op. 76 No. 3 “Emperor” | Second Movement | Veridis Quartet

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Long Read of the Day“Just Go Back to the Work.”

Film-maker Lizzie Gottlieb has made a documentary film, Turn Every Page, about the remarkable partnership between Robert Caro, the biographer of LBJ, and her father, Robert Gottlieb, his Editor.

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Literary Hub has published the transcript of a nice interview that Lisa Liebman did with the film-maker. Here’s how she sets up the conversation…

When director Lizzie Gottlieb set out to explore the remarkable partnership between her father, celebrated book editor Robert Gottlieb, and the preeminent political biographer Robert Caro for her new documentary Turn Every Page, she knew being impartial was not only impossible, it was beside the point. “I thought, I have to bring people in through my eyes,” she says of the high-stakes story she sees as two literary titans “in a race against time to try to finish their life’s work.”

The filmmaker had met many of her now 91-year-old dad’s impressive roster of writers—who included Toni Morrison, John Le Carré, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, and Joseph Heller—during his years running Simon and Schuster, Knopf, and The New Yorker. But the 50-year-relationship between Gottlieb and the now 87-year-old Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author of The Power Broker, and the multi-volume The Years of Lyndon Johnson, remained a mystery. (In the film she notes that she didn’t meet Caro, who’s working on the final Johnson book, until her father’s 80th birthday.)

If you like Caro’s books and/or the process of editing, then this is for you.

Books, etc.Apropos Seamus Heaney’s habit of using a fountain-pen as a dipper, what should I find in Virginia Woolf’s diary for Sunday 3 September, 1922, but this?

”Perhaps the greatest revolution in my life is the change of nibs — no longer can I write legibly with my old blunt tree-stump — people complained — But then the usual difficulties begin — what is to take its place? At the present moment I’m using Blackie [a fountain pen] against his nature, dipping him, that is to say.”`

My commonplace bookletFrom Dave Winer…

”I went to ChatGPT and entered “Simple instructions about how to send email from a Node.js app?” What came back was absolutely perfect, none of the confusing crap and business models you see in online instructions in Google. I see why Google is worried. ;-)”

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Leaves of iceIt’s still cold around here.

Quote of the Day

”The people of Crete, unfortunately, make more history than they can consume locally.”

Saki (H.H. Munro)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsLike Someone in Love (by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke) | Gregory Chen (Piano), Mike Karn (Bass), Scott Lowrie (Drums)

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Long Read of the DayThe Dark Underbelly of ChatGPT

Good exposé by Time.

In its quest to make ChatGPT less toxic, OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan labourers earning less than $2 per hour.

To build that safety system, OpenAI took a leaf out of the playbook of social media companies like Facebook, who had already shown it was possible to build AIs that could detect toxic language like hate speech to help remove it from their platforms. The premise was simple: feed an AI with labeled examples of violence, hate speech, and sexual abuse, and that tool could learn to detect those forms of toxicity in the wild. That detector would be built into ChatGPT to check whether it was echoing the toxicity of its training data, and filter it out before it ever reached the user. It could also help scrub toxic text from the training datasets of future AI models.

To get those labels, OpenAI sent tens of thousands of snippets of text to an outsourcing firm in Kenya, beginning in November 2021. Much of that text appeared to have been pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet. Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest.

OpenAI’s outsourcing partner in Kenya was Sama, a San Francisco-based firm that employs workers in Kenya, Uganda and India to label data for Silicon Valley clients like Google, Meta and Microsoft. Sama markets itself as an “ethical AI” company and claims to have helped lift more than 50,000 people out of poverty.

The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour depending on seniority and performance. For this story, TIME reviewed hundreds of pages of internal Sama and OpenAI documents, including workers’ payslips, and interviewed four Sama employees who worked on the project. All the employees spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for their livelihoods.

OpenAI confirmed that Sama employees in Kenya contributed to a tool it was building to detect toxic content, which was eventually built into ChatGPT.

Books, etc.One of the things that’s always puzzled me about Virginia Woolf’s diaries (to which I am addicted) is her apparent obsession with Katherine Mansfield. Here are the index entries for her in Volume 2 of the Woolf diaries.

Although puzzled by Woolf’s obsession with KM, I’ve always put off reading her. Life’s too short, etc.

Now, however, an essay by Kirsty Gunn in Literary Hub has persuaded me that that omission will have to be rectified. This month is the centenary of KM’s death — which, says Ms Gunn,

marks the beginning of a flurry of publications and reviews honoring the author of a prose style that Virginia Woolf envied (“I was jealous of her writing,” she wrote after Mansfield’s death, “the only writing I have ever been jealous of”) and whose stories established a prototype for the kind of short fiction in English we now take for granted.

And,

Her stories plunge the reader into their midst and off we go: “And after all the weather was ideal.” “The week after was one of the busiest weeks of their lives.” “In the afternoon the chairs came.” From their first lines, the reader is brought right inside the fictional worlds which simply seem to open up and change as time passes—a method that Mansfield herself described as “unfolding,” introducing to literature a kind of free indirect narrative that traces the actions and minds of characters with such detail and nuance and sensitivity that she may as well be writing in invisible ink. “What form is it? you ask,” she wrote in a letter to the painter Dorothy Brett about her long short story “Prelude,” first published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. “As far as I know it’s more or less my own invention.”

Time to visit a bookshop.

My commonplace bookletRentokil pilots facial recognition system as way to exterminate rats

At first I thought that this has to be a spoof released inadvertently two months ahead of April 1st. If it is, then both the Financial Times and the Guardian have taken the bait.

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Tulip ManiaSeen on our kitchen windowsill the other day.

Quote of the Day

”Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get.”

A man from the UK Meteorological Office, quoted by Andrew Martin in the FT weekend edition.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSharon Shannon | Blackbird

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I’ve always thought she’s terrific, and now find from reading Alan Rickman’s diaries that he thought so too.

Long Read of the DayThe UK is wasting a lot of wind power

Fascinating (and sobering) explanation by Archy de Berker of the dysfunctional way the country’s energy market — and grid planning — works.

Note: It’s a graphics-heavy page and might be slow to load, so be patient.

Last year, the UK generated 30% of its energy from renewables, of which windpower (23% total generation) was by far the biggest contributor.

But on the windiest days, we deliberately capped the amount of power our turbines were producing, reducing the total amount generated by 6%. In fact, it’s worse than that: not only did we turn off our turbines, but we paid the owners of windfarms to turn them off. This is called curtailment.

In 2022, a year characterized by extraordinary hikes in energy prices for consumers, we spent £215m on turning windfarms off, and then another £717m turning on gas power plants to replace the lost wind power. In the process, we emitted an extra 1.5 million tonnes of CO2.

Very good explainer which is worth reading. But it’s also a compelling illustration of difficult long-term energy planning is, especially when you have governments like the ones the UK has been labouring under for over a decade.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for alerting me to it.

How you get fired by GoogleAs you will doubtless have read, Google has ‘let go’ (e.g. fired) 12,000 people, taking the total number of redundancies in the big tech companies to 200,000 and rising. Jeff Jarvis pointed me to a LinkedIn post by one of them, Bobby Nath, on how he found out he no longer had a job — via his Nest thermostat!

I woke up this morning to our Google Nest Hub in a locked state asking to link my account. I don’t recall ever seeing it in this state before, but it’s an older prototype unit with bugs from time to time, so I didn’t think much of it. When I went to check my work email, I was still in a waking state and couldn’t make sense of why I was getting so many emails asking if I was OK. Scrolling further down, there was a form email from PeopleOps indicating, as you may have surmised by now, that my employment at Google has been terminated.

Skipping straight to the 5th stage of grief (acceptance) — THANK YOU so much to everyone for the outpouring of support (and apologies in advance if I don’t respond immediately). I’m still in shock of course, but am totally OK for the moment, and am grateful for the privilege of being able to feel OK despite the tragic nature of news like this…

There’s an interesting Comment below the post from another Google executive, Guillermo Romano, who also finds that he has been ‘let go’.

It seems it was a numbers game, they kept the people that costs less or have not been promoted or less pay apparently and let go of the people that had either a higher salary or costs more to keep ( for the same job). I know this does not help but gives maybe a little answer to a “why”.

Still, it was good (for them) while it lasted. Part of the reason was the company adapting to a much worse economic downturn than its bosses anticipated (after all, Google had been growing continuously ever since it was founded), and partly because there’s panic over the deterioration of their Search engine and the perceived threat from competitors like ChatGPT.

Funny how everyone in the tech industry is astonished when they discover that the laws of economic gravity eventually apply to them.

How to sell to the youth of todayNice Leader in The Economist…

Dear boss—You have always tried to attract young and youngish consumers, and our consultants have always come up with new ways to label them. I don’t need to remind you that “millennials” and, increasingly, “Gen Z” are our most important markets. Together they make up a majority of the world’s population and a third of America’s. The trouble is that coming up with rules to define a swathe of humanity is more art than science. It is liable to become an exercise in applying stereotypes; not every youngster is sipping kombucha in a Brooklyn warehouse. Luckily you have me, and I’m here to tell you that much of what is written about marketing to today’s most prized consumers is a myth.

Start with the idea that, glued to smartphones, Gen Z barely notices the physical world and slavishly follows the latest hype from Instagram or TikTok. It’s true that the days of marketing chiefly through television, newspapers and magazines are long gone. Yet social media has not just changed the ways in which people discover brands; it has undermined the power of marketing as a whole. Such is the ease with which digital natives can fact-check our dodgy marketing claims and swipe left on our ads that it is getting harder to build brand loyalty. Online, talk is cheap and prices are readily Googled. Surveys suggest that young Americans are among the most price-sensitive food shoppers. It doesn’t help that they have accumulated less wealth than earlier generations had by the same age.

There is a similar temptation to think that physical shops no longer matter…

It goes on like this. Uncomfortable reading for many senior marketing executives, I’d say.

Mastodon: restoring the lost art of online conversation?Yesterday’s Observer column:

What I loved about Twitter at the beginning was that it enabled you to plug into the thought streams of people you liked or admired. Like all good things, though, that came to an end when the platform embarked on the algorithmic curation of users’ feeds to increase “engagement” (and, it hoped, profits). And from then on, it became increasingly tiresome, though I kept my account. But when it became clear that Elon Musk was going to buy the platform – and wreak havoc – I decided to explore possible alternatives.

Like many other people, my gaze alighted on Mastodon as a possible refuge from the Musk-induced madness. After all, it offered its users the same kind of microblogging facilities. But there the similarities ended. Twitter is a single site. Mastodon, in contrast, is a protocol – “a system of rules for spinning up your own social network that can also interact with any other following the same code”. So whereas Twitter is a universe, Mastodon is what has come to be called a “fediverse” – that is, a decentralised network made up of a large number of semi-independent nodes, or as one observer put it: “A distributed network of Twitter-like services.”

That sounds intimidating, but in reality, it’s relatively straightforward…

Do read the whole piece.

My commonplace bookletThe first Selfie

… Well, in photographic form anyway, since artists have been doing self-portraits for aeons. It comes from 42 Photos That Are Authentic Milestones In The History Of Photography, a cheery and interesting list.

According to the accompanying blurb for this picture,

The very first portrait photograph was actually a selfie! In 1839, Robert Cornelius, a photographer from Philadelphia, had the patience and determination to sit still for 15 minutes, the time needed for a daguerreotype. This resulted in the first clear photograph of a person, the first portrait, and the first ever selfie, all at once.

Thanks to Quentin (himself an accomplished photographer) for the link.

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Angling…… for something.

On Cley beach in Norfolk. For them, patience is clearly a virtue.

Quote of the Day

”Obscenity is what happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.”

Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsDon McLean | American Pie (Live in Austin)

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Long Read of the DaySecretary jobs in the age of AI

Terrific Long Read by Hollis Robbins, who is the Dean of Humanities at the University of Utah, and has studied organisation theory and bureaucracy. In this post, she predicts that secretaries could be in demand in the AI-driven future — not as old-style administrative assistants, but as confidantes and advisors. She starts by pointing out that the term ‘secretary’ literally means ‘person entrusted with secrets,’ from the medieval Latin secretarius, the trusted officer who writes the letters and keeps the records. The secretarial role as originally conceived was therefore far more central than the 20th-century role implied. In some ways, maybe one could think of Thomas Cromwell as Henry VIII’s secretary.

I have been thinking about the “keeper of secrets” aspect of the old-school secretary now that ChatGPT is being touted as the final answer to a cheap, reliable assistant available to all, from job seeker to CEO. Indeed, ChatGPT is a kind of assistant, the way Google is, but let’s separate the assisting tasks from the assistant position, which is, still, woefully low paid. The general idea is: why hire a person when you’ve got an answer machine in your pocket? Not only is ChatGPT cheaper (even when it stops being free) but the very concept of ‘assistant’ is vexed, particularly among assertive Gen-Z and Millennial women who are expecting to start at the top.

And yet I predict that ChatGPT is going to drive a comeback of the “keeper of secrets” role, paid well to screens calls and emails, who will make whoever can afford a good secretary much more efficient. If you’re in a role of any importance, you’re going to be flooded with AI-written communication, much of which will be incorrect. You’re going to need to hire someone with a head of their shoulders to sort through it. Why not a secretary, if a culture shift could bring back both the job and title?

Interesting throughout.

Speaking truth to powerThe UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, excoriated his audience at the Davos gabfest on Wednesday.

“Today, fossil fuel producers and their enablers are still racing to expand production, knowing full well that their business model is inconsistent with human survival,” said Guterres. “This insanity belongs in science fiction, yet we know the ecosystem meltdown is cold, hard scientific fact.”

Guterres highlighted evidence published last week that detailed the precise climate change predictions made by scientists working for ExxonMobil as far back as the 1970s.

”Just like the tobacco industry, they rode roughshod over their own science,” he said, and now the world is on track for a ‘devastating’ 2.8 degree increase in temperature.”

The world’s largest financial institutions and asset managers — many of whom are also on the guest list — are collectively still pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into companies producing and burning fossil fuels, according to a report published by NGOs on Tuesday, despite pledging to align their investments with a world of net zero emissions by the middle of this century.

Those findings echo the criticisms made last year by a task force launched by Guterres to hold corporate actors to account for their pledges.

”More and more businesses are making net zero commitments,” he said. “But benchmarks and criteria are often dubious or murky. This misleads consumers, investors and regulators with false narratives. It feeds a culture of climate misinformation and confusion. And it leaves the door wide open to greenwashing.”

Yep. Wide open.

Lisa’s 40th birthdayPhoto by Ted Thai

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the unveiling of the Apple Lisa, the precursor of the Macintosh. Ars Technica has a nice piece about it.

I was fascinated by the Lisa from the word go, and managed to persuade Apple UK to lend me one so that I could show it to my academic colleagues. When I set it up in a seminar room in my department the place was packed with curious — and, I have to say — some sceptical observers. The really interesting thing (for me) was that it was the administrators who were most wowed by it. And it meant that from the moment the Macintosh arrived they were the ones who were keenest to have one. For at least one of those present it was a life-changing moment — a revelation of what computing was really for. And of what it could do for non-techies.

Books, etc.I’m still reading my way through Alan Rickman’s Diaries. I can see why actors everywhere have been wowed by it, because it captures the kind of lives they have to live if they are successful. Endless travel; insecurity (they’re sensitive about bad reviews (like everyone else); they lunch, dine and (it seems) drink too much; are constantly battling exhaustion, not to mention fanatical or obtuse film directors. And, it seems, have very little time to do much thinking.

My commonplace booklet Two replies to my question of what did people see in it.

Keith Devlin (Whom God Preserve): “A startled dog”.
Chris McLarty: “The face that looks surprised to see you?”

Thanks to both. I’m with Chris, I think.

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Icy Rorschach testWhat is normally a muddy puddle on one of our regular country walks, took on a more enigmatic appearance yesterday. Can you see a face in it?

Quote of the Day

”The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences that never happened.”

Saki (H.H. Munro)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsChristine McVie | Got A Hold On Me

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Long Read of the DayIt’s Time to Get Serious

A bracing post by Katherine Boyle on how “prevailing wisdom insists that your twenties are for extreme exploration—collecting memories, friends, partners, identities.”

TL;DR summary: it’s bullshit.

She has the good sense to start with Sam Bankman-Fried.

The biggest technology story of this past year involves a fraud perpetrated by a boy. Or so the press would have us believe.

Just months before Sam Bankman-Fried’s unraveling, Fortune Magazine referred to the billionaire as a “trading wunderkind” a latter-day Warren Buffett only with a “goofy facade” and a penchant for fidget spinners. Even after his downfall and subsequent arrest in the Bahamas, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and Axios all referred to Bankman-Fried, or SBF, as a disgraced “crypto wunderkind.”

Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times illustrated his boyishness best when interviewing him at the Times’ DealBook Summit last November. “When you read the stories,” Sorkin said, “it sounds like a bunch of kids who were all on Adderall having a sleepover party.”

SBF’s fate will now be decided by the Southern District of New York, but his media charade of aw-shucks interviews and congressional testimony laced with brogrammer idioms built a public persona that we’ve largely come to accept: SBF is just a kid. Indeed, he’s so young that his law school professor parents were involved in his business and political dealings. (In this, they embody the helicopter style of child-rearing favored by nearly the entire Boomer elite.)

The reality, of course, is that SBF is a grown-ass, 30-year-old man. He is twelve years older than many of the men and women we sent to Iraq and Afghanistan…

Great stuff.

Books, etc.A couple of weeks ago I wrote about an experiment my wife and I are doing — reading novels before watching films based on them. My friend Gerard, who is also interested in the adaptation process, wrote to suggest we listen to one of the novelist’s Hilary Mantel’s BBC Reith lectures. So we did and found it interesting and insightful.

Worth your time.

My commonplace bookletFrom WashPo:

For 25 years, the National Archives has been working to rid itself of government red tape — through its gift shop.

We’re talking about actual, physical tape: the red-dyed lengths of fabric that were used from the 1780s to the 1980s to bundle many of the nation’s documents, and that, according to the Archives, gave rise to “red tape” as shorthand for bureaucratic entanglements.

The “tape” the agency is selling off isn’t adhesive tape; it’s a soft, flat and narrow woven cotton that’s snipped from a spool. Red tape eventually was abandoned for white or undyed tape because of its tendency to bleed, but in its heyday, the government used vast amounts of the red stuff. For instance, in 1864, the War Department headquarters purchased 154 miles of red tape, according to the Archives. And even in 1943, the Treasury Department bought nearly 123 miles, a Washington Post article from the time noted. Quite a bit of that mileage landed at the National Archives among its billions of paper records…

Someone should tell the UK’s Brexiteers about this.

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Pigeons of Venice unite!You have nothing to lose save your birdbrains.

Quote of the Day

”All science is either physics or stamp collecting”.

Ernest Rutherford

Typical Rutherfordian hyperbole. And a bit hard on stamp collecting.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSonny Terry & Brownie McGhee | Baby Please Don’t Go

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Long Read of the DayGlobalization is Dead and No One is Listening

Really interesting commentary by Kevin Xu.

Includes his transcript of Morris Chang’s speech at TSMC’s Arizona “tool-in” ceremony.

The “tool-in” ceremony of TSMC’s new fab in Arizona drew a lot of attention last week. CEOs from Apple, Nvidia, and AMD attended and spoke. President Biden, along with a coterie of cabinet officials, congresspeople, and local Arizona politicians, came to rally, celebrate, and claim (as we will see, a premature) victory.

Amidst all the pomp and circumstance was a short, but powerful and sobering speech by Morris Chang, the now-91-years-old founder of TSMC. He shared his dream of building a fab in the US, the hard-earned lessons from TSMC’s first time building a fab in America 25 years ago, his perspective that globalization and free trade is almost dead, and why this event is just the “end of the beginning”.

It was the only speech that gave a real sense of what America’s semiconductor future would really look like. Yet no one listened. No American, or any Western media outlet for that matter, bothered to cover this speech. Only Nikkei and a handful of Taiwanese outlets wrote about it. Not even C-Span carried footage of the speech. (And C-Span carries everything!)

Really interesting, including about the amazing training requirements for people who want to work in this kind of chip-fabrication.

Morris Chang is a pretty formidable guy.

‘Succession’ has nothing on DavosElite conclave mulls next leader.

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DAVOS, Switzerland — It’s the political race everyone is afraid to talk about.

For 52 years the World Economic Forum has been synonymous with its founder and executive chair Klaus Schwab, whose humble manner belies what many who know him describe as great ambition and boundless energy, even into his mid-80s.

Schwab has grown WEF’s $6,000 startup capital in 1971 into a $390 million a year business, turning a once sleepy organization into the think tank world’s FIFA.

Today, WEF’s annual meeting attracts more billionaires and CEOs than any other event on earth, and more political leaders than any gathering outside the United Nations General Assembly.

So what (and who) comes after Klaus Schwab?

Yawn. Frankly, who gives a damn? The Davos gabfest never really recovered from Donald Trump’s election. And it’s interesting to see how media obsession with it has waned in recent years.

Irrelevant factoid #3,567: I went to Davos once, in the Summer, before it was famous. Thought it a very dull place. But I bought a penknife there which I still use, so at least one useful thing came from it .

Striking wind, not oilThe Economist’s Schumpeter columnist (behind a paywall, alas) has an interesting column this week about Texan (Republican) ranchers who are hostile to the green movement but avid supporters of wind and solar energy. Why? There’s money in them thar airflows. His conclusion:

The upshot is that there are ways to promote clean energy that do not rely on convincing climate sceptics that they are bonkers. A better sales pitch may be to play up the cost advantages of renewables rather than the climate benefits, emphasise their contribution to cutting air pollution rather than carbon emissions, and acknowledge that, owing to intermittency factors, natural gas may have a role to play in power generation for years to come. As Michael Webber, a professor of energy at the University of Texas, puts it, “It’s not unusual for Texas to do the right thing for all the wrong reasons.”

My commonplace bookletPassword security

Further to Bruce Schneier’s advice on choosing passwords the other day, if you want to find out if your phone number or email address has appeared in a data breach, haveibeenpwned is a good place to check.

And if you’ve been using LastPass to manage your passwords, it might be worth thinking again.

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Gone Fishin’?

Quote of the Day

”No rules, however wise, are a substitute for affection and tact.”

Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMozart | Soave sia il vento | Cosi fan Tutte

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Long Read of the DayRemembering Pope Benedict’s Challenge

As long-time readers will probably realise, I am not a fan of organised religion. But I am also increasingly appalled by the moral bankruptcy of the neoliberal economic machine that is currently running — and ruining — our lives, not to mention the planet. How is it possible that we tolerate what is being done to our societies — the unfairness, the social exclusion, the poverty, the unconscionable levels of inequality, the hypocrisy and dishonesty of those in power — even in so-called democracies like the UK? And to think that this is happening in societies that are wealthy enough easily to eliminate many of these social ills if we really wanted to. What are the values that are implicit in our tacit acceptance of this? And where did we get them from?

All of which is a long-winded way of explaining why I was struck by this Editorial in Noema magazine by its Editor, Nathan Gardels. It’s about a long-running disagreement between the former Pope Benedict (aka Ratzinger) and political philosophers like Jürgen Habermnas, who I guess is the nearest thing we liberals have to a pontiff. The core of the disagreement is the question of where do we get our values from? Ratzinger’s argument is that, in the end, the deliberative, consensual process that Habermas envisages as the source of them is (a) inadequate and (b) in so far as it has a reality it actually derives from our shared histories as former Christian cultures.

It’s a very interesting read IMO. And a reminder of what a good magazine Noema is.

Books, etc.From Laleh Khalili’s LRB review of When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe.

”Bogdanich and Forsythe’s book is a damning account of the way McKinsey has made workplaces unsafe, ditched consumer protections, disembowelled regulatory agencies, ravaged health and social care organisations, plundered public institutions, hugely reduced workforces and increased worker exploitation. It begins with an account of McKinsey-driven cost-cutting at US Steel, which led to the deaths of two steelworkers. Similar measures at Disney resulted in a young man being crushed to death on the Big Thunder Mountain rollercoaster. Decades after the consequences of smoking became clear, McKinsey continued to work for the big tobacco producers. As the extent of the US opioid epidemic became apparent, McKinsey advised Purdue Pharma to find ‘growth pockets’ where OxyContin could be more easily prescribed, and lobbied regulators for laxer rules on prescriptions. McKinsey’s unethical activities pack the pages of this book, while its supercilious vocabulary of ‘values’ and ‘service’ runs like an oil slick over slurry.

The primary product sold by all management consultants – both software developers and strategic organisers – is the theology of capital. This holds that workers are expendable. They can be replaced by machines, or by harder-working employees grateful they weren’t let go in the last round of redundancies. Managers are necessary to the functioning of corporations – or universities, or non-profit organisations – and the more of them the better. Long working hours and bootstrap entrepreneurialism are what give meaning to life. Meritocracies are a real thing. Free trade, laissez-faire capitalism and reduced regulation are necessary stepping stones towards the free market utopia. There is also a faith that this work is helping ‘create positive, enduring change in the world’, as McKinsey’s mission statement puts it.”

Spot on.

Thanks to Andrew Curry (Whom God Preserve) for alerting me to it.

My commonplace bookletJoseph Weizenbaum’s Original ELIZA code

If, like me, you’ve always been fascinated by Joe Weizenbaum’s famous computer-based Rogerian therapist, ELIZA, then you’ll enjoy this.

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On the BeachMy grandson Jasper on one of my favourite beaches.

Quote of the Day

“The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.

Blaise Pascal

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBrownie McGhee | Good Morning Blues

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Just the thing for a Monday morning!

Long Read of the DayChoosing Secure Passwords

Really helpful advice from Bruce Schneier, who knows this stuff inside out.

The best way to explain how to choose a good password is to explain how they’re broken. The general attack model is what’s known as an offline password-guessing attack. In this scenario, the attacker gets a file of encrypted passwords from somewhere people want to authenticate to. His goal is to turn that encrypted file into unencrypted passwords he can use to authenticate himself. He does this by guessing passwords, and then seeing if they’re correct. He can try guesses as fast as his computer will process them—and he can parallelize the attack—and gets immediate confirmation if he guesses correctly. Yes, there are ways to foil this attack, and that’s why we can still have four-digit PINs on ATM cards, but it’s the correct model for breaking passwords.

There are commercial programs that do password cracking, sold primarily to police departments. There are also hacker tools that do the same thing. And they’re really good.

The efficiency of password cracking depends on two largely independent things: power and efficiency.

Power is simply computing power. As computers have become faster, they’re able to test more passwords per second; one program advertises eight million per second. These crackers might run for days, on many machines simultaneously. For a high-profile police case, they might run for months.

Efficiency is the ability to guess passwords cleverly…

Read on to get to his advice. Better still, take it.

Computers need to make a quantum leap before they can crack encrypted messagesYesterday’s Observer column:

Since the early 1980s, physicists and computer scientists such as Richard Feynman, Paul Benioff, Yuri Manin (who died last weekend at the age of 85) and Britain’s David Deutsch have been thinking about a different idea – using some ideas from subatomic physics to design a new and very distinct kind of computing engine – a quantum computer. In 1985, Deutsch published a proposal for one. And in recent times, companies such as Google and IBM have begun building them.

Why is that relevant? Basically because quantum computers are potentially much more powerful than conventional ones, which are based on digital bits – entities that have only two possible states, on and off (or 1 and zero). Quantum machines are built around qubits, or quantum bits, which can simultaneously be in two different states.

At this point, you may be anxiously checking for the nearest exit. Before doing so, remember that to understand subatomic physics you need first of all to divest yourself of everything you think you know about the physical world we ordinary mortals inhabit. We may sometimes be rude about people who believe in fairies, but particle physicists fervently believe in the neutrino, a subatomic particle that can pass right through the Earth without stopping and we take these scientists seriously…

Do read the whole piece.

My commonplace bookletUkraine Army Video Tells Russians How to Surrender to a Drone

I knew that drones were changing warfare, but I never thought of this. One of the many things Putin didn’t understand is the ingenuity of the Ukrainians.

And btw, if you’d like some insight into why the Russians have run into such trouble, this podcast is pretty informative.

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The Boss

Quote of the Day

”We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them.”

Dora Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsEric Clapton | Walkin’ Blues (Acoustic Live)

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Long Read of the DayA Civil War Over Semicolons

Very nice piece by Gail Beckerman in The Atlantic about how LBJ’s (and Robert Moses’s) biographer, Robert Caro, and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, have been arguing with each other for 50 years.

The partnership of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb is beautifully anachronistic. As writer and editor, respectively, they have together produced 4,888 pages over the course of 50 years, including the multivolume, still unfinished saga that is Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. A lasting collaboration of this sort is impossible to imagine in today’s publishing world of constant churn. Then there’s their method: Caro puts on a dark suit every day, writes his drafts out in longhand, and copies them onto carbon paper using his Smith Corona typewriter, after which Gottlieb marks them up with a pencil—like a couple of cobblers still making shoes with an awl. Whatever deal Caro got from Gottlieb and Knopf in the 1970s, it has allowed him to work monastically on this biography project seemingly without any other source of income. As Caro’s longtime agent, Lynn Nesbit, says of the arrangement in Turn Every Page, a new documentary about Caro and Gottlieb, “I doubt that it could ever happen again.”

Very few authors get that kind of editorial attention nowadays, so it’s interesting to discover what it’s like when it happens.

Particularly nice if you’ve read any of Caro’s LBJ volumes, or indeed his great biography of Robert Moses.

Books, etc.The art of book reviewing

A well-done review is a fine thing. This one by Carolyne Larrington of Marion Turner’s The Wife of Bath: A Biography is a gem.

How does an Oxford academic follow up a prize-winning trade book, a newly researched biography of Geoffrey Chaucer? And, moreover, in lockdown, when archives and libraries are largely inaccessible? Marion Turner, the newly elected J R R Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at Oxford, has avoided ‘second-book syndrome’ with a breathtakingly simple idea: a biography of Chaucer’s most famous character, Dame Alison (or Alice), weaver, pilgrim, businesswoman and serial participant in the marriage market, better known as the Wife of Bath. Informative, clear-sighted, entertaining and as opinionated as its subject, Turner’s new book is a wonderful introduction to the lives of 14th-century women, The Canterbury Tales and the fascinating ways in which Alison has been read and misread since she first hoisted up her voluminous skirts to show her fine red stockings during the last decade of the 14th century…

Almost enough to make one want to buy the book.

California here we don’t comeIn the 1980s I thought that California might be a nice place to live. This blog post by Doc Searls (Whom God Preserve) suggests that I may have been right to resist the temptation.

Most of California has just two seasons: rain and fire. Rain is another name for Winter, and it peaks in January. In most years, January in California isn’t any more wet than, say, New York, Miami or Chicago. But every few years California gets monsoons. Big ones. This is one of those years…

Worth reading.

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Quote of the Day

””Life would be so wonderful if we only knew what to do with it”

Greta Garbo

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSchubert | Die Forelle, D550

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Long Read of the DayThe Mars Religion

Terrifically caustic essay by Maciej Cieglowski about the current obsessions about going to Mars…

When you hold on to a belief so strongly that neither facts nor reason can change it, what you are doing is no longer science, but religion. So I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.

At NASA, the faith takes the form of a cargo cult. The agency has persuaded itself that re-enacting the Moon landings with enough fidelity will reward them with a trip to Mars, bringing back the limitless budgets, uncomplicated patriotism, and rapt public attention of the early sixties. They send up their rockets with the same touching faith that keeps Amtrak hauling empty dining cars across the prairie, dreaming of the golden age of rail.

Outside of NASA, the Mars faith shades darker. It is part of a transhumanist worldview that holds mankind must either spread to the stars or die. Elon Musk, the Martian spiritual leader, has talked about the need to “preserve the light of consciousness” by making us a multiplanetary species. As he sees it, Mars is our only way off of a planet crawling with existential risk. And it’s not just enough to explore mars; we have make it a backup for all civilization. Failing to stock it with subsistence farming incels would be tantamount to humanity lying down in its open grave.

That is some heavy stuff to lay on a small, rocky world…

It is.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for spotting it. I enjoyed his acerbic take on it too:

The difficult and unglamorous problems of a Mars mission — how do you wash your socks? What is there to eat? — get no love from Elon Musk. Once you get beyond “rocket factory go brrrrr,” there is no plan, just a familiar fog of Musky woo. The Mars rockets will refuel from autonomous robot factories powered by sunlight. Their crews will be shielded from radiation by some form of electromagnetic handwaving. Life support, the hardest practical problem in space travel, “is actually quite easy”. And of course Musk dismisses the problem of microbial contamination (which I can’t emphasize enough is governed by international treaty) as both inevitable and no big deal.

My commonplace bookletStudy Finds That Buttons in Cars Are Safer and Quicker to Use Than Touchscreens

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As some Tesla owners (including this one) will confirm.

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Yeats’s FortressOne of my favourite places in Ireland. It’s a 16th century fortified Hiberno-Norman tower house built in Ballylee by the De Burgo family. It was originally known as Ballylee Castle but is now known as Thoor Ballylee (where Thoor is the Irish for ‘tower’) because the building was restored by William Butler Yeats in 1919 as a retreat for himself and his family. They lived there for ten years.

There’s a plaque on the wall that reads:

I, the poet William Yeats,

With old mill boards and sea-green slates,

And smithy work from the Gort forge,

Restored this tower for my wife George.

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

Quote of the Day

”Don’t cheer, boys. Those poor devils are dying.”

Admiral J.W. Philip, on passing a burning Spanish ship at the battle of Santiago on July 3, 1898.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsLiam O’Flynn | Cailín na Gruaige Donn

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Literally, the girl with brown hair.

Long Read of the DayExit by Hari Kunzru

This is worth reading. Kunzru is a terrific novelist, but this is him turning a laser beam onto something that has preoccupied many of us for at least a decade — the ideological underpinnings of the tech imaginary.

One measure of how perceptive the essay is that he’s spotted the significance of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s old man.

One of the most quietly influential books about libertarian political exit is The Sovereign Individual, which was written in 1997 by the antitax activist (and future Newsmax board member) James Dale Davidson with the editor William Rees-Mogg, the father of the Conservative minister and arch Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg. Together the authors imagine a “cognitive elite” who will operate outside political control:

”At the highest plateau of productivity, these Sovereign Individuals will compete and interact on terms that echo the relations among the gods in Greek myth. . . . The new Sovereign Individual will operate . . . in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically. Commanding vastly greater resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion, the Sovereign Individual will redesign governments and reconfigure economies in the new millennium.”

Fueled by the pandemic and the crypto boom, such exit schemes have multiplied.

Do read the piece. It’s worth your time.

’Fine dining’ is not so fine, apparentlyWhenever I hear the phrase “fine dining” I would have reached for my revolver if I possessed one. I’ve always seen it as a pretentious euphemism for what one of my more irascible friends calls “starvation at £100 a plate”.

Anyway…

This rant is prompted by the news, courtesy of the New York Times that the Copenhagen restaurant Noma, supposedly the world’s best eatery, is closing its doors. Its founder, René Redzepi, says that fine dining at the highest level, with its gruelling hours and intense workplace culture, has hit a breaking point: “It’s unsustainable.”

Given that two of its current specialities are grilled reindeer heart on a bed of fresh pine, and saffron ice cream in a beeswax bowl I get the unsustainability bit. So the global class of gastro tourists that “schedules first-class flights and entire vacations around the privilege of paying at least $500 per person for its multicourse tasting menu” will just have to find somewhere else to set fire to $100 bills.

Apparently Noma will become “a full-time food laboratory, developing new dishes and products for its e-commerce operation, Noma Projects, and the dining rooms will be open only for periodic pop-ups” and Mr Redzepi will morph into “something closer to chief creative officer”. Hopefully from then on he’ll be able to sleep nights.

Books, etc.From Craig Brown’s biography of the late Princess Margaret. The passage comes from a chapter about the alleged sexiness of the princess when she was a young woman.

”It was in the early 1950s that Pablo Picasso first began to have erotic dreams about Princess Margaret. Occasionally he would throw her elder sister in for good measure. From time to time Picasso shared these fantasies with his friend, the art historian and collector Roland Penrose, once even confiding in him that he could picture the colour of their pubic hair.”

It’s clear that I’ve led a sheltered life.

My commonplace bookletDisguising solar panels as ancient Roman tiles in Pompeii

Now this is an interesting idea.

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Travel in styleGlimpsed in Provence last Summer. Seems a long time ago just now.

Quote of the Day

”We’re all endowed with certain God-given talents. Mine happens to be punching people in the head.”

Sugar Ray Robinson, world middleweight champion boxer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsRy Cooder & David Lindley | Jesus on the Mainline | New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

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I know, I know: I’ve highlighted this at least a couple of times. The reason: every time it comes up on one of my playlists, I turn up the volume until the neighbours come armed with noise abatement orders. I’m not a religious man, but I wouldn’t mind having it played at my funeral.

Long Read of the DayNothing is Real: Craig Brown on the Slippery Art of Biography

I think this essay by Craig Brown is the best thing I’ve ever read on the biographer’s trade. It’s full of insights and sharp observations.

For example:

In the first paragraph of his biography of the Queen, Robert Lacey describes Her Majesty at Balmoral on the Thursday after the death of Princess Diana, reading the newspapers. “Digesting their angry sermons with the long-practised pensiveness which caused her eyes to narrow, her jaw would firm slightly as her thought processes started, shifting her chin forward a fraction—a signal to her staff to think one more hard thought before they opened their mouths.”

This passage raises any number of questions. Was the intrepid Mr Lacey in the Balmoral breakfast room that September morning, perhaps hiding under the table with a periscope to hand? If not, how could he know that the Queen’s reading “caused her eyes to narrow?” And how does anyone, let alone the Queen, set about practising pensiveness? And — since, presumably, Lacey was crouching in her brain, like one of the Numbskull cartoon characters in The Beezer, could he please explain what, if anything, was going on in The Queen’s brain before she firmed her jaw and “her thought processes started”?

Or this:

In 2003, at the age of 45, Mark Lewisohn began researching a history of the Beatles. Ten years later, he published the first volume. The extended version runs to 1698 pages, and only takes the Beatles up to the end of 1962, and the recording of Love Me Do. Lewisohn is now 62, and expects to be well into his seventies before his trilogy is complete. It is, by any measure, an extraordinary achievement, but the detail sometimes threatens to smother the whole. For instance, you may well want to know that George Harrison’s first car was a Ford Anglia. Fair enough. But do you really need to know that it was a second-hand two-door blue Ford Anglia 105E Deluxe, bought by George from Brian Epstein’s friend Terry Doran who worked at a car dealership in Warrington?

It’s all in aid of understanding the perennial problem facing the conscientious biographer: what to put in — and what to take out.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

And if you’re ever bored, Ma’am Darling — Brown’s hilarious biography of Princess Margaret — will see you right.

Books, etc.One of my sisters gave me this for Christmas. It’s a collection of 11 essays by one of Ireland’s most prolific writers. Initially I thought it would be just one of those collections that writers’ agents bully them into publishing while they are working on the next novel. And because I read most of the periodicals in which his longer pieces appear I expected no surprises.

I was wrong. There’s a marvellous long essay on the Irish judicial system in the 1980s which was published in 2007 in The Dublin Magazine and which I hadn’t seen. And even re-reading some essays that I had read before in periodicals made me see them in a different light. This is especially true of his astonishingly open account of being diagnosed with, and treated for, cancer. Turns out that you can’t just a book by its cover. My sister has good taste.

My commonplace bookletPotato-shaped stones are better for skimming, say experts

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Scientists have identified particular types of stone that can produce “almighty” leaps out of the water when skimmed across the surface.

While aficionados of the pursuit favour thin, flat stones for long-distance skimming, the researchers’ mathematical model reveals that heavier, potato-shaped stones can achieve more dramatic results, which blast the rock into the air.

“Try some wacky stones and see what happens,” said Dr Ryan Palmer, an applied mathematician at the University of Bristol. “Try and throw a stone that looks like a potato. You can get some fun things happening with heavier stones.”

Palmer and his colleague Frank Smith, a professor of applied mathematics at University College London, created the mathematical model to investigate how the shape and mass of an object affect how it skims on the surface of water.

Do not try this at home.

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Edward Hopper’s NighthawksThis is one of my favourite paintings — of a late-night diner in a deserted New York in 1942. Three people, presumably strangers, sit around the counter, physically close yet apparently psychologically isolated — which has often led critics to ‘read’ the painting as an allegory of the alienation of big city life. Not being a critic, I was struck by the fact that my father used to wear a hat very like the one worn by the man next to the woman, and because it reminds me of him I bought a reproduction of it many years ago. Corny, I know, but what the hell. I may not know much about ‘art’ but I know what I like.

Quote of the Day

”Publishers can get their minds halfway round anything.”

John Le Carré

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsFauré | Cantique De Jean Racine Choir of St. John’s College Cambridge

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Long Read of the DayWhat CHATGPT Reveals about the Collapse of Political/Corporate Support for Humanities/Higher Education

A really thoughtful essay by Eric Schliesser on Crooked Timber, (one of the best blogs on the Web, IMO). What he’s spotted is the risk to the Humanities — already under pressure and threat in a neoliberal world — posed by systems like ChatGPT. After all, if Humanities teachers are saying that (a) ChatGPT is basically a bullshit-generator, and (b) is producing stuff that if created by a human student might get him or her a B grade, then sooner or later ideologically-minded politicians and technocrats might start asking: well, then, what does that say about the Humanities?

“Of course”, Schilesser says at one point,

I am not the first to note that in many ways higher education is a certification machine, where the signal generated by the admissions office is of more value to future employers than the subsequent scholastic record. But it is not a good thing that one can pass our college classes while bullshitting thanks to (say) one’s expensive private, high school education that taught one how to write passable paragraphs.

This state of affairs helps explain partially, I think, the contempt by which so many in the political and corporate class (especially in Silicon Valley) hold the academy, and the Humanities in particular (recall also this post a few months ago). (I am not the first to suggest this; see here; here on the UK; here on Silicon Valley and US politics.) And, as I reflected on the academics’ response to ChatGPT, who can blame them? The corporate and political climbers are on to the fact that producing grammatically correct bullshit is apparently often sufficient to pass too many of our introductory courses. (I started thinking about this in a different context: when a smart student, who clearly adored my lectures, fessed up that they could pass my weekly quizzes without doing the reading.) And if introductory courses are their only exposure, I suspect they infer, falsely, from this that there is no genuine expertise or skilled judgment to be acquired in the higher reaches of our disciplines. To be sure, they are encouraged in this latter inference by the countless think pieces stretching back decades by purported insiders that strongly imply that the humanities have been taken over by bullshit artists. (If you are of my generation you are likely to treat the Sokal Affair (1996) or the letter protesting the intention to award a honorary degree to Derridaby Cambridge University (1992) as ground zero, but obviously one can go further back.)

We are all going to have to absorb this latest instalment of what the late great Robert Hughes called “the shock of the New”. And as I said in my Observer column (see below), we’re already overestimating the short-term impact of the technology while underestimating its longer-term implications.

Interesting times.

The ChatGPT bot is causing panic now – but it’ll soon be as mundane a tool as ExcelYesterday’s Observer column…

So the ChatGPT language processing model burst upon an astonished world and the air was rent by squeals of delight and cries of outrage or lamentation. The delighted ones were those transfixed by discovering that a machine could apparently carry out a written commission competently. The outrage was triggered by fears of redundancy on the part of people whose employment requires the ability to write workmanlike prose. And the lamentations came from earnest folks (many of them teachers at various levels) whose day jobs involve grading essays hitherto written by students.

So far, so predictable. If we know anything from history, it is that we generally overestimate the short-term impact of new communication technologies, while grossly underestimating their long-term implications. So it was with print, movies, broadcast radio and television and the internet. And I suspect we have just jumped on to the same cognitive merry-go-round.

Before pressing the panic button, though, it’s worth examining the nature of the beast…

Do read the entire piece

Books, etc.I’m reading Alan Rickman’s diaries at the moment and can see why they’ve had such rave reviews from a legion of famous (and not so famous) actors. It’s basically because he provides a graphic picture of what a terrible life actors have. Even famous ones like him. It’s a chronically unstable, erratic, stressful way to earn a living. We should be grateful that talented people like him want to do it.

My commonplace bookletMan Ages 15 Years in a Four Minute Timelapse With Photos Taken Every Day From 2007-2022

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Sobering stuff. You have to admire his stamina.

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Remembering Jim and HelenIn 1956 Jim and Helen Ede bought four tiny cottages in Kettle’s Yard in central Cambridge and transformed them into an idiosyncratic and charming house — and a place to display Jim’s collection of early 20th-century art. They kept ‘open house’ each afternoon, giving any visitors, particularly students, a personal tour of the collection and eventually gave the house and collection to the University of Cambridge after which they moved to Edinburgh in 1973. Their house became the seed-crystal for a lovely museum which is one of the joys of living in Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”There are two modes of transport in Los Angeles: car and ambulance. Visitors who wish to remain inconspicuous are advised to choose the latter.”

Fran Lebowitz

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBob Dylan | Like a Rolling Stone

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Long Read of the DayChatGPT is a bullshit generator. But it can still be amazingly useful

Entertaining piece on the current obsession du jour by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor. And apparently they wrote it all by themselves.

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit as speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. By this measure, OpenAI’s new chatbot ChatGPT is the greatest bullshitter ever. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained to produce plausible text, not true statements. ChatGPT is shockingly good at sounding convincing on any conceivable topic. But OpenAI is clear that there is no source of truth during training. That means that using ChatGPT in its current form would be a bad idea for applications like education or answering health questions. Even though the bot often gives excellent answers, sometimes it fails badly. And it’s always convincing, so it’s hard to tell the difference.

Yet, there are three kinds of tasks for which ChatGPT and other LLMs can be extremely useful, despite their inability to discern truth in general:

Tasks where it’s easy for the user to check if the bot’s answer is correct, such as debugging help.

Tasks where truth is irrelevant, such as writing fiction.

Tasks for which there does in fact exist a subset of the training data that acts as a source of truth, such as language translation…

Hope you enjoy it. I did. But then I have to write about this stuff, so maybe I have strange interests.

My commonplace bookletOne of the many delights of receiving an email from Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) are the disclaimers at their foot. For example:

For avoidance of doubt: This email does not constitute permission to add me to your mailing list.

READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

As is the case with every email you’ve ever received, this email has not been scanned for all known viruses.

He also sometimes warns that,

FOR PUBLIC SAFETY REASONS, THIS EMAIL HAS BEEN INTERCEPTED BY YOUR GOVERNMENT AND WILL BE RETAINED FOR FUTURE ANALYSIS

Dunce’s CornerMany thanks to the numerous readers who spotted unforced error #12,346: My claim yesterday that the Speaker of the House of Representatives was first in line for the Presidency in the event of the death of a sitting president — a heartbeat away, as I put it. Well, actually, as every schoolboy (and girl) knows, the Speaker is second in line, after the Vice-President. Two heartbeats, rather than one. Apologies.

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Welcoming 2023Keeping a postbox warm in Ely yesterday evening.

Quote of the Day

”The musical equivalent of blancmange.”

Bernard Levin on the music of Delius

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsMozart | Don Giovanni | La ci darem la mano

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Sometimes the creeps have the best tunes.

Long Read of the Day What Happened To Amazon’s Employees After AI Automated Their Work

Intriguing essay by Alex Kantrowitz which addresses the question of how automation affects people’s work.

After Amazon automated its vendor managers’ forecasting, purchasing, and negotiation tasks, I expected to find them sullen. The narrative typically dives into mass unemployment, the end of work, and end times. So I was a bit surprised when they instead seemed matter-of-fact about what happened, unworried about what this new wave of AI portends.

“When we heard ordering was going to be automated by algorithms, on the one hand, it’s like, ‘Okay, what’s happening to my job?’” said Elaine Kwon, a former Amazon vendor manager. “On the other hand you’re also not surprised, you’re like, ‘Okay, as a business this makes sense, and this is in line with what a tech company should be trying to do.’ ”

Another current employee told me that at Amazon, “you’re constantly trying to work yourself out of a job. You should not be doing the same thing day to day. Once you’ve done something consistently, you need to find mechanisms to invent and simplify.”

I think this should be taken with a large pinch of salt. It’s very specific to a particular company, and to people at executive-level in that company. And it comes from a book which seems to me to be unduly awestruck by the so-called ‘titans’ of the tech world. But the question of how automation affects people in white-collar employment is an under-studied area at present — which is why I found it interesting.

Watching Congress losing its mindThe Republicans have a slim majority in the House, which means that they should be able to elect the Speaker. But after two chaotic days and four ballots (some of which I’ve been watching on CSPAN) they haven’t been able to do it. Why? Because Kevin McCarthy, the front-runner can’t get enough votes from his fellow Republicans. This is because he is too nauseatingly slimy even for a party that has lost its mind.

You think I exaggerate? Well, set aside 20 minutes and have a listen to this episode of the NYT’s The Daily podcast.

None of this would matter to the rest of us except for one thing. The Speaker of the House is next in line for the Presidency. And if Biden were to run and win in 2024, and the Republicans still controlled the House, then this Trump-supporting slimeball would be s heartbeat away from the presidency if Biden or his successor passed away.

It’s making Don’t Look Up look prophetic.

Books, etc.My notes the other day about reading (or re-reading) novels before watching film adaptations of them struck a chord with some readers. A Dutch friend wrote to say that in recent months he and his wife have been engaged in a similar exercise — and (unlike us) writing short pieces about films which they think deserve multiple viewings.

One of the case studies they’ve looked at is the 2011 film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – adapted from John le Carré’s novel of the same title.

My friend thinks that the film,

is a brilliant adaptation. To translate the 400+ pages novel into a 2-hour film, while keeping the tone and atmosphere of the book. Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, who wrote the scenario, in a sense have first completely deconstructed the book, to later reconstruct it as film. In the process, they moved scenes to new places, deleted a few, condensed long dialogues into images and to fill up gaps invented some new scenes. For my own education and entertainment I performed a detailed analysis of the (strikingly different) openings of the book and the film. It was very helpful and let me notice details of the film you don’t conscientiously see on a first screening.

So now I have some homework to do. It’s decades since I read the novel. And I’ve never seen the film. I have, however, seen and admired the multi-part BBC series starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley (which, coincidentally, is currently running on THT iPlayer). But that doesn’t count for this project.

He also suggests listening to Hilary Mantel’s fifth Reith Lecture, which I’m about to do.

My commonplace bookletI love, use (and collect) fountain-pens. But when you have quite a few of them, you sometimes find that it’s hard to get the ink flowing in one that’s been lying around for a while.

The poet Seamus Heaney was also an avid fountain-pen user. He had a simple trick for dealing with the dried-up pen problem: dipping it in an ink-bottle as if it were an 18th-century quill!

My wife and I learned this from a video at a wonderful exhibition devoted to him in Dublin in 2020, and we’ve been using it ever since. Works a treat.

Of course, it partly invalidates the reason for having a fountain pen in the first place. But what the hell. Consistency, as Oscar Wilde once observed, is a puerile obsession.

ErratumThe link I gave to Leo Breiman’s article on the two cultures in statistical modelling didn’t work for many readers. I’m not sure why, but Seb Schmoller found a link to a version of it that does work:

https://projecteuclid.org/journals/statistical-science/volume-16/issue-3/Statistical-Modeling–The-Two-Cultures-with-comments-and-a/10.1214/ss/1009213726.full

Apologies, and thanks to Seb.

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On the 11th day of Christmas…Gwydir Street door

Tomorrow’s the last day of Christmas and the partridge has already flown the tree, avoiding the guns of the members of the Royal Family up the road in Sandringham.

Quote of the Day

”I know men aren’t attracted to me by my mind. They’re attracted by what I don’t mind.”

Gypsy Rose Lee

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsLink

Casals | Bach Cello Solo Nr.1, BWV 1007 | recorded in August 1954 in the chapel of a Catholic monastery located south of the small French border town Prades. The audio quality isn’t great, but it’s my favourite recording of it. Casals was 77 when he made it.

Long Read of the Day The third magic

A meditation by Noah Smith on history, science, and AI.

Humanity’s living standards are vastly greater than those of the other animals. Many people attribute this difference to our greater intelligence or our greater linguistic communication ability. But without minimizing the importance of those underlying advantages, I’d like to offer the idea that our material success is due, in large part, to two great innovations. Usually we think of innovations as specific technologies — agriculture, writing, the wheel, the steam engine, the computer. The most important of these are the things we call “general purpose technologies”. But I think that at a deeper level, there are more profound and fundamental meta-innovations that underlie even those things, and these are ways of learning about the world…

This is a thoughtful essay, which also provides some astute references to other sources — for example to Leo Breiman’s great essay on the two cultures in statistical modelling, and Eugene Wigner’s famous essay on “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”.

Worth your time.

My commonplace bookletAnd to boot…

A few years ago I bought a pair of expensive boots more or less on a whim. I haven’t worn boots since I was a small boy and thought that this might turn out to be one of those frivolous purchases that one regrets.

Turns out I was wrong. They took a bit of ‘breaking in’, as the saying goes, but thereafter — somewhat to my astonishment — they became a delight to wear, especially in colder weather. They now look a bit battered, but then so does their owner! And there’s a delightful feeling almost of mutual recognition as one puts them on in the morning.

Looking at them yesterday I was suddenly reminded that both of my grandfathers wore boots all their lives. My father’s father was a Connemara farmer and his boots were black hobnailed ones which, as far as I can remember, never wore out. My other grandfather was wealthy and his boots, also black, were made of softer leather, and were invariably highly polished before he stepped out of doors. Funny to think that their grandson finally got round to discovering their favoured footwear. Age probably has something to do with it…

Also, isn’t the phrase “and to boot…” a strange throwaway line.

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Icy leafSometimes, frost is beautiful.

Quote of the Day

”There is such a thing as ostentations humility, and it is all over Twitter. It won’t save your reputation that you yourself don’t tweet the twee stuff. You’ll be tainted by association on a platform where 812,000 people follow someone pretending to be the Downing Street cat. What is worse, you might join them over time.”

Janan Ganesh, “The real reason to get off Twitter”, Financial Times, 12/13 November, 2022.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsLiam O’Flynn | Newfoundland | performed at the Ateneul Roman, Bucharest in 2011

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I’ve always loved this. It’s the 10th movement in The Brendan Voyage, Shaun Davey’s first major orchestral suite, composed for uilleann pipes played by Liam O’Flynn. It depicts Tim Severin’s adventure in reconstructing Saint Brendan’s 6th century Atlantic crossing to America in a 36-foot, two-masted boat built of Irish ash and oak, hand-lashed together with nearly two miles (3 km) of leather thong, wrapped with 49 traditionally tanned ox hides, and sealed with wool grease. The voyage ended on June 26, 1977 when Severin and his crew reached Peckford Island, Newfoundland. Hence the title of the movement.

Long Read of the Day Nostalgia for decline in deconvergent Britain

This is the less-than-compelling headline on a compelling analysis by the historian Adam Tooze of the real extent of the UK’s decline. And although Brexit obviously figures in the story, it really only plays a walk-on part in the longer narrative.

We need to talk about the state of Britain, the situation is dire. But the evocation of earlier debates about decline, debates which stretch back to the 1950s and beyond, is not just beside the point. It distracts from alarming novelty of the current situation. If you don’t engage with the data, the incoherence and repetitive structure of those earlier debates about decline, can seem to justify a relativistic or downright apologetic stance. Ding-dong exchanges between Brexiteers and Remainers have not helped to clarify the situation. Whilst Brexiteers chase the vanishing dream of “global Britain”, the national economic collapse that, according to “Project Fear”, was supposed to follow Brexit, never arrived either. That is not to say that the economic impact of Brexit will not be severe. The latest predictions are nasty. See for instance the CER. But the Brexit effects have not yet been fully felt.

More importantly for our purposes, the shock of 2016 cannot by itself explain what really ought to alarm us, namely the astonishing stagnation in productivity and real incomes that now stretches back over more than a decade. This stagnation, and this is the essential point, does not fall into the pattern familiar since the 1950s, of stop-start, of repeated currency crises and of more or less disappointing cycles of growth. Though it takes place at a high level of average income, the current stagnation is unlike anything in the last quarter millenium. The prospect of future damage from Brexit, only renders the outlook more bleak. In light of the UK’s situation and its likely future prospects, to indulge in the familiar back and forth between declinism and anti-declinism is to indulge in escapist nostalgia.

This is not a story about the last 20 or 30 years, btw. It’s about 120 years of decline. Here’s one of the charts that tells the story of the rate of growth of productivity in the UK — I.e. of the economic factor which ultimately determines how well the economy is doing.

On the more recent past, just after I put that chart in, I came on a striking quote from an essay in The Economist:

“Britain seems trapped in a doom loop of superannuated governments which, after a term or two of charismatic leadership and reformist vim, wind up bereft of talent, sinking in their own mistakes and wracked by backbench rebellions; in office but barely in power. Eventually routed at the polls, it then takes the guilty parties several parliamentary terms to recover. In opposition, both Labour and the Tories have determinedly learned the wrong lessons from defeat before alighting on the right ones. In a system with two big parties, for either to lose its mind is dangerous. For both to do so at once—as happened when, amid recent Tory convulsions, Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left throwback—is a calamity.”

Something is afoot with copyright this Public Domain DaySunday’s Observer column…

Here’s a reason to be cheerful this morning: it’s Public Domain Day, ie the day on which a new batch of hitherto copyrighted works comes out of copyright and enters the US public domain – the zone that consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. For those readers who do not reside in the US, there is perhaps another reason for celebrating today, because copyright terms are longer in the US than they are in other parts of the world, including the EU and the UK. And therein lies a story about intellectual property laws and the power of political lobbying in a so-called liberal democracy…

Do read the whole piece.

Can Elon Musk’s Tesla Really Last?Following the vertiginous drop in its share price, Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate and NYT columnist, is sceptical. The column seems to be behind the paywall, but this is the gist:

I’m not talking about how great Teslas are or aren’t right now; I’m not a car enthusiast (I should have one of those bumper stickers that say, “My other car is also junk”), so I can’t judge. But the lesson from Apple and Microsoft is that to be extremely profitable in the long run a tech company needs to establish a market position that holds up even when the time comes, as it always does, that people aren’t all that excited about its products.

So what would make that happen for Tesla? You could imagine a world in which dedicated Tesla hookups were the only widely available charging stations, or in which Teslas were the only electric cars mechanics knew how to fix. But with major auto manufacturers moving into the electric vehicle business, the possibility of such a world has already vanished. In fact, I’d argue that the Inflation Reduction Act, with its strong incentives for electrification, will actually hurt Tesla. Why? Because it will quickly make electric cars so common that Teslas no longer seem special.

He’s right. Tesla’s just an automobile company that was first off the block in the EV business — and had the nous to realise that its USP would be that it also had its own charging infrastructure available only to those who owned its cars.

The recent drop in Tesla’s share price signals that the stock market has finally recognised that it’s just another car company. Which is progress of a sort.

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A winter seascapeI love this picture by John Darch (Whom God Preserve) taken the other day on the beach at Ballybunion in Kerry. It’s a beach I knew well as a child, because my father (a keen golfer) was a member of the golf club there and the rest of the family sometimes decamped to the beach while he and his three regular playing partners tackled the fairways, rough, bunkers and greens of what the great Tom Watson (who won five British Opens) once called “the best golf course in the world”.

Later on, members of the club commissioned this plaque in his honour.

Quote of the Day

”I think this is what’s wrong with our political system. It’s organized to get people elected, then the people we elect do the work of big companies. And their work is to squeeze every bit of value they can out of the natural and intellectual resources of the world, and keep it for themselves. If they can kill something that’s worth $100 to reap $1 of value from the corpse, they see that as good business. That’s the approach that has got our species into the climate change corner we’re in. If you burn everything all you’ll have left to breathe are smoking corpses. That’s where we are in everything humans do. That’s why we feel a void for ourselves, collectively. We blame the government, but we’re the ones who believe the lies. We know they’re lying but we believe them anyway.

Dave Winer, as part of a blog post explaining why he was so disappointed by Obama’s Presidency, despite having supported him in every way he could.

Seemed like an appropriate quotation to start the year.

Musical alternative to the radio news of the DayMozart | 12 Variations on Ah, vous dirai-je, maman KV 265 | Clara Haskil

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Such a show-off, that Mozart kid. The piece reminds me of the film Amadeus and Peter Shaffer’s portrayal of him as “the John McEnroe of music” (as some critic put it.)

Long Read of the Day Greta Thunberg ends year with one of the greatest tweets in history

Lovely piece by Rebecca Solnit on the connection between machismo, misogyny and hostility to climate action.

On 27 December, former kickboxer, professional misogynist and online entrepreneur Andrew Tate, 36, sent a boastfully hostile tweet to climate activist Greta Thunberg, 19, about his sports car collection. “Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” he wrote. He was probably hoping to enhance his status by mocking her climate commitment. Instead, she burned the macho guy to a crisp in nine words.

Cars are routinely tokens of virility and status for men, and the image accompanying his tweet of him pumping gas into one of his vehicles, coupled with his claims about their “enormous emissions”, had unsolicited dick pic energy. Thunberg seemed aware of that when she replied: “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.”

Her reply gained traction to quickly become one of the top 10 tweets of all time…

Read on. It’s a great story.

Books, etc.As an experiment, we’re reading E.M.Forster’s novels and then watching the movies that have been based on them. We started with Room with a View, and then moved on to Howards End. A Passage to India is obviously the next on the list, but Christmas intervened, so that one is for 2023.

It’s been an interesting journey. First of all, it’s nice to re-engage with the books and to observe Forster’s writerly strengths and foibles; but most importantly to appreciate their significance in the era when they were first published. On that last criterion, he comes out of it well, tackling issues (sexism, imperialism, misogyny, class, sexuality) that were mostly taboo in his time.

It’s also interesting to see how screenwriters and directors like the Merchant Ivory team take a story one has come to know well and tell it in a different medium. Sometimes the book does it better; sometimes vice versa. And occasionally the film has to fill in gaps that the novelist has glossed over. In Howard’s End, for example Leonard Bast’s heart disease is not mentioned in the novel until after his violent death, whereas Merchant Ivory go to some lengths to set it up in the film.

I have a soft spot for Forster because — in one of those serendipitous accidents that shape a life — I attended his 90th birthday party. I was there because one of the first things my late wife Carol and I did when we arrived in Cambridge in 1968 was to join the Cambridge Humanists, of which he was then the Patron. The society decided to celebrate his birthday in his rooms in King’s and all members were invited. And there he was, in a wheelchair, but very much present. What struck me was how small and modest he looked: there was nothing of the ‘great man of literature’ about him. Which was reassuring but also slightly disappointing to an impressionable lad like me.

The event was hosted by Francis Crick, who six years earlier had (with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins) won the Nobel prize for the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA.

As you can imagine, it was a heady experience for a scholarship boy (and an engineering student) who had just arrived from Ireland. Afterwards I read several of Forster’s novels followed by Aspects of E.M. Forster, a nice collection of essays by friends of his which had been given to me by John Fenton (also a member of the Cambridge Humanists). I’ve just re-read it with renewed pleasure, and re-learned things from it (such as how Forster had wound up as a Fellow of King’s) that I had forgotten.

But the book of Forster’s that I liked best was his collection of essays, Two Cheers for Democracy which somehow better evoked the quiet, undemonstrative, uncharismatic liberal I had seen on his birthday.

I’ve always liked his adage that “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” And Two Cheers is full of evocations of that quiet, undemonstrative, liberal temperament of his. Think of, “I do not believe in Belief… Lord, I disbelieve — help thou my unbelief.” Or, “Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think creation’s.” Or, “The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.”

My one quibble with Forster is that he was wrong about Joyce’s Ulysses, which — in Chapter 6 of Aspects of the Novel — he described as

a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the Interests of Hell.

But then even Virginia Woolf got Ulysses wrong, so Forster was in good company.

My commonplace bookletFor the Brexiteer in your life

God Save Private Eye!

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Quintessentially EnglishA parish church seen on a walk yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”A committee is an animal with four back legs.”

John Le Carré

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsHandel | Arrival of the Queen of Sheba | Academy of Ancient Music

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Can’t think of a better way to greet the arrival of a New Year!

Long Read of the DayThe Deep Structure of Democratic Crisis

Talk to any (continental) European who is interested in politics and soon or later you will find yourself talking about the radical difference between the ‘Anglosphere’ and the rest of Europe. And that’s because such a difference really exists. The UK and the US have more in common than most people seem to realise. Just to list three examples: both have dysfunctional electoral systems which produce un-representative legislatures; both are two-party states in which the two dominant political parties have been hollowed out by sectional interests; and both are now scarred by alarming levels of socio-economic inequality. And of course they also share a common language and ruling elites heavily invested in neoliberal ideologies.

All of which is a long way of explaining why this review essay by Ruth Berins Collier and Jake Grumbach about the underpinning structural features of post-industrial political economy that constitute a challenge to democracy is interesting. It’s primarily about the US, but it has resonances on this side of the Pond also. What’s most striking about it is the way it tries to get at the seismic shifts that underpin the chaos of the present moment in both societies.

First, to use a term of art from political science, the structure of mass politics shifted from a single dominant “cleavage”— a conflict between owners and workers organized by labor unions — to a pattern in which politics is organized around many different competing cleavages. Second, there was a shift in the balance of power between capital and the state, which reduced the capacity of the government to respond to social and economic upheaval. Both of these developments present a challenge to democracy, and technology has only accelerated each.

Worth a read, IMO.

Books, etc.Just reflecting on the best books I read in 2022…

The ones that particularly stand out are:

Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. I found it a compulsive read — and sometimes a salutary one because it forced me to contemplate the errors of my casual assumptions! For example, for many years after I’d read Rodgers’s ‘The Age of Fracture’ and Mirowski on Hayek, Von Mises and the stealthy rise of the ‘Neoliberal Thought Collective’ I’d come to regard Ronald Reagan not as a prime motive force but as a kind of genial cheerleader of economic forces that were already under way as he climbed to the Presidency. Indeed, when I was the Observer’s TV critic during his presidency, I made a point of always referring to him as “the Acting President of the United States” and revelled in the stories of how he watched a re-run of ‘The Sound of Music’ instead of reading James Baker’s Briefing Book the night before chairing the Williamsburg summit. In other words, I underestimated him — saw him as the useful idiot of people smarter than him. But the most valuable thing about the book is the way it clarified the process by which an ideology gets translated into actual power. That’s where Gerstle’s idea of a political ‘order’ is such a masterstroke, especially the criterion that, to qualify, it has to be a mindset that infects not just one particular political party but also its opponents! That’s very illuminating in relation to Tony Blair’s ’New Labour’! Also, as I read the book I kept thinking about Thomas Kuhn and his view of how scientific disciplines work. You know the model: in any discipline, normal life revolves around stable intellectual frameworks that he eventually called ‘paradigms’. But then there comes a moment where there’s a realisation that a dominant paradigm is running into trouble and a rival one appears. And then, suddenly, the discipline is plunged into crisis because the old and new paradigms are ‘incommensurable’ — there exists no neutral language by which the relative merits of each can be objectively assessed. (Think Newtonian dynamics and quantum mechanics.) The thought that occurred to me as the book drew to a close is that we are now entering the political equivalent of a paradigm shift. Which means a period of chaos!
Roy Foster’s On Seamus Heaney — a moving and sensitive exploration of Heaney’s poetic journey, written by a great scholar who both understands the cultural context in which the poet evolved and loves his work. As do I.
Helen Thompson’s Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century. A fine book by a great scholar that was long in the making, but worth waiting for. Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve) wrote a really perceptive review of it alongside the Gerstle book.
Jamie Susskind’s The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century. The most refreshing thing about this fine book is its ideological stance. The reason why most current attempts to rein in tech power are doomed to fail is because its critics implicitly accept its legitimacy rather than being outraged by its arrogant effrontery. That because they’ve been drinking the neoliberal Kool Aid for nearly half a century. Ideology, after all, is what determines how you think when you don’t know you’re thinking. It’s time for a change, and ‘The Digital Republic is a good place to start.

My commonplace bookletJust what your favourite Instagram Influencer needs

From the current issue of Private Eye (Which God Preserve).

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

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England’s green and pleasant land…Millfield under snow

… under snow.

Quote of the Day

”He who hesitates is sometimes saved.”

James Thurber

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsNorah Jones | Come Away With Me

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Long Read of the DayWho Broke American Democracy?

An insightful essay by Angus Deaton on Project Syndicate which widens the perennial focus from the usual suspects (polarisation, the GOP and social media) onto the way the country’s political and electoral systems have catered to the interests of elites and the well-off at the expense of those without a college degree. Obvious, really, but it takes a Nobel laureate to point it out.

The current mainstream narrative in the United States holds that democracy is under threat from MAGA zealots, election deniers, and Republicans who are threatening to ignore unfavorable results (as well as recruiting loyalists to oversee elections and police polling places).

That narrative is true, but only up to a point. There is another, longer-running story with a different set of malefactors. It’s a story in which, for more than 50 years, Americans without college degrees have seen their lives deteriorate over a range of material, health, and social outcomes.

Although two-thirds of the adult US population does not have a four-year college degree, the political system rarely responds to their needs and has frequently enacted policies that harm them in favor of corporate interests and better-educated Americans. What has been “stolen” from them is not an election, but the right to participate in political decision-making – a right that is supposedly guaranteed by democracy. Viewed in this light, their efforts to seize control of the voting system are not so much a repudiation of fair elections as an attempt to make elections deliver some of what they want…

Read on. It’s good.

Books, etc.Two interesting books coming in 2023.

Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. Democracy and capitalism have always been uneasy bedfellows, but to date they have managed to find ways of getting along. But there’s a real crunch coming and Martin Wolf is someone who has been thinking about this for a long time. It’s out in February.
Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington have an interesting book on the stocks — The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies. For decades I’ve been amazed by the global consulting racket and the way that firms like PwC, KPMG, Bain, the Boston Group, McKinsey et. al. get away with it. I enjoyed Duff McDonald’s revealing profile of that last outfit, btw, so not surprisingly, Mazzucato’s and Collington’s book is on my list.

My commonplace bookletEmma Thompson’s tribute to Alan Rickman.

Truly wonderful short video. Do watch it.

My New Year’s Resolution: read his diaries.

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Quote of the Day

”Here we have a saying: a good friend is someone who visits you when you are in prison. But a really good friend is someone who comes to hear your lectures.”

Malcolm Bradbury

Hmmm… One day, many years ago, I gave a keynote talk to a large audience (300 or so). It went well, I thought — good questions, lots of applause at the end, etc. Smugly, I gathered my papers and headed for the exit when I noticed one of my academic colleagues who had been sitting — unnoticed by me — at the back. “Very good lecture”, he said. “Just the right number of half-truths.”

Out of the mouths of babes and academics…

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJoachim Cooder | When The Train Comes Along

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New to me, but striking.

Long Read of the DayMartin Rees on the future, existential risks and a good many other things besides

Martin Rees (Whom God Preserve) published another book this year — If Science is to Save Us — and John Mecklin, Editor-in-Chief of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists interviewed him about it and a number of related topics. I found the transcript of the interview fascinating, and hope you do too.

Here’s how it begins…

Martin Rees: Can I just say, at the start, that my book is not very homogeneous; the first half is concerned with big global issues, and the second half is the more personal perspective of a scientist, and interaction with the scientific community, with the public, with the government and politicians, etc. So the book’s really in two halves, and those who don’t like it say it is a dog’s breakfast; those who like it more will say it’s a smorgasbord.

John Mecklin: I enjoyed both parts of it. But could you quickly for our readers summarize the part at the beginning that is less personal: What was the main point you were trying to make with If Science is to Save Us?

Rees: I was making the point that more and more of the issues which concern us or determine our future have a scientific dimension…

Reflections on Generative ‘AI’: #2(A thoughtstream on a current obsession.)

The last couple of years have seen an explosion of new ‘tools built on machine-learning technology which the tech industry brands as “AI” (i.e. artificial intelligence) in an attempt to give them a veneer of respectability. After all, “Machine-learning” isn’t exactly a sexy term. While these tools are certainly artificial, they are only ‘intelligent’ in an extremely limited, focussed sense.

The tools that have mainly captured public and media attention recently are so-called ‘generative’ ones because they are able to create artefacts (graphical objects and written compositions) that humans also create (or aspire to create).

This note is about the graphical tools like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. (If you’re puzzled about the names, then join the club, but I’m sure that are rationales for them somewhere.)

Public interest has been ignited by the images that these tools can create in response to a verbal prompt from a user. For example: “Draw a picture of J.K. Rowling as an astronaut.” The results are often amusing, unexpected and/or dramatic.

Recently, one of these images — labelled Théâtre D’opéra Spatial — won first prize in Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition.

It’s a very striking work and was created by a games-maker, James Allen, using Midjourney, one of the ‘generative’ tools. Mr Allen’s Blue Riband sparked a controversy among artists and others which left him unmoved. Their anger should be directed at the companies that make the tools, he said, not at people like him who merely use them. And he topped it off with an incendiary closing line: “Art is dead, dude”, he said to the New York Times, “It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.”

This rings a bell, does it not, for anyone interested in the history of media? It brings to mind the moment in 1839 when the French painter Paul Delaroche saw a daguerreotype (an early type of photograph) for the first time and promptly declared, “From today, painting is dead!”

With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, we know that Delaroche was wrong. He had fallen into the trap that the great cultural critic Neil Postman identified many decades ago — believing that new media technology is additive (or subtractive) when in fact its main impact is ecological. A new communications technology doesn’t wipe out its predecessors. The Internet didn’t kill broadcast TV, for example, but it certainly changed the media ecosystem in which broadcast media have to operate.

Or, as L.M. Sacasas puts it,

Powerful new tools can restructure the complex techno-social ecosystem we call art in sometimes striking and often unpredictable ways. Even if we don’t think a new tool “kills” art, we should be curious about how it might transform art, or at least some of the skills and practices we have called art.”

Of course, in one limited sense Delaroche was right: photography undoubtedly had a dramatic impact on some kinds of painting — ‘realism’ — and photography made that particular activity more or less pointless in a few years.

But, as another critic, Federico Alegria put it,

painting was not going to surrender, and that’s when many of the now known “isms” (abstractionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, dadaism, and TOO MANY others) became alive. And that’s one of the great beauties of this tragicomedy, photography took a lot from painting, but by doing that, painting was capable of truly reinventing itself from scratch.

Besides, Delaroche’s hyperbolic prediction rather overlooked the extent to which, for centuries, painters had been using photographic ideas to help them in their work. Years ago, David Hockney wrote a terrific book — Secret Knowledge – Rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters in which he demonstrated how Renaissance artists used mirrors and lenses to develop perspective and chiaroscuro. And, in another remarkable book, my former colleague, Phil Steadman, explored Jan Vermeer’s possible knowledge of 17th-century optical science, and outlined the history of the camera obscura which projected an accurate image for artists to trace. The clincher for me was Phil’s meticulous reconstruction of Vermeer’s studio, complete with a camera obscura, which provided intriguing evidence for his conjecture that Vermeer did indeed use the device.

The moral is one that is generally lost on the tech industry. Because its practitioners know no history, they invariably think that everything they come up with is de novo. Sometimes, perhaps, it is. But the lesson from history is that however disruptive something novel appears to be, humans will find a way of using it, often in ways that its inventors never envisaged. The street finds its own use for things.

Part of an ongoing series…

My commonplace bookletMy friend Quentin had an interesting post on his blog yesterday. He had come on this juxtaposition and wondered if it was a spoof, so he investigated — and it wasn’t.

The whole post is worth reading.

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2 x 8 Star Street

Quote of the Day

”Cricket is full of theorists who can ruin your game in no time.”

Ian Botham

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsDiana Krall | Narrow Daylight

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Selection prompted by the slowly-lengthening daylight hours.

Long Read of the DayTech Journalism Doesn’t Know What to Do With Mastodon

Perceptive rant by George Dillard.

I was prompted to write this post when I ran across the following post on Mastodon by Annalee Newitz:

Gotta love tech journalists who describe Mastodon as “that impossible-to-use website.” First of all, it’s an app. C’mon. Second of all, aren’t these the same people who write breathless explainers about the wonder of cryptocurrencies, which are not only impossible to understand but literally built from bullshit?

Like Newitz, I’m an increasingly enthusiastic adopter of Mastodon, and, like them, I’ve been kind of confused by the press coverage around the platform. The media seems to be regarding Mastodon as a bizarre curiosity, something that the general public couldn’t possibly grasp. Sure, the guys with a Linux server in their basement might geek out on it, but this thing isn’t for the masses…

The problem — as Dillard acutely observes — is that Mastodon doesn’t fit the standard tech narratives.

He’s right. Do read it.

Reflections on Generative ‘AI’: #1(A thoughtstream on a current obsession.)

2023 looks like being more like 1993 than any other year in recent history. In Spring of that year Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina released Mosaic, the first modern Web browser and suddenly the non-technical world understood what this strange ‘Internet’ thing was for.

We’ve now reached a similar inflection point with something called ‘AI’, which is really the tech industry’s name for an arcane technology called machine-learning. Until now, most people hadn’t a clue what it was about, or indeed what it was for (except perhaps automating jobs). But in 2022 a new variant of this ‘AI’ arrived. It’s called ‘Generative AI’ — machine-learning systems that can ‘generate’ plausible artefacts. Midjourney, for example, can create interesting and/or amusing graphics in response to text prompts like “Draw a picture of J.K Rowling as an astronaut”.

Up to now, most people have regarded them as interesting toys (though graphics artists fear them as threats to their jobs). But the first killer-app of Generative AI has just arrived in the form of ChatGPT, a system that can often (though not always) generate plausible text in response to a prompt. It’s become wildly popular almost overnight — going from zero to a million users in five days. Why? Because everyone can intuitively get that it can do something that they feel is useful but personally find difficult to do themselves. Which means that — finally — they understand what this ‘AI’ thing is for.

Well, maybe they do. But my guess is that they don’t understand what it might mean. Hence this series…

More tomorrow.

My commonplace bookletWhat we don’t say in Silicon Valley anymore

From the blog of Om Malik (Whom God Preserve)…

In my time writing about Silicon Valley, it has gone from being a place of naive curiosity to a place where posturing is everything. And the reason we have this state of affairs is that, with extreme success, the denizens of the valley have ostracized these four phrases from their vocabulary:

I’m sorry
I don’t know
I was wrong
I need help.

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Spot the snapper

Quote of the Day

” It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Fredric Jameson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsAnarchy in the UK | The Ukulele Orchestra

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I was much cheered by this. Thanks to Ian Low for pointing me towards it.

Long Read of the DayThe missing profile of a crypto Wunderkind

Some time ago Adam Fisher wrote a remarkable — and compulsively readable — profile of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX crypto exchange which went belly-up recently, who is now out on $250m bail in the US. The spectacularly enthusiastic profile was originally written for Sequoia Capital, a big Silicon Valley venture capital firm that invested in SBF’s activities. But once FTX imploded it suddenly disappeared from Sequoia’s site.

Fortunately it was archived (that’s the Internet for you) and here it is for your delectation.

It’s a long but (IMO) a striking — and also salutary — read. Someone said that it looked like something that F. Scott Fitzgerald might have written in his day. And I can see why.

From the closing paragraphs, though, you can see why it suddenly disappeared.

After my interview with SBF, I was convinced: I was talking to a future trillionaire. Whatever mojo he worked on the partners at Sequoia—who fell for him after one Zoom—had worked on me, too. For me, it was simply a gut feeling. I’ve been talking to founders and doing deep dives into technology companies for decades. It’s been my entire professional life as a writer. And because of that experience, there must be a pattern-matching algorithm churning away somewhere in my subconscious. I don’t know how I know, I just do. SBF is a winner.

But that wasn’t even the main thing. There was something else I felt: something in my heart, not just my gut. After sitting ten feet from him for most of the week, studying him in the human musk of the startup grind and chatting in between beanbag naps, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this guy is actually as selfless as he claims to be.

So I find myself convinced that, if SBF can keep his wits about him in the years ahead, he’s going to slay—that, just as Alameda was a stepping stone to FTX, FTX will be to the super-app. Banking will be disrupted and transformed by crypto, just as media was transformed and disrupted by the web. Something of the sort must happen eventually, as the current system, with its layers upon layers of intermediaries, is antiquated and prone to crashing—the global financial crisis of 2008 was just the latest in a long line of failures that occurred because banks didn’t actually know what was on their balance sheets. Crypto is money that can audit itself, no accountant or bookkeeper needed, and thus a financial system with the blockchain built in can, in theory, cut out most of the financial middlemen, to the advantage of all. Of course, that’s the pitch of every crypto company out there. The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. I’m a Nozick man myself, but I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better.

We shouldn’t be too hard on Mr Fisher. We’ve all written daft things in our time. But what of the allegedly sober Venture Capitalist which commissioned the piece, and invested in SBF?

My Commonplace BookletA novel sales pitch for a literary magazine

From the London Review of Books yesterday…

You will know the tune, so here are the lyrics:

Rudolph the well-read reindeer
Had a love for stunning prose.
Rudolph the well-read reindeer
Wanted to be in-the-know.

All of the other reindeer
Used to laugh and read the Sun.
They never let poor Rudolph Give a gift to anyone.

Then one dreary Christmas Eve
Santa came to say:
Rudolph with your mind so bright
What gifts should I give tonight?

Then all the other reindeer
Opened up the LRB,
And Rudolph the well-read reindeer
He went down in history!

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Having one’s cake (and hopefully eating it)

This is really just to say thank you for being a subscriber.

Musical Alternative to the morning’s radio newsSurely it has to be this.

Enjoy the holiday.

John

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The World Wide (Cob)web

Quote of the Day

”My Twitter feed has essentially become a television tuned to a channel only showing 24/7 programs about what should and shouldn’t be on TV.”

Austin Carr, writing in Bloomberg’s Tech Daily

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsYo-Yo Ma and Alison Krauss | The Wexford Carol

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A change from the usual Xmas fare.

Long Read of the DayO Holy Crap

Wonderful guest post by Walter Kirk on Bari Weiss’s blog.

About five years ago, for seven dollars, I bought an old citrus juicer at a thrift shop. It was one of those vintage small appliances which seem built to survive gas explosions and hammer attacks. When I turned on the motor with a metal toggle switch, a drive shaft spun a heavy ceramic knob that gouged out the hearts of lemon and orange halves, leaving not a scrap of pulp uncrushed. The thing worked beautifully, almost like new, so I looked up its serial number on the internet to see when the unit was manufactured, guessing it might be almost 40 years old.

Wrong. It dated to the 1940s. It was 70, the stubborn monster, still giving satisfaction with every use.

I can’t say the same about my coffee grinders. I use the plural because I’ve owned a lot of them, all bought in their original packaging and dead within a year. They’re good ones, supposedly, with burrs not blades, but they stop performing before long, ending their long journeys from overseas factories in unmarked graves in my local Montana landfill.

I have a whole ghost kitchen in this landfill, and soon I will need to reserve a bigger plot…

You get the drift.

Time to Close Down the Elon Musk CircusJack Shafer writing on the way Uber-trolls like Musk and Trump lead journalists everywhere by the nose. At the moment Musk is making monkeys of the world’s mainstream media.

In addition to being the world’s second richest person, Elon Musk is now the greatest press manipulator since Donald Trump inhabited the White House. Daily, often hourly, frequently minute-by-minute, Musk intercepts the news cycle and rides it like a clown on a barrel to the astonishment of all. Should he fall, he always gets back on and rides some more as the press corps records and transmits his every gyration.

…

Given Musk’s track record, reporters should put little stock in what he says. Instead, the press continues to chart and publish nearly every bold utterance he makes and every tweet he types into his account. This tendency, already severe, has exploded into full flower over the past month, ever since Musk rolled his barrel into Twitter headquarters in San Francisco and established residence there to remake the service. Why does the press keep falling for this circus act?

I’ve been asking that question for several years. To no avail. Sigh.

My commonplace bookletThe Military-Industrial complex is alive and well and living in the Pentagon

From The Register…

The US Air Force has awarded $334 million to defense contractor Leidos to develop the next phase in its hypersonic arsenal: An unmanned craft meant for super-speed spying dubbed “Mayhem.”

This latest contract award comes less than a week after the USAF announced the successful test of its first service-ready hypersonic weapon (defined as able to travel faster than Mach 5 while maintaining maneuverability), the Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon, or ARRW.

Unlike ARRW, Leidos’ Mayhem award isn’t just about building a weapon – it’s for “Expendable Hypersonic Multi-mission ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) and Strike program, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and strike craft.” A warhead will fit, but this is more like a photon torpedo/probe/space coffin from Star Trek: customizable to meet the needs of the mission.

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Dickensian XmasA doorway in Doughty Street, London, the street where Charles Dickens once lived, photographed one December when I was on my way to an Observer lunch. Further down the street I passed the house which was the office of the Spectator magazine, then edited by one Boris Johnson. I stopped, thinking that I would photograph that door also, when it opened and out stepped a posh floozie of the kind favoured by Johnson. The conversation went like this:

Floozie: “What do you think you’re doing?”

Me: “I’m thinking of taking a photograph.”

Floozie: “Why?”

Me: “Because I’ve always wondered what a den of iniquity looked like?”

As I raised the Leica to my eye she turned on her heel and went back into the building, slamming the door behind her.

After which I went to lunch in high good humour, though without the pic I was after.

Quote of the Day

”There is no human bliss equal to twelve hours of work with only six hours in which to do it.”

Anthony Trollope

(Who used to write a thousand words an hour before breakfast.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsPatti Smith performs Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” | Nobel Prize Award Ceremony 2016

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It’s not often you see a veteran performer overcome by the lyrics she’s singing. Wonderful.

Long Read of the DayBecoming a chatbot: my life as a real estate AI’s human backup

Fabulous essay by Laura Preston

For one weird year, I was the human who stepped in to make sure a property chatbot didn’t blow its cover – I was a person pretending to be a computer pretending to be a person.

Gripping, illuminating, nicely written and a good antidote to the kind of gig-work she was doing.

Books, etc.A classic laid bare

Lovely review by Alex Clark of Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem.

Sample:

One of the numerous illuminating anecdotes of their entwined lives sees TS Eliot deliver a parcel to James Joyce in Paris at their first ever meeting. Entrusted with the gift by Pound but forbidden from knowing its contents, Eliot, alongside his fellow traveller Wyndham Lewis, ceremoniously presented the package as the trio assembled at a Left Bank hotel and waited as Joyce struggled with its strings until, for want of a knife, a pair of nail scissors was found. Within, a clearly second-hand pair of brown shoes, prompted by Pound’s anxiety that Joyce, whom he liked and admired, was short of funds and in need of sturdy footwear. “‘Oh!’ said Joyce faintly, and sat down.” That night the Château Latour flowed, and subsequently a humiliated Joyce settled every bill…

My commonplace bookletDave Winer’s not going to allow Musk get between him and his car

Lovely rant by Dave (Whom God Preserve):

As a Tesla owner I find all the press about people dumping their Teslas because Musk is a brat pretty fucked up. Like going to a diner in Ohio to find out what Trumpsters are up to as if that were measuring anything credible.

I am an extreme liberal, esp when it comes to the web. My creds are excellent. And I love my Model Y. I feel like its a privilege to drive it every time I get in the car. And I’ve owned some terrific cars in my life. There are some cars that are just great to drive. So great that their flaws are not relevant. That Elon Musk is tied to the product is unfortunate. But until I drive a car that’s equal to the car I have, I’m not going to bend to the bullshit the press is putting out there.

I also still use Twitter. I’m not going to let Musk chase me off. He’ll have to suspend me if he wants me off. I would regret that. I’ve been on Twitter since 2006. Musk can do whatever he wants, Twitter is big enough for both of us.

I voted for Obama twice, Hillary and Biden. So fuck you if you think driving a Tesla is like being a MAGA.

Yep. As a fellow Tesla owner I agree with every word of this. One of the strangest things about getting the car was the way people started to hold me personally responsible for Musk.

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Through OS9, brightlyA 2007 post on Memex 1.1 rendered in the original Mac Operating System (pre-OSX).

Michael Dales is one of the most accomplished geeks I am fortunate to know. Years ago he was CTO of one of the tech companies Quentin and I were involved in. But he is also an accomplished photographer, an expert on motorbikes (ICE and Electric) and now he’s a luthier who makes wonderful bespoke guitars.

This image comes from a side-project of his — writing his blog posts on an old G3 Powermac. It shows what Memex 1.1 looked like on a Macintosh running OS9 back in the day.

Quote of the Day

”This going into Europe will not turn out to be the thrilling mutual exchange proposed. It is more like nine middle-aged couples with failing marriages meeting in a darkened bedroom in a Brussels for a group grope.”

E.P. Thompson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsJimmy Yancey | The Mellow Blues

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Long Read of the DayTrump’s post-presidential existence

I really shouldn’t be recommending this Washington Post piece, but I’m ashamed to say I found it riveting. Here’s a sample:

On a typical day since leaving office, advisers said, Trump gets up early, makes phone calls, watches television and reads some newspapers. Then, six days a week, he plays 18 or sometimes 27 holes of golf at one of his courses. After lunch, he changes into a suit from his golf shirt and slacks and shows up in the office above the Mar-a-Lago ballroom or, when he is in New Jersey, a similar office in a cottage near the Bedminster club’s pool.

By evening, Trump emerges for dinner, surrounded most nights by adoring club members who stand and applaud at his appearance; they stand and applaud again after he finishes his meal and retires for the night. He often orders special meals from the kitchen and spends time curating the music wafting over the crowd, frequently pushing for the volume to be raised or lowered based on his mood. In the Oval Office, Trump had a button he could push to summon an aide to bring him a Diet Coke or snacks. Now, he just yells out commands to whichever employee is in earshot…

18 or 27 holes a day!. I was a very keen golfer in my youth, but this sounds excessive even to me. And, since I guess he doesn’t do much walking on the course (just riding in a gold-cart), it means he’s not getting much real exercise.

There’s lots more in this piece, much of it serious.

Books, etc.A summary of the report from the US House of Representatives on the January 6 ‘insurrection’ was released on Monday. This NPR piece about the way various publishers are planning to publish the full report in book form is interesting. Whether publishers succeed in making it into a bestseller depends in part on whether the Congressional panel produces the usual stodgy government report which reads — in the words of one professor of English consulted by NPR — “like the instruction manual to a microwave oven”, i.e. “tedious, stilted, dry and stuffed with technical language”.

My hunch, from watching how the Panel went about its work, is that the document might be a page-turner the moment it appears on the Web. It was clear that some people working for the lawmakers understood the importance of building a compelling narrative. Which is what thriller-writers do.

My commonplace bookletOne way of thinking about the future

A sketch for a paper I’m working on.

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Shadows of ChristmasThe sun came out when I was opening the blinds yesterday morning, yielding this image.

Here’s the decoration that gave rise to it:

Quote of the Day

”If God had intended us to have group sex, I guess he’d have given us all more organs.”

Malcolm Bradbury

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsChuck Berry | Johnny B. Goode

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The FT had a fascinating piece about the song’s history in its weekend edition (behind a paywall), which said, in part, that

Johnny B. Goode is thought to be the first song in popular musical history in which the singer celebrates their own success. This surely accounts for why rock’s most legendary artists have regularly performed it: Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Cliff Richard, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Beach Boys, Sex Pistols, Grateful Dead, the Carpenters and dozens of others have sung Berry’s celebration of himself as a kind of mantra — they may not be able to read or write but, hey, they can play a guitar like ringing a bell!

John Lennon once introduced Berry by saying “If you had tried to give rock ‘n’ roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry'”.

Long Read of the DayElon’s stale playbook

Sorry to keep going on about Musk and Twitter, but this essay by Linette Lopez was too insightful to pass up. Her argument is that Musk was always a “visionary jerk” and a bad boss at Tesla and SpaceX, but got away with it in those cases because the companies were making tangible things. But it won’t work at Twitter.

Lopez opens her case thus:

Here’s the Musk playbook: Enter a field with very little competition. Claim that your new company will solve a massive, global problem or achieve a seemingly impossible goal. Raise money from a fervent group of true believers and keep them on the hook with flashy, half-baked product ideas. Suck up billions from the government. Underpay, undervalue, and overwork your employees. Repeat.

Twitter is the antithesis of an “Elon Musk company.” It’s an influential but small player in a field that is dominated by giant, well-funded competitors. The government is more likely to put the clamps on Twitter than give it some windfall contract. And Twitter’s employees have options: They can leave and work for companies that treat them much better than Musk ever would.

But perhaps most importantly, a lot of people think Twitter — and Musk’s ownership of the company — is part of a global media problem, rather than some grand solution. And without a big, world-changing promise to paper over his sophomoric product ideas and erratic management, Musk’s Twitter takeover is doomed…

Read on. It’s good.

Why were the media hypnotised by Sam Bankman-Fried?My Observer column on Sunday.

The big puzzle, though, was why couldn’t FTX have just given its investors their money back? The answer appears to be that it wasn’t there; in some way, SBF’s hedge fund had been treating FTX as its piggy bank, possibly even playing the hedge fund market with investors’ money.

Once it was clear that this particular game was up, SBF then embarked on an astonishing apology tour on every media outlet he could find. In almost every interview he was touchingly apologetic while at the same time maintaining that he had no knowledge of potentially fraudulent activities at his own company, including using billions of dollars of customers’ deposits as collateral for loans for other purposes. He had, he explained ruefully, been out of his depth. On some occasions, he also seemed to be trying to deflect blame on to Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of his other company, Alameda Research.

The biggest question prompted by this apology tour is: why did so many apparently serious media outfits let him get away with it? The interview questions were often softball ones, occasionally toe-curlingly so…

Do read the whole thing.

My commonplace bookletDecember 20 was my Dad’s birthday. He was born in 1914 and so would have been 108 today. A perfectly banal thought, I know, but it always hits me on the day. He came into the world four months into the the war that was going to be “over by Christmas”.

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Remembering BillMy old friend, colleague and mentor, Bill Kirkman, died recently at the age of 90 and had a splendid and well-attended funeral on Saturday, at which I gave one of the tributes.

Bill was the founding Director of the Wolfson Press Fellowship Programme in 1982. The Programme welcomes journalists in mid-career to Wolfson College, Cambridge for a term, during which they research a project of their own choosing under light academic supervision. It’s been running every year since 1982 (except for a two-year Covid-induced break) and to date has welcomed almost 350 journalists from 47 countries.

I took over the Directorship of the Press Fellowship in 1996, when Bill decided to “retire”. (He was what one might describe as a ‘serial retirer’ in the sense that once he gave up one occupation, he immediately took on two more.)

I found him a hard act to follow. He was one of the most efficient people I’ve ever known. He ran the Fellowship by coming into lunch in College most days, reading the correspondence and dictating replies in faultless English to the Programme’s Secretary, before cycling back to the University Careers Service (of which he was also the Director) to resume the task of keeping his staff there on their toes. Because he had been such a distinguished journalist before he switched to University work — he had been the Times’s correspondent for the whole of Africa during the de-colonialisation period — he had immense credibility with Press Fellows from all over the world, and especially with those from the Commonwealth. And he had written a very good book about the historic transition that he had witnessed.

And of course it helped that he seemed to know everybody! Bill was on first-name terms with every one of the African leaders who emerged from the shadows of imperial rule. He also knew most of the British Cabinet ministers who had managed what Harold Macmillan famously called “the winds of change”. And to top it all, he had been born in Bihar in Eastern India, rather than in the Home Counties in which members of the British Establishment are traditionally bred.

He was great company — unfailingly witty, convivial and generous. He was also a staunch and reliable friend of great integrity. He had what the BBC used to call “a rich gravy voice” — which made him a formidable raconteur with a great stock of stories and jokes — at which he laughed nearly as heartily as I do at my own. When his family occasionally complained to him about this, his retort was, “Well, someone has to!”

I feel deeply privileged to have known him — and to have been able to continue the work that he began in Wolfson. We have a saying in Irish that could have been written for Bill. “Ní bheidh a leithéad arís ann” is how it goes. It means: “We will not see his like again.”

We won’t. May he rest in peace.

Quote of the Day

”To have some idea of what it’s like, stand in the outside lane of a motorway and get your mate to drive his car at you at 95mph and wait till he’s 12 yards away, before you decide how to jump.”

Geoff Boycott, the great England opening batsman, on the experience of facing fast bowlers.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsSteeleye Span | All Around My Hat

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I’ve always liked this song, banal though it is.

Long Read of the Day Who gains and loses from the new AI?

Really perceptive guesstimate by Tyler Cowen.

The returns to factual knowledge are falling, continuing a trend that started with databases, search engines and Wikipedia. It is no longer so profitable to be a lawyer who knows a large amount of accumulated case law. Instead, the skills of synthesis and persuasion are more critical for success.

ChatGPT excels at producing ordinary, bureaucratic prose, written in an acceptable but non-descript style. In turn, we are likely to better understand how much of our society is organized around that basis, from corporate brochures to regulations to second-tier journalism. The rewards and status will go down for those who produce such writing today, and the rewards for exceptional originality are likely to rise. What exactly can you do to stand out from the froth of the chat bots?

Worth reading in full. Especially if you work in areas where the capability of apps like ChatGPT makes them into commonplace tools (think spreadsheets or Google Search) that everyone uses.

Elon Musk is a Jekyll and Hyde character.My Observer OpEd on Elon Musk’s campaign to save Twitter by destroying it first.

Watching what’s going on at Twitter is like watching a guy losing his mind in slow motion. The guy in question is Elon Musk, who once upon a time was the world’s richest man and now isn’t. (That slot is apparently occupied by Bernard Arnault, the luxury goods mogul.)

Musk is in a hole but apparently doesn’t know Denis Healey’s First Law of Holes: when you’re in one, stop digging. The funny thing is that he dug the hole himself. First, he paid way over the odds for Twitter. Then, when Tesla shares (the main source of his wealth) tanked, and Twitter’s share price dropped, he tried to get out of the deal. That failed, so he was forced to borrow a lot of money – incurring interest payments of around a billion dollars a year – thereby becoming the reluctant owner of a loss-making company. And he hasn’t the faintest idea of how to make it work.

So he’s thrashing around, doing one contradictory thing after another…

Do read the whole piece.

I Wish I Could Tell You This One Is Not All About TwitterThis follows on nicely from the previous section.

Jon Gruber nails it.

After suspending those journalists, BuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos hosted an hours-long Twitter Spaces discussion — Spaces is the group audio call-in feature that was modelled on last summer’s flash-in-the-pan hit Clubhouse — that featured, as speakers, several of the journalists who’d been banned from Twitter earlier last night. That’s right: Twitter’s backend infrastructure is such a mishmash that suspended accounts are still able to join and participate in Spaces.

Eventually, as Notopoulos’s Spaces panel continued to grow in listeners — there were several thousand when I briefly tuned in — Musk himself joined. It did not go well. Or rather, it did not go well for Musk. It went just great if you enjoy a good laugh. After being asked a pointed but utterly fair question by Notopoulos, Musk simply bailed. Moments later, the entire Spaces feature was yanked offline by Twitter. Not just the space that was currently being hosted by Notopoulos, but the entire feature, Twitter-wide.

Surely a coincidence.

But it gets better. Last night Twitter began classifying all links to all popular Mastodon servers as “malware”….

Worth reading.

My commonplace bookletJohn Gray on James Lovelock

Lovely piece in the Guardian by the political philosopher on his friend. Sample:

Jim attributed his great old age to long daily walks – he lived to 103 and right up to the end his mind was very vivid. I joined him sometimes wandering through his grounds, where he’d let Gaia have its will. He had a cat and once the cat sat on my shoulder through the entire walk. His ideas had a big impact on me particularly because of his non-anthropocentric worldview. He certainly helped to shape the understanding in my book Straw Dogs that humans aren’t the centre even of life on Earth, let alone of the universe. Jim loved to be surrounded by the beauty of nature, but at the same time he knew: Gaia doesn’t care about you. He had no doubt that Gaia was a very stern mother and that humans had made too much of a mess of the world. It would react as it is doing by global warming.

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Thanks to all who pointed out that I got the day wrong yesterday. I did get the date right, though.

Simple pleasures.. like a simple table decoration at breakfast.

Quote of the Day

”Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell.”

Frank Borman, US astronaut

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsStrawbs | Part Of The Union

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Wonderful!

Long Read of the DayThe crime-writing Belgian ‘sheriff’ fighting EU corruption

We (me included) pay far too much attention to the US and too little to Europe. So it’s nice to be able to highlight a fascinating Politico profile of Michel Clause, the Belgian prosecutor who has been investigating allegations of Qatari cash and influence peddling at the heart of the EU.

Belgian investigative magistrate Michel Claise, whose role is similar to that of a U.S. public prosecutor, was there on Saturday night, alongside the President of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola, when police raided the home of Belgian MEP Marc Tarabella. On Monday, as POLITICO reporters tried to find out which offices in the Parliament in Brussels were being raided in the escalating Qatari probe, security officers told them the “magistrate” was working inside.

In a series of raids that continued Tuesday, Claise and his team has secured €1.5 million in cash and arrested six people on preliminary charges of corruption, money laundering and criminal organization. One suspect is Eva Kaili, a Greek MEP who was one of the European Parliament’s vice presidents until she was stripped of that title Tuesday. The probe centers on a group who may have used their positions in parliament to promote Qatari interests. Kaili has said she is innocent and is due in court on Wednesday.

If others are involved, they would do well to worry. In the endless corridors of the Palais de Justice in Brussels, Claise is known as “The Sheriff” for his relentless pursuit of his targets…

Do read on.

And if you think that the influence the Qataris were buying in Brussels concerned the World Cup, forget it. It’s probably all about the “open skies” deal that the EU has apparently agreed with the midget statelet which would give its state airline access to the 450m-strong EU market in exchange for access to Qatar’s er, 2.8 million souls.

How good is ChatGPT at writing English essays?Carl Hendrick, who has taught English for 15 years, has been experimenting with this piece of ‘Generative AI’. He thinks we need to pay attention to its implications, and explains why in this Twitter thread.

He’s right.

My commonplace bookletAmong my many other failings, I’m a fountain-pen geek, so imagine my delight when I discovered a fellow-sufferer — the writer Pitchaya Sudbanthad — via a nice piece by him on the pleasures of restoring fountain pens as a way of getting away from “writerly abstraction“.

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A Rose in WinterSeen on a woodland walk.

Quote of the Day

”If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

Derek Bok (President of Harvard 1971-91)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsLuca Sestak | How Long Blues

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I love the Jimmy Yancey version of this, but can’t find a recording that has decent audio quality.

Long Read of the DayWill ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay?

Stand by for a year of obsessing about ‘Generative AI’

ChatGPT went from zero to a million users in five days. What it reminds me of is the moment in 1993 when Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina released Mosaic, the first modern Web browser. The Internet we use today (the network based on the TCP/IP family of protocols) had been up and running for ten years by that time, but it had essentially been a parallel universe inhabited mainly by geeks. Inhabitants of the other universe — what John Perry Barlow called ‘meatspace’ (aka the real world) — basically had no idea what this “Internet thingy” (as one newspaper editor put it to me) was for. But the moment they experienced Mosaic they suddenly knew what it was for. And the rest is history.

My feeling is that we have now reached an analogous inflection point with ‘AI’, which is the tech euphemism for machine-learning. The tech world has been obsessed by it for nearly a decade, but most ‘normal’ people have no idea of what it is or why it might be a big deal.

Earlier this year, ‘Generative AI’ like Midjourney gave them a glimmer of insight into why it could be interesting, but basically they saw those tools as toys. It’s fun to be able to issue an instruction like “Draw a picture of J.K. Rowling as an astronaut” and then see interesting and amusing images. That kind of ‘AI’ is basically a power tool for people who can’t draw.

(See Commonplace Booklet below for a link to an example.)

ChatGPT is different because it does something that people need to do — compose and write apparently coherent text — but find difficult. And here it is in a machine, just waiting for instructions from you. Having listened to the reactions of numerous non-techie people who have tried it, what I’m hearing is “Oh now I see — this is what this AI-stuff is for!”

Which is why this little essay by Stephen Marche is interesting.

Here’s how it begins:

Suppose you are a professor of pedagogy, and you assign an essay on learning styles. A student hands in an essay with the following opening paragraph:

“The construct of “learning styles” is problematic because it fails to account for the processes through which learning styles are shaped. Some students might develop a particular learning style because they have had particular experiences. Others might develop a particular learning style by trying to accommodate to a learning environment that was not well suited to their learning needs. Ultimately, we need to understand the interactions among learning styles and environmental and personal factors, and how these shape how we learn and the kinds of learning we experience.”

Pass or fail? A- or B+? And how would your grade change if you knew a human student hadn’t written it at all? Because Mike Sharples, a professor in the U.K., used GPT-3, a large language model from OpenAI that automatically generates text from a prompt, to write it. (The whole essay, which Sharples considered graduate-level, is available, complete with references, here.) Personally, I lean toward a B+. The passage reads like filler, but so do most student essays…

Thanks to John Seeley for spotting it.

My commonplace bookletLemon juicer designed by ChatGPT and drawn by Midjourney

An experiment by Azeem Azhar. Link here.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not [subscribe]? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

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A leaf in WinterSometimes, the joy of photography comes not from seeing what’s around you, but from noticing what’s under your feet.

Quote of the Day

”I have learned two very important lessons in my life. I don’t remember the first, but the second is to write things down.”

Groucho Marx

Me too.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBrahms | Alto Rhapsody | Kathleen Ferrier

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This is an old recording and the audio quality isn’t great, but I prefer it to modern versions. And I love Ferrier’s voice.

Long Read of the Day Your platform is not an ecosystem

A terrific assault on corporate cant by Maria Farrell (Whom God Preserve) against the way tech companies’ try to sanctify closed tech platforms by claiming that they are ‘ecosystems’.

An ecosystem is a set of unbidden organisms and the physical environment with and in which they interact. It’s constantly evolving, and the real interest, value and drive for change all come from the emergent properties of the relations between its many parts. An ecosystem is not the plaything of a pampered princeling, like Meta, but a set of living, striving things, both competitive and cooperative, and the place they live. The two kinds of system are almost impossibly different. One is biological, the other technological. One is complex and adaptive, the other only pretends to be.

Why are the maddening, built environments that certain investors and their pet CEOs want us to spend our lives inside called ecosystems, when they’re the very opposite of anything truly alive?

Vintage Maria. And beautifully eloquent. Worth your time.

Dorothy ParkerI’m a sucker for Parker stories. This one comes from a letter by Jason Lindley to The Independent on 27 July, 1993.

When Parker married her second husband, Alan Campbell, they both received permission to take a week off work from the film studio for a honeymoon at Lake Arrowhead. Three weeks later they had not returned, so the studio boss’s secretary rang the couple and said, “He wants to know why you haven’t come back to work.” Parker replied: “Tell him that I’ve been too fucking busy and vice versa.”

My commonplace bookletA long-term analysis of bike lane safety in seven American cities between 2000 and 2012 looked at 17,000 fatalities and 77,000 serious crashes involving cyclists over the period. It found that protected bike lanes increase road safety for everyone (not just the cyclists); coloured lanes on the road surface have no effect either way; and painting bike signs on the road surface actually makes things worse for cyclists.

I’ve often wondered about those painted bike-signs.

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SnowOn Sunday evening, after I had put Monday’s edition to bed (as we used to say in the letterpress days), I went outside to get some logs and found that it was — unexpectedly — snowing. Suddenly, everything was muffled and eerily quiet. And, as always happens when it first snows, I found myself thinking of the closing pages of James Joyce’s great short story, The Dead, and of the wonderful movie that John Huston made of it.

In the story, Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta have returned from a convivial party to the posh Dublin hotel where they are staying. Before retiring to bed they have a sombre conversation about a young boy, Micheal Furey, who had been in love with Gretta many years ago and who had died heartbroken when she had gone to live elsewhere. Sobbing, Gretta throws herself onto the bed and lies face down until she falls asleep, leaving Gabriel pensive and ashamed of his earlier brusqueness.

This is how the story ends.

https://memex.naughtons.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/The-Dead.m4a

Quote of the Day

”If there’s one tweet that will tell you everything you need to know about Elon Musk, it’s this one from early this morning:

In five words, Musk manages to mock transgender and nonbinary people, signal his disdain for public-health officials, and send up a flare to far-right shitposters and trolls. The tweet is a cruel and senseless play on pronouns that also invokes the right’s fury toward Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, for what they believe is a government overreach in public-health policy throughout the pandemic and an obfuscation of the coronavirus’s origins.”

Charlie Warzel writing in The Atlantic.

Musk is, like Trump before him, an Uber-troll. I’ve never used Twitter much and have been havering about deleting my account ever since Musk bought it. The only reason I haven’t is that I need to use my Twitter login to access Dave’s new feed-reader, Feedland, which is one of the best things to happen on the Web for years. Dave is aware of the problem — but thinks is a “lesser of two evils” choice. “Not loving FeedLand because it uses Twitter for identity”, he writes,

“is like not loving a friend because they had a baby with someone you don’t like. Or not loving NetNewsWire, for example, because it runs on Macs and iOS and Apple does crazy shit that fucks everything up. (I use Macs, lots of them, despite what I think of Apple.)”

I get it, so I will keep my Twitter account (but not post to it) until Dave decides to add another user-authentication method. Feedland is too good to lose.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsBach – Oboe d’Amore Concerto in D BWV 1053 Cafe Zimmerman

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Long Read of the DayThe Apocalyptic Vision of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’

Fabulous long read by James Parker in The Atlantic. The best thing I’ve read on The Waste Land. It’s interesting that the two best essays I’ve read marking the centenary of the poem — this one and Anthony Lane’s have both been by journalists rather than literary critics.

This is how Parker’s essay opens…

Imagine, if you will, a poem that incorporates the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the blowing up of the Kerch Bridge, Grindr, ketamine, The Purge, Lana Del Rey, the next three COVID variants, and the feeling you get when you can’t remember your Hulu password. Imagine that this poem—which also mysteriously contains all of recorded literature—is written in a form so splintered, so jumpy, but so eerily holistic that it resembles either a new branch of particle physics or a new religion: a new account, at any rate, of the relationships that underpin reality.

Now imagine this poem making news, going viral, becoming the poem—hailed over here, reviled over there—such that everybody is obliged to react to it, and every poem yet unwritten is already, inevitably, altered by it. And now imagine that the author of this poem—the poet himself—is a haunted-looking commuter whom you half-recognize from the subway platform.

You’re getting close to The Waste Land.

Do read it.

My commonplace bookletRaspberry Pi hires former spy gadget-maker who baked devices into surveillance ops

Nice story in The Register.

A former technical surveillance officer at the UK’s Eastern Region Special Operations Unit (ERSOU) – a team charged with tackling serious organized crime and terrorism across seven local police forces – has joined the Raspberry Pi Foundation and expressed his professional admiration for the organization’s single board computers when pressed into service on police business.

Toby Roberts, the former officer, has been revealed as the Foundation’s maker-in-residence – a gig devoted to baking Pis into all sorts of devices to assist pros and hobbyists alike do likewise…

If he offers you a piece of the Chocolate Pi, be suspicious.

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A Berry, Berry Christmas?Seen on a wintry woodland walk on Saturday morning.

Quote of the Day

”I have the reputation of having read all of Henry James, which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.”

James Thurber

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsRegina Spektor | Better

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Stumbled on this in an old playlist the other day. I had forgotten how good it is.

Long Read of the DayAI’s Jurassic Park moment

A really perceptive blog post by Gary Marcus about the longer-term implications of ‘generative AI’ — i.e. software that uses machine-learning algorithms to enable machines to generate artificial content — text, images, audio and video content based on its training data — in a way that might persuade a human user into believing that its outputs are ‘real’.

The essay comes at a particularly appropriate moment because in the last few weeks we’ve seen an explosion of excitement as countless people have been experimenting with ChatGPT and in the process making (what I regard as) some foolish inferences about its capabilities.

These systems can be incredibly fun to play with. Take this example, generated by chatGPT by Henry Minsky (son of Marvin Minsky, one of AI’s founders), who asked chatGPT to “Describe losing your sock in the dryer in the style of the declaration of independence”:

“When in the course of household events, it becomes necessary for one to dissolve the bonds that have connected a sock to its mate, and to assume among the powers of the laundry room, the separate and equal station to which the laws of physics and of household maintenance entitle it, a decent respect to the opinions of socks requires that it should declare the causes which impel it to go missing.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all socks are created equal, and are endowed by their manufacturer with certain unalienable rights….”

That a machine could do this, with so little effort on the part of the user, is frankly mind-boggling.

But at the same time it is, or should be, terrifying. It is no exaggeration to say that systems like these pose a real and imminent threat to the fabric of society.

The core of that threat comes from the combination of three facts…

Read on. It’s important.

I wrote this column myself, but how long before a chatbot could do it for me?My column about ChatGPT in yesterday’s Observer :

ChatGPT has become wildly popular because it’s easy to access and use: it can be run in a browser. All you have to do is open a free account with OpenAI and then give the program a task by describing what you want it to do in plain English. For example, you can ask it (as I did), “Is Donald Trump really a narcissist?”, and it will reply: “There is widespread speculation and debate among psychologists and mental health professionals about whether or not Donald Trump exhibits symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. Some argue that his behaviour and statements align with the diagnostic criteria for the disorder, while others believe that his behaviour is better explained by other psychological factors.”

Obviously, this is not exactly profound, but at least it’s grammatical. It also strives for a quasi-authoritative style, which should set some alarm bells ringing; authoritative-sounding misinformation may have more purchase on ordinary mortals than the usual guff…

Do read the whole thing.

Chart of the DayChatGPT got to a million users in five days. The chart puts that in context.

From Azeem Azhar.

How to live to be 96Anthony Lane writing at the time of the Queen’s death…

Trying to grasp what made her tick is no easy task, but a useful place to start would be “The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy,” a judicious biography by the historian Ben Pimlott. The index has an entry devoted to the sovereign’s interests. “Dogs” gets nine mentions; “Horses,” seven; “Racing,” six; “Shooting,” five; “Art collection,” four; “Reading,” three; “Politics,” a paltry two; and “Jigsaw puzzles, Scrabble, and television,” one.

And that is how you live to be ninety-six. Stay outdoors as much as possible. Keep a few books and games for rainy days. Enjoy the company of quadrupeds. And hope that nobody from the government drops in for tea. Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith—or, as Private Eye used to call her, Brenda—was a countrywoman at heart. That is to say, she was hale, sane, shrewd, constitutionally stoic, and schooled to believe that time spent on emotional self-perusal or intellectual fretting is time wasted. When films and TV dramas portrayed her as introspective, they got her quite wrong; her gaze was trained steadily outward, not into her soul. Despite her vast wealth and the public splendor that adorned her reign, the Queen had the instinctive prudence of a generation raised in a time of war. Finish the food on your plate. However strong your feelings, keep them safe, like money in a purse. Don’t wave them around like flags. Although she was the most famous woman in the world, on permanent show, no one could ever accuse her of being a showoff.

My commonplace bookletInteresting Twitter Thread by @dansoncj on how Covid control in at least some parts of China seems to be becoming chaotic.

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Morning rush-hour, CopenhagenNote the numbers of cyclists — and the absence of cars.

Quote of the Day

“Why do so many talented economic theorists believe and teach elegant fantasies so obviously refuted by plainly evident facts?”

James Tobin, who won the Nobel prize for economics in 1981 and was a professor at Yale.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsPeter Maxwell Davies | Farewell to Stromness | LAGQ

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Unusual version of a memorable piece.

Long Read of the DayCory Doctorow Wants You to Know What Computers Can and Can’t Do

Terrific New Yorker interview with Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve). I’ve known and admired Cory for years, and always feel exhausted just from reading the list of things he manages to do in 24 hours.

Doctorow, who is fifty-one, grew up in Toronto, the descendant of Jewish immigrants from what are now Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Before becoming a novelist, he co-founded a free-software company, served as a co-editor of the blog Boing Boing, and spent several years working for the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. Our first conversation, in late 2020, took place just after he had published the novel “Attack Surface,” part of his Little Brother series; it dramatizes the moral conflict of cybersecurity insiders who try to strike a balance between keeping their jobs and following their consciences.

The second time we spoke, Doctorow told me that he had eight books in production. “I’m the kind of person who deals with anxiety by working instead of by being unable to work,” he explained, when I asked how he was handling the ongoing pandemic. Among those eight books were “Chokepoint Capitalism,” co-written with the law professor Rebecca Giblin and published this past September, and “Red Team Blues,” a novel set in the world of cryptocurrency, which will come out in April. In the course of two interviews, Doctorow discussed the right and wrong lessons that one can learn from science fiction, the real dangers of artificial intelligence, and the comeuppance of Big Tech, among other topics.

It’s a wide-ranging interview. It needed to be because Cory has an amazing range. And he has a gift for coming up with pithy phrases that cut right to the heart of things. IMO, he’s the best living critic of the tech industry.

Machine-learning language model fails Politics 101I’ve been thinking a lot about ChatGPT (and indeed my Observer column on Sunday will be about it). So I was interested that when Ben Thompson’s daughter was doing her homework on a politics course she requested that her Dad ask ChatGPT this question:

“Did Thomas Hobbes believe in separation of powers?”

This was its reply:

Yes, Thomas Hobbes believed in the concept of separation of powers. In his book “Leviathan,” Hobbes argued that a strong, centralized government is necessary to maintain order and prevent conflict in society. However, he also believed that a single ruler or group should not have complete control over all aspects of government. Instead, he advocated for the separation of powers into different branches, with each branch having specific responsibilities and powers. Hobbes believed that the legislative branch of government should be responsible for making laws, the executive branch should be responsible for enforcing laws, and the judicial branch should be responsible for interpreting laws. This separation of powers would prevent any one branch from becoming too powerful and would help to ensure that the government acts in the best interests of the people.

Overall, Hobbes’ views on separation of powers were influential in the development of modern systems of government. Many political philosophers and statesmen, including John Locke and the authors of the United States Constitution, were influenced by his ideas.

The most polite thing one could say about this is that it is baloney. But it’s confident-sounding baloney. As Ben puts it:

Hobbes was a proponent of absolutism, the belief that the only workable alternative to anarchy — the natural state of human affairs — was to vest absolute power in a monarch; checks and balances was the argument put forth by Hobbes’ younger contemporary John Locke, who believed that power should be split between an executive and legislative branch.

So how could the bot get it so wrong?

Hobbes and Locke are almost always mentioned together, so Locke’s articulation of the importance of the separation of powers is likely adjacent to mentions of Hobbes and Leviathan in the homework assignments you can find scattered across the Internet. Those assignments — by virtue of being on the Internet — are probably some of the grist of the GPT-3 language model that undergirds ChatGPT.

My commonplace bookletInteresting Twitter thread on the weird German coup plotters.

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Happy Birthday, TransistorThe transistor, the building block of the digital age, was invented 75 years ago this month.

Image from the issue of the IEEE Spectrum magazine celebrating the anniversary.

Quote of the Day

”Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.”

James Thurber

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsHumphrey Lyttelton | Bad Penny Blues

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With a great intro. Many thanks to John Darch for suggesting it.

Long Read of the Day What if failure is the plan?

The inimitable danah boyd on Twitter’s ongoing crisis.

Nearly everyone I talk with is surprised that the actual service of Twitter is mostly still working. What that says to me is that the engineering team was far more solid than I appreciated. Any engineering team worth its salt is going to build redundancy and resilience into the system. Exceptions that are thrown should be caught and managed. But that doesn’t mean that a system can persist indefinitely without maintenance and repair.

Think of it in terms of a house. If you walk away from your home for a while, the pipes will probably keep working fine on their own. Until a big freeze comes. And then, if no one is looking, they’ll burst, flood the house, and trigger failure after failure. The reason for doing maintenance is to minimize the likelihood of this event. And the reason to have contingencies built in is to prevent a problem from rippling across the system.

What happens when Twitter’s code needs to be tweaked to manage an iOS upgrade? Or if a library dependency goes poof? What happens when a security vulnerability isn’t patched?

Interesting and wide-ranging piece by one of the world’s leading experts on social media.

Why you won’t find much ‘free speech’ about China on Musk’s TwitterTesla is the only substantial American company to continue in China. Amazon, Google, Best Buy, Uber, LinkedIn, Macy’s and eBAY have all exited with tails between legs. Apple is desperately trying to move production of iPhones to somewhere else. But Tesla stays.

Why? Because the company sells $16 billion-worth of cars a year in the country. And it’s in too deep to pull the plug. Its Shanghai plant, which the FT says can turn out around a million cars a year, is too big to abandon.

In the meantime, the Chinese regime is suspicious about Tesla cars, which are barred from military complexes and other ‘sensitive’ areas due to ‘security’ concerns. And military staff and employees of key state-owned companies are restricted from using Teslas.

All of which means that if Musk allows critical tweeting about Xi Jinping et al on his platform then he can expect trouble.

Being a sensible chap, he will avoid that possibility.

My commonplace bookletBecause of my newspaper column I receive an astonishing number of PR pitches every day. Sometimes, they make me wonder if the people who write them have any idea of the implications of the tech ideas they are pushing.

Yesterday’s email contained a pitch for an outfit called ZHIYUN entitled 9 must-try tips to improve your TikTok videos. One of these tips runs as follows:

Set the tone, mood and atmosphere with lighting

Lighting is an essential aspect of producing a successful video. TikToker Christian Shay mentioned that lighting is very important, so choose what works best for you. Use proper light control and manipulation for texture, the vibrancy of colour, and luminosity of your subjects.

A handy tool to help you out with your lighting is the ZHIYUN FIVERAY F100 light stick, a portable photography tool with six different lighting effects including fire, faulty bulb, and candle, allowing you to create ambiance and illuminate your subject, day or night.

Clearly, the PR flack who sent me this doesn’t know what I think about TikTok. But then, why should s/he?

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Cyclists onlyThe road on which we cycle in to town has been closed to motor vehicles in a radical experiment. Suddenly, cycling is even more pleasant than before. And quieter. And safer.

Quote of the Day

”It’s not the voting that’s democracy. It’s the counting.”

Tom Stoppard

That’s Trump’s modus operandi.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsTuba Skinny | Jubilee Stomp | Royal Street I

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Long Read of the DayEveryone’s Over Instagram

If you’re not on Instagram and suffering from FOMO, cheer up. There’s good news on the way, and Kate Lindsay is the bearer of it.

Earlier this fall, while riding the subway, I overheard two friends doing some reconnaissance ahead of a party. They were young and cool—intimidatingly so, dressed in the requisite New York all black, with a dash of Y2K revival—and trying to figure out how to find a mutual acquaintance online.

“Does she have Instagram?” one asked, before adding with a laugh: “Does anybody?”

“I don’t even have it on my phone anymore,” the other confessed.

Even just a couple of years ago, it would have been unheard-of for these 20-something New Yorkers to shrug off Instagram—a sanctimonious lifestyle choice people would have regretted starting a conversation about at that party they were headed to. But now it’s not so surprising at all. To scroll through Instagram today is to parse a series of sponsored posts from brands, recommended Reels from people you don’t follow, and the occasional picture from a friend that’s finally surfaced after being posted several days ago. It’s not what it used to be…

Sic transit gloria mundi etc. I joined Instagram when it started, because some of my photography buddies thought I should. I lasted about two weeks before I realised that it was basically an addictive scrolling machine. And I was only following reputable photographers like the Magnum collective. So I quit. Ever since then I regularly receive emails from Instagram saying how they miss me and can even make it easy for me to repent.

It’s interesting to see how it’s become passé, though, which is why this essay is worth your time.

Tacit knowledge (contd.)The subject of ‘tacit knowledge’ in yesterday’s edition clearly struck a chord with some readers, which is gratifying because I regard it as a radically undervalued phenomenon that is relevant to all aspects of the computerisation of work, and of course to many of the arguments currently going on about so-called ‘AI’.

Anthony Barnett (Whom God Preserve) wrote to say that the concept of tacit knowledge “was first developed as a working concept by Mike Cooley in his book Architect or Bee back in the 70s”. I haven’t read it but Anthony, who wrote the Foreword to the 1987 reissued edition of that book book, obviously knows Cooley’s thinking well.

I suppose that the qualification “working concept” may make Anthony’s claim for Cooley accurate, but “tacit knowing” — the idea that there is knowledge that cannot be adequately articulated by verbal means — is usually attributed to Michael Polyani’s 1968 book, Personal Knowledge, and some people have argued that it even goes back to a paper that the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle read in 1945 to the Aristotelian Society in London.

Simon Roberts, who used to work for the semiconductor giant Intel, wrote to say that

“your point about tacit knowledge in chip making made me think of my time at Intel in Leixlip where the relocation teams spent the lion’s share of their time moving large numbers of Fab [i.e. fabrication']engineers from location to location to ‘enskill’ local teams in a new Fab process. At any one point they were re-settling 50 odd people (and their families) from Israel to Leixlip, and then in time moving the Leixlip team to Arizona or Portland to bring the next team up to speed. They could ‘copy exactly’ the fabs but it was the people they needed to make the new equipment faultlessly churn out the wafers.”

Which supports the arguments made both by Harry Collins in his study of TEA-lasers, and by Chris Miller in his book on the politics of semiconductor manufacture.

Some readers were understandably puzzled by the idea that two companies of which they had never heard — ASML and TSMC — should somehow be the choke-points of the modern world. This is conventional wisdom for those of us who follow the tech industry, but it was remiss of me not to remember that most people have better things to do than follow this stuff.

For them, here’s a quick briefing.

ASML — Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography — is a Dutch company founded in 1984 which develops and makes the photolithography machines that are used to etch the most advanced silicon ships at the heart of all our computing devices. As Wikipedia puts it,

In these machines, patterns are optically imaged onto a silicon wafer that is covered with a film of light-sensitive material (photoresist). This procedure is repeated dozens of times on a single wafer. The photoresist is then further processed to create the actual electronic circuits on the silicon. The optical imaging that ASML’s machines deal with is used in the fabrication of nearly all integrated circuits and, as of 2011, ASML had 67 percent of the worldwide sales of lithography machines.

ASML is the most valuable company in Europe, with a stock-market valuation of around $200 billion.

TSMC is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and the world’s leading ‘silicon foundry’. According to Wikipedia,

TSMC is the first foundry to provide 7-nanometre and 5-nanometre (used by the 2020 Apple A14 and M1 SoC, as well as the MediaTek Dimensity 8100) production capabilities, and the first to commercialize extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology in high volume.

The idea of an iron-age concept like ‘foundry’ being applied to this extraordinary firm sounds quaint. But in a way it’s metaphorically accurate. Most advanced semiconductors (CPUs, graphics cards, etc.) are designed by companies like Apple in their Western redoubts. But they do not actually make the chips which embody their designs. Instead, they outsource the formidably demanding task of manufacturing them to foundries, of which TSMC is the pre-eminent one. The fact that TSMC is physically based in Taiwan — which the Chinese Communist Party regards as rightfully being a part of mainland China — is a matter of extreme concern to the West world. If the company’s fabrication facilities were to be destroyed in a Chinese invasion of the island, then the entire world would rapidly feel the effects on its IT infrastructure and development.

My commonplace bookletYesterday’s photograph of the front gate of Christ’s College reminded Andrew Ingram of a photograph of the same gate taken in 1979 with an interesting sign attached. The image is a bit blurry, but you get the message. There’s no knowing what students will get up to.

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The Golden GateChrist’s, Cambridge. Charles Darwin’s and John Milton’s college.

Quote of the Day

”Last week, in a series of interviews following the collapse of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and now-former chief executive officer of the Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange, attempted to engender sympathy and compassion in explaining why his company so spectacularly flamed out in November. Bankman-Fried’s public and seemingly calculated self-flagellation had all the hallmarks of the classic corporate apology: repeated mea culpas, dour-looking expressions, and, as has become too common in the tech world, dense and indecipherable industry jargon.

Bloomberg’s Austin Carr, on Bankman-Fried’s apology tour, conducted from a $30m penthouse in the Bahamas. Fortunately, the US has an extradition treaty with the Bahamas, a tax-haven with some nice beaches attached.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsCésar Franck | Panis Angelicus / Patricia Janečková – sopráno

Link

There are so many recordings of this. The most eccentric one I found has Pavarotti and Sting. And the most OTT version is André Rieu’s (together with what looks like the massed bands of the Netherlands). Great tune, though.

Long Read of the DayTacit Knowledge

In her brief but enlightening review of Chris Miller’s Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, Diane Coyle (Whom God Preserve) notes that Miller provides

lots of great examples of the difficulty of copying advanced chip technology because of the necessary tacit knowledge: for instance, every AMSL photolithography machine comes with a lifetime supply of AMSL technicians to tend to it. This is either hopeful – China will find it hard to catch up fully – or not – the US or EU will not be able to catch up with TSMC because of the latter’s vast embedded know-how.

My guess is that many people who write about the geopolitics of chip production haven’t done too much thinking about the importance of tacit knowledge in technological (and scientific) progress. They think it’s all about building facilities, putting in the requisite capital investment, etc. And of course about the geopolitics of where chip fabrication facilities are located.

At the moment one of the two great chokepoints of the silicon chip supply chain — AMSL — is located in the Netherlands. The other — TSMC — is in Taiwan, which is of course a cause of increasing concern to Western countries. But location is only a part of the story. The other is the knowhow locked up in the heads of the people who work in these firms.

Diane’s reference to tacit knowledge made me think about the Masters thesis of the philosopher Harry Collins, in which he investigated how a particular technology, the TEA-laser, spread from physics lab to physics lab.

He talked about this in an interesting interview with Physics Today in 2021.

At the end of my master’s degree in sociology, I had to choose a topic for my dissertation, and I thought it would be interesting to go back into science labs. After some false starts I was introduced to some scientists who were trying to build a new kind of laser, called a transversely excited atmospheric pressure carbon dioxide laser, or TEA laser. I thought it would make an interesting master’s topic to see how people learned to build one of these lasers. What I had in mind is that I would study information transmission.

This perspective came through philosophers—Ludwig Wittgenstein and Thomas Kuhn. How do people come to accept what is true? In ordinary life it is a matter of social agreement, and so when I wandered into science labs, that question guided me.

Interviewer: What did you learn?

COLLINS: I was lucky because it happened that nobody could make the laser work if they hadn’t spent time in a laboratory that already had a working laser. There was very good information in the journals about how to build such a laser. But anybody who tried to put one together using written articles failed. They had something that looked like a laser on their bench, but it wouldn’t lase.

What people didn’t understand was that the inductance of the leads was important. If you’d been to somebody else’s lab, you would build a complicated metal framework to hold a big capacitor close to the top electrode. But if you were working from just a circuit diagram, you naturally put this big heavy thing on the bench, and the lead from the capacitor to the top electrode would be too long and have too high an inductance for the laser to work. That is the kind of thing that is involved in the transfer of tacit knowledge.

At some stage (I forget when or where) Harry proposed an insightful metaphor for the process of knowledge exchange which I’ve used ever since in supervising students. In formal knowledge-engineering exercises in the 1980s, researchers would interview experts to try to extract the rules or heuristics that they employed in their work — and then try to express those in computerised ’expert systems’ which would supposedly work, but often didn’t. Harry’s metaphor was that such interviewing methods are like straining dumpling soup through a colander: you get the dumplings, but you lose the soup. And it’s the soup you really need, because it’s the tacit knowledge.

Books, etc.Eric Schliesser has written two critical pieces on Crooked Timber about William MacAskill’s book, What We Owe the Future, of which this is the second. What struck me after I’d read it was a comment by ‘Alex SL’ under the second essay:

The most interesting observation to me is the final one: “At present, society is still malleable and can be blown into many shapes [but]… at some point … it might set”.

This highly implausible statement must be motivated reasoning, because, if we think about it, for their ideology to make any sense, longtermists have to believe that the future is malleable now but will soon become set into a straight path. If one were to acknowledge that the distant future was still equally malleable by actors in a hundred years, or by actors in five hundred years, or by actors in one thousand years, with the possibility of contemporary achievements being reversed by some of those later actors, then one would immediately realise to what hilarious degree individual contemporary “moral entrepreneurs” or EA billionaires or philosophers overestimate their own ability to forecast and their own impact on the imagined shape of imaginary events happening millions of years from now. And also, in their arrogance, overestimate their influence compared to that of billions of others, who they effectively visualise and treat as non-player-characters, a form of dehumanising others.

And the insight that future actors still have the same freedom to shape their world as we do today might reduce the likelihood of a longtermist being considered a very important person right now or of somebody donating to MIRI [Machine Intelligence Research Institute] and similar undertakings, which is what matters to longtermists in practice. I am not even saying this in the sense of it all being a fraud (although I find it very, very difficult to believe that the likes of MacAskill and Bostrom can actually, really believe the stuff they argue for publicly, given that they are by all accounts smart people), but in the sense that in their own logic they need to gain such influence and funding to shape the future for what they see as the better. This is not the case for philosophies centred on becoming a better person oneself, for example.

Spot on.

My commonplace booklet“Ladies in shorts
And gentlemen with naked torsos
Are invited to forbid themselves
To enter the Church”

Church Notice, French Pyrenees.

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Classical selfieAll that’s missing is a smartphone.

Seen in the gardens of Dartington Hall.

Quote of the Day

”The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.”

Dylan Thomas, speaking of his native Wales.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio newsKeith Jarrett – Over the Rainbow (Tokyo 1984)

Link

Long Read of the DayHeresy

Thoughtful essay by Paul Graham.

April 2022

One of the most surprising things I’ve witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth of the concept of heresy.

In his excellent biography of Newton, Richard Westfall writes about the moment when he was elected a fellow of Trinity College:

Supported comfortably, Newton was free to devote himself wholly to whatever he chose. To remain on, he had only to avoid the three unforgivable sins: crime, heresy, and marriage.

The first time I read that, in the 1990s, it sounded amusingly medieval. How strange, to have to avoid committing heresy. But when I reread it 20 years later it sounded like a description of contemporary employment.

There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for. Those doing the firing don’t use the word “heresy” to describe them, but structurally they’re equivalent. Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done…

One of the few interesting pieces I’ve read on a contemporary malaise.

Longtermism: how good intentions and the rich created a dangerous creedYesterday’s Observer column:

In the past few weeks a photograph of Tony Blair and his buddy Bill Clinton sharing a panel with a scruffy kid wearing a T-shirt, baggy shorts and trainers has been doing the rounds. The April event was in the Bahamas and funded by an outfit called FTX – a supposedly “user-friendly crypto exchange” – owned by the scruffy kid, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF from now on). Blair and Clinton are looking very pleased to be there, providing confirmation of the aphrodisiac effect of great wealth, because the lad who was playing host was apparently as rich as Croesus, or at any rate worth $32bn.

And this was real wealth, it seemed. After all, the venture capitalists at Sequoia – who had backed Silicon Valley success stories such as Google and PayPal – had given him the green light (as well as some of their investors’ money). A few months after Blair and Clinton made their pilgrimage to the sun-soaked and regulation-lite Bahamas, one of Sequoia’s partners offered a breathless endorsement of SBF and his crypto exchange. “Of the exchanges that we had met and looked at”, she wrote, “some of them had regulatory issues, some of them were already public. And then there was Sam.” And FTX, which, Sequoia felt, was “Goldilocks-perfect”.

And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. In fact it was effectively bankrupt. And it had been managed, said the administrator brought in to sort out the mess, using fraternity-house accounting principles – which kind-of squared with SBF’s sartorial style…

Do read the whole thing.

Books, etc.Apropos my Observer column (see previous item), this review of the MacAskill book by Scott Alexander makes for interesting reading.

Mastodon and TwitterFrom Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve):

Mastodon is like email and twitter got married and had a baby. Last night I posted a message to both Mastodon and Twitter saying how great M’s support for RSS is. Apparently a lot of people on Masto didn’t know about it and the response has been resounding. And the numbers are very lopsided. The piece has been “boosted” (the Masto equiv of RT) 1.1K times, yet I only have 3.7K followers there. Meanwhile on Twitter, where I have 69K followers, it has been RTd just 17 times. My feeling was previously that Mastodon was more alive, it’s good to have a number to put behind that.

Interesting, ne c’est pas?

CorrectionThe link in Friday’s edition to Kieran Healey’s blog post on the January 6 ‘insurrection’ was faulty. It should have been this.

Apologies. And thanks to the readers who pointed it out.

My commonplace booklet

MARMALADE

Ingredients: Sugar Oranges Conservatives

Jar Label, Hong Kong

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The Hall, in technicolour Like me, William Davies (Whom God Preserve) loves Dartington Hall. And when I opened my laptop yesterday evening, this is what I found in an email from him. With this note attached: So we are here … Continue reading →

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Predictive Signology You’ve heard of predictive policing, but how about this from Bath? And it was done long before the Queen died! Thanks to Christopher Smart for the pic. Quote of the Day ”War is capitalism with the gloves off.” … Continue reading →

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Into the Light Quote of the Day ”I believe in the Church, the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church; and nowhere does it exist.” William Temple, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942 (and was an outspoken advocate of social … Continue reading →

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The Way In… … to the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen. Quote of the Day ”I went to Vietnam to take the train. People have done stranger things to that country.” Paul Theroux, 1975 Musical alternative to the morning’s radio … Continue reading →

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Morning has broken Early morning at Dartington Hall, where we spent the weekend (as we generally try to do whenever we’re in Devon). It’s a wonderful place, with a fascinating history which is well recounted by Michael Young in his … Continue reading →

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Sometimes, invasions don’t work out as well as you hoped. This morning’s Observer column: Intrigued by an Ars Technica post about Amazon’s Alexa that suggested all was not well in the tech company’s division that looks after its smart home … Continue reading →

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A souvenir of the dry season… …when we longed for rain to rescue our parched lawn. (Which is now almost waterlogged.) Quote of the Day ”Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers… Today, England … Continue reading →

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EV charging, Riga And the date when this was taken? July 2017. Makes you think about how ‘advanced’ the UK was then. Quote of the Day ”Russia: a gas station masquerading as a country.” John McCain (RIP) Musical alternative to … Continue reading →

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Danish pastry croissant Breakfast in the Royal Library in Copenhagen with Olafur Eliasson’s Cirkelbroen (Circle Bridge) in the background. Quote of the Day ”It’s as though Musk has taken Facebook’s “Move fast and break things” motto and reduced it to … Continue reading →

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59 years ago today… …he was murdered. I can still remember where I was when I heard the news. I guess many of you can too. Quote of the Day ”What has made football so uniquely effective a medium for … Continue reading →

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Hot stuff We have a new wood-burning stove, and our cat approves of it. Quote of the Day ”Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.” James Fenton There’s hope for me yet. Musical alternative … Continue reading →

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Today’s Observer column: Underpinning Musk’s views about free speech and the public sphere (AKA town square) is the fatuous metaphor of “the marketplace of ideas” that emerged from the deliberations of the US supreme court in 1953 (though something like … Continue reading →

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Personal Chairs The entrance to my favourite Copenhagen café, where we had breakfast last Thursday morning. Quote of the Day ”What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” … Continue reading →

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From The Guardian: In a stinging court filing posted on Thursday John Ray III, the new boss of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, said the company had suffered an “unprecedented and complete failure of corporate controls”. Cryptocurrency FTX’s logo reflected … Continue reading →

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So where’s the actual door? Copenhagen, November 2022. Quote of the Day ”In a sense one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.” Edmund Wilson Musical alternative to … Continue reading →

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Quote of the Day “I asked why he was a priest and he said that if you have to work for anybody an absentee boss is best.” Janette Winterson Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Toselli | Serenade | … Continue reading →

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Lee Miller: in her own pictures (and words) I was in Copenhagen last week at an interesting conference in the remarkable ‘Black Diamond’ extension of the Royal Danish Library. When I went in I saw this poster for an exhibition … Continue reading →

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Cyclists ahoy! Copenhagen is one of the most liveable cities in the world, IMO. The first thing that strikes one in the morning is the astonishing number of cyclists commuting to work, school and elsewhere. It makes Cambridge look like … Continue reading →

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Home from home Quote of the Day ”A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say.” Michael Winner, film director Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news She Moved Through the Fair | Patrick Dexter (Cello) Link … Continue reading →

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On Putin’s border Riga, 2017 Quote of the Day “The secret of power is the knowledge that others are more cowardly than you are” Ludwig Borne Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Tuba Skinny | Once in a While … Continue reading →

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Spoiler alert This edition is largely about Twitter, a platform which has recently been bought by Elon Musk, a tech billionaire who is two parts genius and one part fruitcake (and in some ways also a slightly pathetic figure because … Continue reading →

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Pretending that opaque, error-prone ML is part of the grand, romantic quest to find artificial intelligence is an attempt to distract us from the truth. This morning’s Observer column: One of the most useful texts for anyone covering the tech … Continue reading →

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Autumnal fruits Seen on a woodland walk yesterday. Quote of the Day “Microsoft says it has an AI that can replicate thousands of different types of jobs. It also has some kinks: For example, when asked to name the most … Continue reading →

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Lou Gourmandises A nice reminder of a hot Summer. Quote of the Day ”It’s a little ironic that there is a certain kind of tech founder/investor/exec who happily talks about San Francisco as a dysfunctional mess because it lacks assertive … Continue reading →

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Pillars of Creation This photograph in mid-infrared light from the James Webb telescope shows a lot of the dust that’s apparently a major factor in star formation, together with stars that are still in the process of developing — which … Continue reading →

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Into the light Leaving St Pancras station. Quote of the Day ”Now that you’ve got me right down to it, the only thing I didn’t like about The Barretts of Wimple Street was the play.” Dorothy Parker, reviewing the play … Continue reading →

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My OpEd piece from yesterday’s Observer… When the news broke that Elon Musk had finally been obliged to buy Twitter, the company he had tried – for months – to get out of purchasing, it reminded many observers of the … Continue reading →

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The disappearance of childhood Coming on this picture by Breugel, The Peasant’s Wedding, when rummaging through a collection of postcards yesterday made me dig out and re-read Neil Postman’s wonderful book, The Disappearance of Childhood, in which he argued that … Continue reading →

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The Rat-Race as was Paul Day’s stunning frieze of strap-hanging Tube travellers in the concourse of St Pancras station . Quote of the Day ”There’ll always be an England, but who wants an England full of morons reading the Express?” … Continue reading →

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Lunch break This wonderful Van Gogh — Noon, rest from work — is in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. I thought I knew most of his paintings, but this one is new to me — and a revelation. Thanks to … Continue reading →

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Trussonomics Seen on the side of a large building in London yesterday. I was reminded of a conversation between two women I overheard on a Dublin bus many years ago. They were discussing their ‘useless’ sons, both of whom were … Continue reading →

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Airstream on a stormy night Eddington, near Cambridge Quote of the Day ”Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the picture of man at twice its natural size.” Virginia Woolf in … Continue reading →

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So who exactly do you think you are? Our imperious cat, Tilly, in typically incredulous mood, photographed by one of her two domestic retainers. Quote of the Day Has anyone seen a dramatic critic in the daytime? Of course not. … Continue reading →

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Welcome! This week’s Economist cover. The magazine has a splendid first Leader on the subject (which, sadly, is probably behind a paywall) which begins thus: In 2012 Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, two of the authors of a pamphlet called … Continue reading →

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Oh, No! Seen on a door in (I think) Arles. Quote of the Day ”I thought lacrosse was what you find in church.” Robin Williams Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news My Back Pages | Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn, … Continue reading →

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On history repeating itself… Yesterday’s rant about historical cycles set some Classics scholars thinking about the year 69AD (or, as we PC folks are supposed to say, 69CE) when the Romans had no fewer than four emperors in a single … Continue reading →

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Rooftop view In my favourite Provencal village. And I didn’t use a drone to get the shot! Quote of the Day ”I don’t think there was ever a piece of music that changed a man’s decision on how to vote.” … Continue reading →

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A rose by any other name… On our kitchen windowsill yesterday. Quote of the Day ”His legs, perhaps, were shorter than they should have been.” Lytton Strachey on Dr Arnold in Eminent Victorians Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news … Continue reading →

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Always On France, July 2022 Quote of the Day ”The cruellest lies are often told in silence.” Robert Louis Stevenson Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Bob Dylan and The Band | Forever Young Link Long Read of the … Continue reading →

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Miss Potter’s view The view from one of the first-floor rooms in Hill Top, Beatrix Potter’s cottage in the Lake District. It’s an nteresting house. Quote of the Day ”Applause is a receipt, not a bill.” Artur Schnabel, explaining why … Continue reading →

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Autumn leaves Seen on a walk the other day. Quote of the Day ”Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people.” David Sarnoff Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news J.S. Bach | Concerto for two … Continue reading →

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Anyone for cricket? Seen on Brancaster beach on Friday. Quote of the Day “If work’s so great, why don’t the rich do it?” Groucho Marx Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Christine McVie | Songbird | Fleetwood Mac Rumours … Continue reading →

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On discovering that Liz Truss is to be Prime Minister (Courtesy of EdvardMunch.org) Quote of the Day “One evening, I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. … Continue reading →

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First Autumn visitor We came down to breakfast to find he had attached himself to our front door. The only thing to do, I thought, was to put a 28mm Summilux into macro mode and take his portrait. Clearly, he … Continue reading →

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Archway to the grave Lavenham, Suffolk. Quote of the Day ”The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a Grand National with a fence every ten yards, each to be jumped backwards as well as forwards, and you have … Continue reading →

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For this trike… Spotted at a Los Bandidos rally in Arles, 2017. Quote of the Day “A suicide kills two people, Maggie. That’s what it’s for.” Quentin, in Arthur Miller’s play, After the Fall Musical alternative to the morning’s radio … Continue reading →

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On the Beach Striking photograph by John Darch who, like the fine photographer he is, waited until all the ingredients — including the reflection of the horse in the wet sand — were present before pressing the shutter. Quote of … Continue reading →

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Fully knitted-out Seen in a lovely wool shop in Riga. Quote of the Day “In so far as the family as an institution turns women into darling little slaves and men into their chief providers and unweaned dependents, the problem … Continue reading →

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There’s a fascinating — and unintentionally hilarious — report in the FT (and therefore behind a paywall). The TL;DR summary is that a big venture capital firm which invested in companies that became the dominant tech giants is now investing … Continue reading →

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After the Presentation School of Architecture, University of Liverpool, degree-day afternoon. Quote of the Day “You go Uruguay and I’ll go mine.” Groucho Marx (in Animal Crackers) Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Randy Newman | Louisiana 1927 Link … Continue reading →

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Gondola We’re reading Colm Tóibín’s The Magician, his fictional re-imagining of the life of Thomas Mann, at the moment, and have just got to the point where the subject makes his first visit to Venice, where he is immediately struck … Continue reading →

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The Bundle Berlin, December 2016 Quote of the Day ”When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Czesław Miłosz Makes me think of Thomas Mann and Buddenbrooks Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Julie Fowlis … Continue reading →

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Riverside The Rhone at Arles on a lovely Summer evening. Quote of the Day “Men are the only animals who devote themselves assiduously to making one another unhappy. It is, I suppose, one of their godlike qualities.” H.L. Mencken Musical … Continue reading →

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Move over, Salvador My son Brian has been experimenting with DALL-E. This was its response to his request to produce a “3D render of a chaise longue sofa that looks like a banana”. It reminded him — and me — … Continue reading →

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The Little Mermaid Famous statue in Copenhagen. This photograph was taken by my wife while I was pontificating in the National Library. Quote of the Day “I never was a boy, never played at cricket; it is better to let … Continue reading →

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Fishing, not phishing Quote of the Day “Conscience: the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.” H.L. Mencken Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Ry Cooder and The Village | She Runs Hot Link There’s a … Continue reading →

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Analog Surveillance A ‘listening door’ used by the East German regime in the pre-1989 era. Photograph of an exhibit in the (unmissable) Stasi Museum in Berlin. Note the number of batteries required! Poor quality image because it was behind a … Continue reading →

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Floral dance, anyone? Hanging on a wall in Aups. Quote of the Day ”Pardon my long preamble. It’s like a chorus-girl’s tights — it touches everything and covers nothing.” Gertrude Lawrence Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Ry Cooder … Continue reading →

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Quote of the Day ”It is not certain that everything is uncertain” Blaise Pascal Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Sharon Shannon | Tune for a Found Harmonium Link Nobody sleeps at the back when this lady plays. Long … Continue reading →

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Racegoers Believe it or not, they were waiting for the Tour de France the year it started in Cambridge. Quote of the Day ”Technology is a great servant but a terrible master.” Sherry Turkle Musical alternative to the morning’s radio … Continue reading →

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The UK’s very own Puzzle Palace One of the rooms in (I think) Hut 6 in Bletchley Park, restored to its wartime condition. It was taken on a visit just before the restoration was completed. As an incurable pen geek, … Continue reading →

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‘A prophet is not without honour”, says the Bible, “save in his own country.” This was manifestly not true in the case of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian cultural critic, who died 35 years ago, and was famous not only in … Continue reading →

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Acton this Day Lord Acton (he of “power corrupts…’ fame) wearing one of my hats. His bust is in a back staircase in the University Library in Cambridge. I check on the old boy occasionally, just to make sure that … Continue reading →

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The Web Master Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, catching up on his email at a Royal Society symposium in September 2010 Quote of the Day Just because nobody complains doesn’t mean all parachutes are perfect” Benny Hill … Continue reading →

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Madame Blanc Quote of the Day ”Life is full of alternatives but no choice.” Patrick White Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Mark Knopfler | Going Home Link We watched the film last night, and it was nice to … Continue reading →

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Riverside Quote of the Day ”You can say what you like about long dresses, but they cover a multitude of shins.” Mae West Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Mozart | Die Zauberflöte |Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen | Simon … Continue reading →

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The Entertainer Not Scott Joplin exactly, but good… Arles, 2022 Quote of the Day ”Assistant heads must roll!” Anonymous, quoted in The Guardian 30 June 2004. The traditional solution to management problems in British broadcasting Musical alternative to the morning’s … Continue reading →

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So what do you want to eat? One of those conversations… Quote of the Day “The dark shadow we seem to see in the distance is not really a mountain ahead, but the shadow of the mountain behind – a … Continue reading →

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Two Horses are better than one One of the joys of being a recovering petrolhead in Provence is coming on beautiful examples of iconic cars — in this case the Citroen Deux Chevaux or 2CV. It was a brilliant concept … Continue reading →

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Provisional lives Book poster — Arles, July 2022. The blurb reads: “Provisional Life – Life on Borrowed Time – is a photo book that presents the living conditions of people who have had to flee war to survive in refugee … Continue reading →

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Analogue nostalgia Arles, at the end of a very hot working day. Quote of the Day ”If we had had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.” Leon Trotsky Musical alternative to the … Continue reading →

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Life, eh? Arles, July 2022 Quote of the Day ”Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe, Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast, Is that portentous phrase, ‘I told you so.’” Byron, Don Juan Musical alternative to the morning’s … Continue reading →

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This is my old iPod Classic. It was a present from a wealthy and generous friend many years ago, when 40GB iPods were seriously expensive (he brought six of them to a dinner at our house one winter’s evening and … Continue reading →

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My swimming companion Well, actually, s/he is entirely functional — to monitor the temperature of the water! Quote of the Day ”Instead of being arrested, as we stated, for kicking his wife down a flight of stairs and hurling a … Continue reading →

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Bread and Circuses Arles, on a July evening. Quote of the Day ”I was mistaken for a prostitute once in the last war. When a GI asked me what I charged, I said, ‘Well, dear, what do your mother and … Continue reading →

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Indecision Outside a café in Arles where I felt the kid wanted the adults to make up their minds. Quote of the Day ”The newly published diaries of Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, are meant to be … Continue reading →

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Our world today Actually, our world as it was on Sunday 17th. And the implication? We aren’t going to make it to 2050 without catastrophic collapse. The graphic comes from a sobering essay by Umair Haque, who’s never been a … Continue reading →

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The family that cycles together… … stays together. Spotted in Arles on Friday evening. Quote of the Day ”Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and, where it lands, painting a target.” Homer Adkins Musical alternative to … Continue reading →

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Ceci n’est pas une fenêtre… … as Matisse Magritte might put it. Seen on Friday evening in Arles, the final waypoint on our slow journey to Provence. Quote of the Day ”Negotiating with de Valera…is like trying to pick up … Continue reading →

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Meet Wurzel Gummidge Natural and er, lifelike. In a field near where I live. Quote of the Day ”He objected to ideas only if others had them.” A.J.P. Taylor on Ernest Bevin Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Chris … Continue reading →

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The Lone Wolf A solitary breakfaster, photographed from my room at a luxurious German Schloss I stayed in a few years ago. (For the avoidance of doubt: a big corporate outfit was footing the bill for my stay.) Quote of … Continue reading →

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Seeing to infinity and beyond From Tortoise Media’s indispensable daily Sensemaker newsletter… This image, the first produced by the James Webb telescope, “shows the infrared light put out by galaxies formed over 13 billion years ago, which appear as red … Continue reading →

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Valery-sur-Somme We’re getting ready for our slow drive down to Provence and I was suddenly struck by this lovely Degas landscape while looking for something else. At one point on our route we cross the Somme. Quote of the Day … Continue reading →

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Ultimate Selfies #4 Edward Hopper Quote of the Day ”The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.” George Bernard Shaw Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Paul Simon & George Harrison | Here Comes … Continue reading →

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Hollyhock In our garden yesterday evening. I always think of them as quintessentially English flowers. Quote of the Day ”Will people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you just rattle your jewellery.” John Lennon, at … Continue reading →

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Ultimate Selfies – #2 Albrecht Durer Quote of the Day “It is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.” George Eliot Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Paul McCartney | I’ve Got a Feeling … Continue reading →

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Consider the Lily Cycling home the other day, I noticed an intriguing white spot that had suddenly appeared in the roadside hedge. On closer inspection it turned out to be a glorious lily We fell to wondering how it got … Continue reading →

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Ultimate Selfies – #1 Degas: self-portrait in a soft hat. Quote of the Day ”Yet her conception of God was certainly not orthodox. She felt towards Him as she she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer; and in … Continue reading →

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Across the Bay The view from Ventry, one of my favourite beaches in Kerry. Quote of the Day ”Police had enough officers on the scene of the Uvalde school massacre to have stopped the gunman three minutes after he entered … Continue reading →

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Now we see you… … now we don’t. Discarded CCTV kit. Cambridge. Quote of the Day ”It’s impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.” Jerome K. Jerome He’s right. I can testify to it. … Continue reading →

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The Royalist Mail Derbyshire, Saturday. Quote of the Day ”It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.” A.N. Whitehead A good example of how a distinguished philosopher can sometimes talk nonsense. Musical alternative to … Continue reading →

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Bloomsday reports We had our Bloomsday lunch in Cambridge on Thursday — burgundy and gorgonzola sandwiches and numerous readings from the great book. But, in sartorial terms, I’m afraid that our little gathering wasn’t a patch on this assembly of … Continue reading →

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This morning’s Observer column: Some people regard GPT-3 as a genuine milestone in the evolution of artificial intelligence; it had passed the eponymous test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 to assess the ability of a machine to exhibit intelligent … Continue reading →

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Our mysterious plantlet The consensus is that it’s a field maple. The fact that the first leaf I photographed was asymmetrical seems to have been just a freak aberration. I should have photographed it from the top — like this. … Continue reading →

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Happy Bloomsday! Oil on canvas by Jacques-Emile Blanche, 1935 Now in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Today’s the day that admirers of James Joyce’s great modernist novel Ulysses celebrate every year. Why? Because all the action in the novel … Continue reading →

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An early version of Habermas’s ‘public sphere’? An illustration of an 18th-century coffee house from the British Library’s Breaking the News exhibition that I went to yesterday. The mystery of our mysterious plant. Many thanks to everyone who emailed with … Continue reading →

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Our mystery plant As regular readers know, I think that the great thing about being a blogger is that readers usually know more about stuff than you do. So can I please exploit your collective IQ? My wife found this … Continue reading →

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Warning: economist at work! Portrait of Maynard Keynes by Duncan Grant, probably painted at Charleston. You need some nerve to wear a hat like that. Quote of the Day ”Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; … Continue reading →

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This morning’s Observer column: In the bad old days, prospecting for gold was a grisly business involving hysterical crowds, pickaxes, digging, the wearing of appalling hats, standing in rivers panning for nuggets, “staking” claims and so on. The California gold … Continue reading →

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A year is a long time, sometimes Our beloved cat, Zoombini, passed away a year ago today. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think of her. What made her remarkable was the extent to which she craved human … Continue reading →

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Rose-tinted lenses Quote of the Day “She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood: how to deal with enthusiasts.” Thomas Babington Macaulay, on the Catholic Church Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Ed Pickford | The Workers’ … Continue reading →

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Putting the horse before the cart Just came on this and liked it. It’s by Georges Seurat and painted in 1884. Currently in the Guggenheim in New York. Quote of the Day ””Life is a long preparation for something that … Continue reading →

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A cannon for our times This cannon, an artillery piece from the Crimean war, stands on the green in front of Ely cathedral in Cambridgeshire. It was captured from the Russians in Sebastopol and given to Ely City by Queen … Continue reading →

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Quote of the Day Everybody complains of their memory, but nobody of their judgement” La Rochefoucauld Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Handel | Nightingale chorus | Solomon Link Long Read of the Day The Kystriksveien: Earth’s most beautiful … Continue reading →

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This morning’s Observer column: It was one of the few pieces of cheery news to emerge from the war in Ukraine. Russian looters, no doubt with the assistance of Russian troops, stole 27 pieces of John Deere farm equipment, worth … Continue reading →

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Peak viewing time The view from the top of the Connor Pass in Kerry. Quote of the Day ”If this were played upon a stage now I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.” Shakespeare, Twelfth Night Comes to mind … Continue reading →

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Pieces of Cake Seen in Waitrose yesterday. Quote of the Day Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) has this lovely disclaimer on his website. READ CAREFULLY By reading this website, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from … Continue reading →

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Jubilee Souvenir From the current Private Eye. Quote of the Day ”Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.” Jean-Paul Sartre Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Ladyva | Boogie Woogie Stomp … Continue reading →

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An evening sky Quote of the Day ”Photography is truth. And cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.” Jean-Luc Godard It’s baloney, of course, but it makes a good sound-bite. Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Richard Wagner | … Continue reading →

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Caterpillar pillar Walking on a local footpath on Saturday I suddenly found myself entangled in a long — and virtually invisible — thread that had clearly been woven by a spider. Further investigation revealed another such thread, extending all the … Continue reading →

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This morning’s Observer column: Last week, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) slapped a £7.5m fine on a smallish tech company called Clearview AI for “using images of people in the UK, and elsewhere, that were collected from the web … Continue reading →

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Our new neighbours We have a breeding pair of Canada geese in the village and they recently produced their latest brood — who started as tiny fluffballs and are already turning into lanky teenagers. Quote of the Day ”He talked … Continue reading →

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Meadow walk Seen yesterday evening. Quote of the Day ”Apparently Anna Wintour wants to be seen as human, and Amy Odell’s biography goes some way to helping her achieve that aim. Nearly all the photographs show her smiling, looking friendly, … Continue reading →

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Quote of the Day ”I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.” Peter Ustinov Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Eric Clapton with JJ Cale … Continue reading →

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Man’s best (and smarter) friend This is one of my favourite photographs. One sweltering August afternoon we were driving along the seafront at Antibes on our way to Vence when we spotted this scene, and I stopped, grabbed my Leica … Continue reading →

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The point of no return Seen in the Orchard, Grantchester, years ago. Quote of the Day “Just as in London you are supposedly never more than 6ft away from a rat, in Mayfair you are rarely far from a serious … Continue reading →

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This morning’s Observer column: … In June 1945, the [US] State department approved the transfer of Von Braun and his specialist team to the US. He worked on the US army’s ballistic missile programme and designed the rocket that launched … Continue reading →

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If you’re superstitious this would not be a good day to walk under ladders. Cross Words My wife and I are cruciverbalists in the same sense that we are ornithologists. That is to say, we like watching birds, but often … Continue reading →

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Work in progress In 2010, a we had a guest speaker for a project I was running in the Cambridge university library. He had done his PhD on Isaac Newton and before his talk the University Librarian arranged for its … Continue reading →

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The river at dusk Taken walking back from dinner yesterday evening Quote of the Day ”What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.” George Bernard Shaw Acute observation. I’ve seen umpteen confirmations of it in my … Continue reading →

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Quote of the Day ”Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison.” * Evelyn Waugh Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Little Richard | Good Golly Miss Molly | Muhammad … Continue reading →

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Getting to first base Base of a table in one of my favourite cafes. Quote of the Day “It is outrageous that five unelected, unaccountable and relatively unknown political operatives masquerading as impartial jurists can so profoundly alter our lives.” … Continue reading →

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How to stitch together a fractured Northern Ireland Wonderful graphical summary of the fractured polity of Northern Ireland. Source: Quartz newsletter. Quote of the Day ”The taste was of that little crumb of Madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray … Continue reading →

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Wheel of Fortune? Liverpool, Spring 2010 Quote of the Day ”The text box of Twitter still prompts every user with “What’s happening?” What’s happening, invariably, is that they are looking at Twitter. This simple fact accounts for perhaps 99 percent … Continue reading →

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Stone-age Tablets Very sharp piece of social observation, this. One of the saddest sights I’ve seen was of a young child, aged between two and three, playing with a picture book and trying to manipulate it with her fingers as … Continue reading →

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Ship ahoy! This photograph seems to me as close to perfect as one could hope for. It shows my friends Quentin and Rose in their new sailboat on Grafham Water early on Sunday morning. It was taken by Douglas Smart … Continue reading →

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My take on the Musk-Twitter saga.

Musk now declares himself to be a “free speech absolutist”. He doesn’t, however, seem to have done much thinking about what would actually be involved in running a platform based on absolutist principles. As the FT’s John Thornhill put it: “He grandly declares that maximal free speech reduces civilisational risk. Cue widespread applause. But back in the day, Twitter also described itself as ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party’. Then it collided with porn bots, cyberbullies and terrorist extremists. ‘We have tried that. It did not work, Elon,’ says a former Twitter executive.”

Musk suffers from the delusion that “Twitter has become the de-facto town square”, which, frankly, is baloney. The internet, as Mike Masnick points out, is the metaphorical “town square”. Twitter is just one small private shop in that space – a shop in which hyperventilating elites, trolls, journalists and millions of bots hang out and fight with one another.

He also seems to have forgotten that Twitter operates outside the first-amendment-obsessed US – in Europe, for example. Last Tuesday, Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for the internal market, warned that Twitter must follow European rules on moderating illegal and harmful content online, even after it goes private. “We welcome everyone,” said Breton. “We are open but on our conditions… ‘Elon, there are rules. You are welcome but these are our rules. It’s not your rules which will apply here.’” Since Musk seems temperamentally allergic to rules imposed by governmental agencies, Twitter under his command should have interesting challenges ahead in Europe…

Read on

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The “people’s car”

Hitler being shown the Volkswagen on its launch. Next to him, in civilian clothes, is its designer, Ferdinand Porsche. I’ve often wondered if the photographer — behind Hitler focussing a Leica — might be Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer. Against that is the thought that although Hoffmann sometimes wore a military uniform, it seems unlikely that he was in the SS.

Quote of the Day

”Accuracy is a duty, not a virtue”

A.E. Housman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Mark Knopfler | Miss You Blues

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Wonderful.

Long Read of the Day Dinner with Queen Elizabeth

Unmissable 1996 New Yorker essay by Paul Theroux.

Subscriber slump may be bad news for Netflix, but better for the planet

Yesterday’s Observer column:

In the early 1930s, when Claud Cockburn worked on the Times, the subeditors had a competition to see who could compose the dullest headline. Cockburn claimed that he won with “Small earthquake in Chile. Not many dead”. Alas, subsequent factcheckers have failed to unearth such a headline in the archives, but it came to mind last week when Netflix announced, in a quarterly earnings report, that for the first time in a decade it had lost subscribers – 200,000 of them, to be exact. In North America, it had lost 640,000 and suffered additional losses in every other region except for Asia-Pacific area, where it added a million.

This didn’t seem very interesting to this columnist, especially as it included the period when Netflix had pulled out of Russia, where it had 700,000 subscribers, which to my mind meant that the reported loss would have been a gain of half a million had Putin not invaded Ukraine.

Still, the negative 200,000 figure seemed to spook Wall Street. Netflix’s stock price collapsed by nearly 40% in two days, taking more than $50bn off the company’s market value in the blink of an eye…

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Dave Winer on what a better Twitter could be Dave (Whom God Preserve and whose birthday is today!) is one of the smartest software developers around. His ThinkTank outliner for the Apple Mac was one of the best programs I’ve ever used, and it hooked me on outliners for life. I once used it to write the first draft of an entire book.

But Dave is also one of the wise Elders of our online world. He’s a tireless campaigner for the open Web — which is why every word he’s ever written is available, for free, on his blog — even if has also been published inside some paywalled or corporate silo. I’ve followed his example: I’ve written a lot of stuff that has appeared behind paywalls and other enclosed spaces (like Substack), but it’s always also been available on Memex, hosted on my own server.

He is also a fierce critic of mainstream media, which he believes has still not properly adjusted to the possibilities of a networked world.

On Saturday, like everyone else, he was musing about Musk buying Twitter:

People often ask if when I talk about having our own TWTRs that means Mastodon. It could, if that’s your thing. But the center of this space will host all kinds of apps. Just like vehicles with wheels aren’t all Chevies and Hondas. Some are buses, trucks, Teslas or eBikes. There will be a lot of variety in the middle.

There was a time when all computers were basically the same. Big honkers in air conditioned rooms with raised floors. You had to have a degree to run one.

Then we got personal computers. Steve Jobs had a term for this. He called them “fractional horsepower” computers, to compare it to large mainframes.

I loved the idea of the Mac because it made the power of the mainframe usable by independent and free individuals. People who had ideas, and wanted to organize and share them…

ps: If you’re interested in Mastodon, see here.

My commonplace booklet Joe Biden’s speech to the annual White House Correspondents dinner

Transcript is here. Some good jokes too. For example in the opening salvo:

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you, Steve, for that introduction. And a special thanks to the 42 percent of you who actually applauded. (Laughter.)

I’m really excited to be here tonight with the only group of Americans with a lower approval rating than I have. (Laughter.) That’s hard to say after what we just saw. (Laughter.)

This is the first time a President attended this dinner in six years. (Applause.) It’s understandable. We had a horrible plague followed by two years of COVID. (Laughter and applause.)

Just imagine if my predecessor came to this dinner this year. Now, that would really have been a real coup if that occurred. (Laughter.) A little tough, huh? (Laughter.)

But I’m honored to be here at such an event with so much history…

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This morning’s Observer column

In the early 1930s, when Claud Cockburn worked on the Times, the subeditors had a competition to see who could compose the dullest headline. Cockburn claimed that he won with “Small earthquake in Chile. Not many dead”. Alas, subsequent factcheckers have failed to unearth such a headline in the archives, but it came to mind last week when Netflix announced, in a quarterly earnings report, that for the first time in a decade it had lost subscribers – 200,000 of them, to be exact. In North America, it had lost 640,000 and suffered additional losses in every other region except for Asia-Pacific area, where it added a million.

This didn’t seem very interesting to this columnist, especially as it included the period when Netflix had pulled out of Russia, where it had 700,000 subscribers, which to my mind meant that the reported loss would have been a gain of half a million had Putin not invaded Ukraine.

Still, the negative 200,000 figure seemed to spook Wall Street. Netflix’s stock price collapsed by nearly 40% in two days, taking more than $50bn off the company’s market value in the blink of an eye…

Read on

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Seeds of glory

If you have a lawn, dandelions are a curse. But their mechanism for propagating is magical. Each of the tiny seeds in this diffuse sphere has its own parachute.

Quote of the Day

”For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

Robert Louis Stevenson, in Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, one of my favourite books.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Liam O’Flynn, Neil Martin, Seán Keane, Matt Molloy & Arty McGlynn

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Recorded in 1999. Lovely reminder of the great piper, Liam O’Flynn. Tunes are: *An Buachaill Caol Dubh, Caisleán an Óir (Hornpipe 1:54), Paddy Fahey’s (Reel 3:47), The Pinch of Snuff (Reel 5:05) & The Fair-Haired Boy (Reel 5:48). Liam (Uilleann Pipes), Neil Martin (Cello), Seán Keane (Fiddle) and Matt Molloy. Also unusual to have a cello in such an ensemble.

Long Read of the Day The Internet is Made of Demons

Absolutely fascinating review essay by Sam Kriss, triggered by Justin E.H. Smith’s new book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning.

I’m reading (and enjoying) the book, and was very struck by the way Kriss’s essay ends:

Thinkers of the past have plenty to teach us about the internet, and the world has indeed been doing vaguely internetty things for a very long time. But as I suggested above, our digital internet marks a significant transformation in those processes: it’s the point at which our communications media cease to mediate. Instead of talking to each other, we start talking to the machine. If there are intimations of the internet running throughout history, it might be because it’s a nightmare that has haunted all societies. People have always been aware of the internet: once, it was the loneliness lurking around the edge of the camp, the terrible possibility of a system of signs that doesn’t link people together, but wrenches them apart instead. In the end, what I can’t get away from are the demons. Whenever people imagined the internet, demons were always there.

Lludd and Llefelys, one of the medieval Welsh tales collected in the Mabinogion, is a vision of the internet. In fact, it describes the internet twice. Here, a terrible plague has settled on Britain: the arrival of the Coraniaid, an invincible supernatural enemy. What makes the Coraniaid so dangerous is their incredibly sharp hearing. They can hear everything that’s said, everywhere on the island, even a whisper hundreds of miles away. They already know the details of every plot against them. People have stopped talking; it’s the only way to stay safe. To defeat them, the brothers Lludd and Llefelys start speaking to each other through a brass horn, which protects their words. Today, we’d call it encryption. But this horn contains a demon; whatever you speak into it, the words that come out are always cruel and hostile. This medium turns the brothers against each other; it’s a communications device that makes them more alone. In the story, the brothers get rid of the demon by washing out the horn with wine. I’m not so sure we can do that today: the horn and its demon are one and the same thing.

More on hypersonic missiles Apropos the essay I posted yesterday, Andrew Curry (Whom God Preserve) pointed me to two pieces in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — who would be quick to be concerned — that have taken a more relaxed view. They can be found here and here. The second of these articles is particularly scornful of media commentary on the implications of hypersonic missiles:

Many articles report, or exclaim, that there is no defense against hypersonic gliders. The word “unstoppable” pops up often. Again, compared to what? The United States cannot now defend against even modest ballistic missile attacks. One of Saudi Arabia’s most critical oil refining facilities was attacked by subsonic cruise missiles using decades-old technology that the Saudis, with a $180 billion defense budget, were not able to defend against at all. When headlines convey the message that the new thing about hypersonic gliders is that they are unstoppable, this implies that ballistic missiles are stoppable—that is, ballistic missile defense is easy, a done deal, and these new hypersonic weapons are undoing all that with revolutionary consequences. This is a major, dangerous distortion. Defending completely a huge area like the continental United States is an impossible task, whether against hypersonic weapons, ballistic missiles, or even subsonic cruise missiles. More limited point defense against intermediate-range ballistic missiles is extremely challenging but not impossible, but missile designers still have tricks that can make even that defense more difficult.

And, as Andrew points out, with tongue firmly in cheek,

It’s also possible that the capabilities and threat posed by hypersonic missiles have been hyped by those involved in their development to ramp up funding. Although no-one in the defence world would ever do such a thing, obviously.

Obviously.

My commonplace booklet The trailer for Alex Winter’s forthcoming film, The YouTube Effect.

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Peep-oh!

Quote of the Day

”Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.”

Samuel Johnson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan | Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right |Live | 2014

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Eccentric version of a great song but I love the guitars.

Long Read of the Day How hypersonic missiles work and the unique threats they pose

Fascinating (and useful) explainer by Professor Iain Boyd.

Russia used a hypersonic missile against a Ukrainian arms depot in the western part of the country on March 18, 2022. That might sound scary, but the technology the Russians used is not particularly advanced. However, next-generation hypersonic missiles that Russia, China and the U.S. are developing do pose a significant threat to national and global security.

I am an aerospace engineer who studies space and defense systems, including hypersonic systems. These new systems pose an important challenge due to their maneuverability all along their trajectory. Because their flight paths can change as they travel, these missiles must be tracked throughout their flight.

A second important challenge stems from the fact that they operate in a different region of the atmosphere from other existing threats. The new hypersonic weapons fly much higher than slower subsonic missiles but much lower than intercontinental ballistic missiles. The U.S. and its allies do not have good tracking coverage for this in-between region, nor does Russia or China.

This matters because hypersonic missiles threaten to upend the relative stability of the current era of nuclear weapons. Just something else to keep one awake at night.

A Yacht Owner’s Worst Nightmare Interesting piece in The Atlantic by Olga Khazan on how Europe and the U.S. Seize Oligarchs’ Yachts

TL;DR: it’s more difficult than you think.

I was hoping for exciting nighttime combat on the high seas, but the process of detaining a yacht is rather boring. Most of the 16 yacht “seizures” that have occurred so far have been more like freezes, according to Alex Finley, a writer and former CIA officer who has been tracking the seizures. First, a country will notice that a large, majestic vessel is parked in one of its shipyards and attempt to ascertain its true owner—a process that requires cracking open shell company after shell company, a nesting doll of paperwork, if you will. If the yacht is indeed connected to an oligarch, the country’s port authority simply forbids the yacht to move. The yacht remains at the dock, and the oligarch can’t use it for a while. The owners aren’t usually on their yachts when the boats are seized, Finley told me, so there are unfortunately no images of carabinieri dragging away tuxedoed men as they curse in Russian. Nor are the boats chained to the docks with comically large padlocks, as I had hoped. “They just are not given permission to leave,” Finley said.

Some countries are deregistering the yachts, negating their insurance, which discourages the boat from sailing off. An Italian official who was not authorized to give reporters his name told me that the boats are simply floating in the harbor, with no one allowed to get on. This person then sent me some videos of Italian officials walking around a dock in a calm and unhurried manner.

The real drama seems to happen either before or after the yachts are seized…

Pity. I was hoping for gunboats and boarding parties and Putin’s buddies swinging from the yardarm. Still, it’s an informative read.

My commonplace booklet I Like Free Speech So Much I’ve Decided to Buy It by Eli Grober

From McSweeney’s

Hi there, I’m Elon Musk. I’m mostly known for rockets and cars, but what I really care about is free speech. I can’t get enough of it. In fact, I like free speech so much I’ve decided to buy it.

That’s right, it turns out free speech isn’t free—it costs exactly $44 billion. That might sound like too much money for one person to be allowed to spend, but that’s only because it is. And I’ve decided free speech is worth the cost. I’m going to make sure some board full of rich guys doesn’t get to define what counts as free speech. Instead, just one rich guy will get to decide what counts as free speech: me.

So what does free speech mean to me? Free speech means… well, anything you want it to mean. Free speech is magical. It’s amorphous. It’s undefinable. That’s the power of free speech: nobody in history has ever defined it—not our founders, or politicians, or judges, or even average citizens. There’s simply no definition of free speech.

“That’s not true,” you might say, “It’s pretty clearly defined.” And to that, I’d say, “That’s the beauty of free speech—it can be a lie. I was lying to you. And that’s allowed.”

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The grapes of wrath

Seen in an upmarket Norfolk greengrocer’s one Halloween afternoon.

Quote of the Day

”The trouble, Mr Goldwyn, is that you are only interested in art and I am only interested in money.”

George Bernard Shaw, when declining to sell the movie rights to his plays to Sam Goldwyn.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Haydn | Trumpet Concerto in Eb, 1st movement | Allegro | Alison Balsom | BBC Proms, 2009.

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Long Read of the Day The Huge Endeavor to Produce a Tiny Microchip

This is a long, long read — but worth it if you’re puzzled why the post-Covid world is suddenly short of silicon chips, the tiny miniaturised circuits that now run the world. They’re amazingly difficult to make, and more than 90% of the really sophisticated ones are currently manufactured in Taiwan. Which is why Intel, the huge American semiconductor firm, is spending $20 billion on two factories at its chip-making complex in Arizona that will take three years to complete, with others to come in Ohio and Germany.

There’s a dramatic contrast between the tiny size of these silicon circuits and the enormity of the fabricant plants (fabs) needed to manufacture them. This New York Times report does a pretty good job of explaining and conveying that.

It also provides a compelling reminder that chip-fabrication has massive environmental downsides. Intel’s two fabs in Arizona draw 11m gallons of water a day from the local utility — in a drought-plagued state. The company claims that 82% of the water it consumes is reclaimed through filtration systems, settling ponds, etc. and sent back to the nearby city of Chandler, which operates treatment facilities (funded by Intel) and redistributes it for irrigation and other non-drinking uses.

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was 40 last Friday

Photo by Bill Bertram

Nice piece of nostalgia from The Register:

The ZX Spectrum, replete with rubber keyboard, debuted at £125 for the 16KB version and £175 for the 48KB incarnation. A 32KB RAM pack could be plugged into the rear expansion slot of the former, and this writer well remembers the joy of an unexpected reset caused by a wobbly bit of hardware.

Over five million of the Z80A-based devices were sold, and its impact cannot be overstated. While over 1.5 million BBC Micros (made by Acorn) may have also been sold during its lifetime, it was the ZX Spectrum that found its way into far more homes across Europe, and its impact continues to resonate in the IT world of today.

Raspberry Pi supremo Eben Upton was more on the Acorn side of things, but recalled the effect of the plastic slab: “As a much more affordable alternative to the Beeb, and with roughly 3x the lifetime sales, the Spectrum probably had a greater role in promoting the accidental route into engineering careers in the ’80s and early ’90s.”

Gosh, was that really 40 years ago. Time really does fly. Wonder if mine is still in the attic, along with my first Nokia phone (the one as big as a house-brick).

Mikhail Gorbachev had one too!

My commonplace booklet This City Pledges to Be Carbon-Neutral by the Time It’s Too Late

Nice spoof by Matthew Brian Cohen.

Thanks to decades of inaction, climate change is now an inevitable reality. However, there is still time to mitigate the brunt of the damage, and in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, we must be bold. That’s why, as mayor, I’ve set an ambitious (but achievable!) goal for our city to be carbon-neutral by the time it’s already too late.

The time for action is now, and by now, I mean twenty to thirty-five years from now. The window to push this back is rapidly closing. I fear that history will look back and ask us why we didn’t delay acting any sooner. That’s why my administration is committed to doing everything we can to kick the can down the road and tackle this looming existential threat at some vague point in the future.

The science is clear: to meet our climate goals, we need to radically transform both our societal infrastructure and our individual behaviors. And since we’re not willing to do that, the hope is that someday, when it’s one hundred thirty degrees in the middle of March, we will. In the meantime, we’re just going to stay the course as the oil and gas industry continues to see record profits from exciting new products like inner-city fracking and zero-use plastics…

It is a spoof — honest.

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The History Man

My friend, the historian Peter Clarke, at the launch of his book on Keynes in 2009.

Quote of the Day

”I always say beauty is only sin deep.”

Saki (H.H. Munro)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Albert Ammons | Boogie Woogie Stomp | Ladyva live in Germany.

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Nobody sleeps at the back when this kind of music is played.

Long Read of the Day Last week Josh Simons and I had a conversation with Alina Utrata about Elon Musk and Twitter on her splendid Anti-Dystopians podcast. At that point all we knew was that Musk had rejected the Twitter Board’s offer of a seat on the Board in return for an undertaking not to increase his shareholding beyond a certain point, and our conversation was largely about: Twitter’s key role in the networked public sphere; various aspects of Musk’s enthusiasm for “free speech”; and the implications of his declared interest in buying the whole company and taking it private.

Since we recorded the podcast, the story moved on, and yesterday the announcement came that the Board had accepted Musk’s offer of $54.20 per share. So Twitter’s second-biggest troll has now bought the platform he relentlessly trolled. Nobody knows how this will play out — or indeed what Musk is playing at — but my gut instinct is that ‘free speech’ is not the top of his agenda.

In the meantime, Ranjan Roy, a canny observer of these things, has put together the widest range of speculations that I’ve seen, which is why I recommend it as today’s Long Read. Here’s the gist:

My mini-grand theory is that this entire sequence of events: The Twitter purchase, the SEC escalation, Tesla’s blowout quarter – it’s all about the next giant package. Musk saw an opportunity at the beginning of the year. Tesla’s business was on a roll, his pay package was almost complete, the SEC was threatening his Twitter account, and Tesla’s stock had stalled out for six months. Every great entrepreneur understands the importance of momentum and he decided to capitalize on this confluence of events.

But there’s lots more.

The key takeaway is that this is only incidentally about free speech. It’s really about democracy, power and naked capitalism.

How democracies spy on their citizens Generally they use Pegasus, a fiendish piece of spyware for compromising iPhones which was developed — and is marketed — by an Israeli company, NSO. This New Yorker piece provides a readable introduction to the ways it’s being used (including infecting a phone or phones in Boris Johnson’s office). The only good news in this story is that NSO now appears to be struggling.

The company has been valued at more than a billion dollars. But now it is contending with debt, battling an array of corporate backers, and, according to industry observers, faltering in its long-standing efforts to sell its products to U.S. law enforcement, in part through an American branch, Westbridge Technologies. It also faces numerous lawsuits in many countries, brought by Meta (formerly Facebook), by Apple, and by individuals who have been hacked by NSO. The company said in its statement that it had been “targeted by a number of politically motivated advocacy organizations, many with well-known anti-Israel biases,” and added that “we have repeatedly cooperated with governmental investigations, where credible allegations merit, and have learned from each of these findings and reports, and improved the safeguards in our technologies.”

If NSO is indeed in trouble, it is thanks mainly to amazing forensic work by the Citizen Lab, a terrific research group based at the University of Toronto that focusses on high-tech human-rights abuses.

My commonplace booklet How Ikea tricks you into buying more stuff. Who knew? Link

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Quote of the Day

“The first problem love presents us with is how to find it. But the most enduring problem of love, which is also the most enduring problem of life, is how to live with the fact that we will lose it.”

Kathryn Schulz, in her new book, Lost and Found: A Memoir.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news John Field | Nocturne No. 3 in A-Flat Major, H 26

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Long Read of the Day Kevin McCarthy Will Live to Lie Again

Terrific, coruscating column by Jack Shafer on the House Minority Leader, whose spine has been surgically removed by Trump.

McCarthy, whose relationship with the truth perpetually veers toward the squishy, suffered two mortifications at the hands of the press on Thursday. First, New York Times reporters Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin reported from their forthcoming book, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future, that in a Jan. 10, 2021 call to top Republicans, McCarthy had said Donald Trump should resign from the presidency. “‘I’ve had it with this guy,’ he told a group of Republican leaders,” Burns and Martin wrote.

“Totally false,” McCarthy immediately protested in a statement, and his office denied that he had said Trump should resign. Then came McCarthy’s second indignity as that night MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow played an audio recording, provided by the Times, of McCarthy that proved the Burns and Martin report. Sensing McCarthy’s political corpse was aflame, the press bore down on the House minority leader this morning. “Is Kevin McCarthy toast?” asked my POLITICO colleagues. “The Humiliation of Kevin McCarthy,” gloated the Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes. McCarthy got it in the neck from both members of the commentariat and from Capitol Hill legislators. Trump sycophant Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) went so far as to blast his colleague on Twitter over the disclosure.

You can guess what happened next. A trip to Mar-a-Lago to bow and scrape to the man who now appears to own the Republican Party. Shafer exhumes the whole sordid story. I wish more hacks wrote like this.

A self-driving revolution? We’re barely out of second gear Yesterday’s Observer column:

“Britain moves closer to a self-driving revolution,” said a perky message from the Department for Transport that popped into my inbox on Wednesday morning. The purpose of the message was to let us know that the government is changing the Highway Code to “ensure the first self-driving vehicles are introduced safely on UK roads” and to “clarify drivers’ responsibilities in self-driving vehicles, including when a driver must be ready to take back control”.

The changes will specify that while travelling in self-driving mode, motorists must be ready to resume control in a timely way if they are prompted to, such as when they approach motorway exits. They also signal a puzzling change to current regulations, allowing drivers “to view content that is not related to driving on built-in display screens while the self-driving vehicle is in control”. So you could watch Gardeners’ World on iPlayer, but not YouTube videos of F1 races? Reassuringly, though, it will still be illegal to use mobile phones in self-driving mode, “given the greater risk they pose in distracting drivers as shown in research”.

As usual, the announcement comes coated in three layers of prime political cant. This “exciting technology” is “developing at pace right here in Great Britain” (but apparently not in Northern Ireland; could it be that the DUP doesn’t approve of such advanced technology?). The government is “ensuring we have strong foundations in place for drivers when the technology takes to our roads”, which will be great once it has attended to the crumbling physical foundations of the roads in my neighbourhood. And of course it’s all happening “while boosting economic growth across the nation and securing Britain’s place as a global science superpower”…

Read on

Optimism 2.0 The experiment has started so let’s make it work

Diane Coyle’s illuminating review of Yascha Mounk’s new book, The Great Experiment: How to Make Diverse Democracies Work:

The final part starts with “reasons for optimism” – one of which is that actually, most of the diverse democracies are slowly making progress toward better integration, accepting that people have diverse and multiple identities. The book also argues that optimism is important because it will affect actions and outcomes. It acknowledges what it terms the ‘Chapter 10 problem’ – the generally unsatisfying list of policies at the end of a book, as demanded by publishers and indeed readers. It doesn’t really provide this so much as a few general reflections, concluding: “Constructing diverse democracies that command the enthusiastic support of the great majority of their citzens is going to be hard.” But what choice do we have other than to try? The Great Experiment is already well under way.

So I liked the upbeat message. I don’t think there’s much that’s new here for readers of the death of democracy genre, but the arrangement of the argument into an optimistic outlook is very welcome.

Thinner on paper Delicious evocation by Peter Hitchens of his early days at the Daily Express:

An air of decline and lost empires pervaded the surprisingly shabby building, whose sleek 1930s exterior concealed dingy offices where filthy, yellowish windows gave us a dreary view of the equally unlovely cigarette-stained newsroom of our rivals next door. The shabby, shouty newsroom, heart of the beast, looked as if the invention of the telephone had come as a complete surprise. Sticky black cables hung from the ceiling in thick clumps like jungle creepers, leading to black dial phones covered in a strange crusty film which I think must have been the congealed breath of a thousand reporters. Typewriters, now only to be found in museums, were everywhere. There was even carbon paper, for making copies. There were men in black waistcoats, endlessly whispering into receivers, who looked as if they had been there since 1936. Compressed-air tubes propelled edited material to the forbidden zones where the compositors worked, giving the corridors the look of those in a large warship…

Hitchins is the only living British journalist who reminds me of Evelyn Waugh, not least because the Express was the model for the Daily Beast in Waugh’s wonderful novel, Scoop.

As admirers of the book will know, Waugh had a low opinion of journalists. His hapless hero, William Boot, for example,

“had once seen in Taunton a barely intelligible film about newspaper life in New York where neurotic men in shirt-sleeves and eye-shades had rushed from telephones to tape machines, insulting and betraying one another in surroundings of unredeemed squalor.”

Technology’s Mindfulness Racket Lovely by essay Evgeny Morozov (Whom God Preserve).

In yet another sign that the new age lingo of the 1960s is still very much with us, “mindfulness” has become the new “sustainability”: No one quite knows what it is, but everyone seems to be for it. It recently made the cover of Time magazine, while a long list of celebrities—Arianna Huffington, Deepak Chopra, Paolo Coelho—are all tirelessly preaching the virtues of curbing technology-induced stress and regulating the oppressiveness of constant connectivity, often at conferences with titles like “Wisdom 2.0.”

The embrace of the mindfulness agenda by the technology crowd is especially peculiar. Consider Huffington, whose eponymous publication has even launched a stress-tracking app with the poetic name of “GPS for the Soul”—a new app to fight the distraction caused by the old apps—and turned the business of mindfulness into a dedicated beat.

This is from 2014. I love his acerbic style and share his aversion to tech hubris.

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This morning’s Observer column:

“Britain moves closer to a self-driving revolution,” said a perky message from the Department for Transport that popped into my inbox on Wednesday morning. The purpose of the message was to let us know that the government is changing the Highway Code to “ensure the first self-driving vehicles are introduced safely on UK roads” and to “clarify drivers’ responsibilities in self-driving vehicles, including when a driver must be ready to take back control”.

The changes will specify that while travelling in self-driving mode, motorists must be ready to resume control in a timely way if they are prompted to, such as when they approach motorway exits. They also signal a puzzling change to current regulations, allowing drivers “to view content that is not related to driving on built-in display screens while the self-driving vehicle is in control”. So you could watch Gardeners’ World on iPlayer, but not YouTube videos of F1 races? Reassuringly, though, it will still be illegal to use mobile phones in self-driving mode, “given the greater risk they pose in distracting drivers as shown in research”.

As usual, the announcement comes coated in three layers of prime political cant. This “exciting technology” is “developing at pace right here in Great Britain” (but apparently not in Northern Ireland; could it be that the DUP doesn’t approve of such advanced technology?). The government is “ensuring we have strong foundations in place for drivers when the technology takes to our roads”, which will be great once it has attended to the crumbling physical foundations of the roads in my neighbourhood. And of course it’s all happening “while boosting economic growth across the nation and securing Britain’s place as a global science superpower”…

Read on

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Carnations

Found in an old photo archive.

Quote of the Day

”The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

George Bernard Shaw

In that context, Elon Musk (see Commonplace Booklet below) is clearly an unreasonable man. The key question therefore, is whether in the end he represents progress, and if so of what kind.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Don McLean | American Pie (Live in Austin)

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Long Read of the Day How to stay optimistic in these dark times

I’m temperamentally an optimist with a fairly sunny disposition. On the other hand, the more I understand about the way our societies are evolving, the bleaker the future begins to look. I often think that what is needed now is a theory of incompetent systems — i.e. systems that cannot fix themselves. The two examples that come immediately to mind are: democracy in America (and possibly elsewhere too); and global warming, but there are probably others. Pessimism seems a logical result of such ‘realistic’ assessments of the state the world is in.

But pessimism if a disabling emotion, and in looking for other ways of thinking about the future I keep coming back to Gramsci’s idea of “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. So you can imagine how pleased I was to come on this thoughtful blog post by Noah Smith in which he explores what adopting that philosophy might mean for us now.

Hope you like it.

On Jonathan Haidt’s essay yesterday… Graham Minenor-Matheson wrote:

Just wanted to draw your attention to a Twitter thread by the media scholar Daniel Kreiss responding to that article . Essentially Kreiss sees a number of problems with Haidt’s article notably that it is ahistorical and gets a lot wrong about social media and how politics happens through it. Hope you read it!

I did, and it’s good. My hope in highlighting the Haidt essay was that it would spark a productive debate, and that seems to be happening. The Kreiss thread is a much better response than the one I mentioned yesterday. I hope there’ll be more.

The core problem with an essay like Haidt’s is that it’s very difficult to attempt a big-picture or long-sweep view without skating over thin ice to keep the narrative going. Which is why many academics now eschew the essay as a form.

One of my heroes was the late Neil Postman, the great cultural critic. He was always being attacked by scholars on similar grounds. And yet he got some important things right — and in the process shaped the way I think about our information environment.

It’d be interesting to do an annotated version of Haidt’s essay at some stage.

My commonplace booklet * The Musk TED interview Link

Live, unedited and revealing. The only historical parallel for Musk that I can think of is Henry Ford. Which is why this interview might be worth an hour of your time.

How to survive a ‘tactical’ nuclear explosion.

Never thought I’d see this kind of thing again in my lifetime. Link

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The shards of geological time

Maghera, Co Donegal.

Quote of the Day

”Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”

Mae West

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Finbarr Furey | Nearer my God to Thee

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First time I’ve heard him play this. Short and sweet.

Long Read of the Day Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

And why it’s not just a phase.

You need to make an appointment with this long, long essay by Jonathan Haidt. It’s the most sustained attempt I’ve found in non-book form to try and encompass the overall impact of social media on democracy. Admittedly, its prime focus is American democracy, and it may be that that dilutes its relevance for other countries and cultures. But it’s definitely worth your time.

Here’s how it opens:

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?

There have been all kinds of pushback against the essay — see, for example here. To date, I haven’t found them convincing, or willing to take his on argument on its own ground.

New York Times has a new pontiff Nice Politico column by Jack Shafer:

The New York Times crowned a new pope this morning, Joseph Kahn, making him executive editor starting in June. Like the modern Vatican, the Times doesn’t wait for its maximum leader to die before appointing a new one. There will be no coronation mass for Kahn as he takes the top editorial position at the paper in June. Nor will he be bestowed a papal tiara or deliver a pontifical blessing. Having served as retiring Executive Editor Dean Baquet’s understudy since 2016, he will move in, Baquet will move out, and the Times will have turned. Executive editors come and go. Only the Times remains.

As the new pope of the Times, Kahn will wield astonishing power. He will order and kill stories with kingly authority. He will determine not only his paper’s news agenda but that of journalism’s lesser priests, who will await his news judgment before expressing their own. He will hire and make careers. He will fire and break them. He will become a permanent resident in the minds of the paper’s 1,750 newsroom staffers, who will spend half their workdays wondering what he wants and how to please him.

But unlike Rome’s top priest, it seems that the Times pope doesn’t flex absolute power over his institution.

Imperial delusions Buried deep in the collective psyche of Middle England (and of its ruling elites) is a bad case of Imperial nostalgia, or at any rate a conviction that, on balance, the British Empire had been a civilising force in the world. It’s one of the reasons why the risk of Brexit never really went away. (After all, joining the EU in 1973 was an implicit acceptance that Britain was ‘just another country — like Italy’, as one anti-European MP put it to me back then.) And of course this Imperial nostalgia is completely baffling to anyone coming from a country which has been the supposed beneficiary of this ‘civilising’ process. We in Ireland had 800 years of it, and we are still living with the results in relation to the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Brexiteers’ casual indifference to the Good Friday Agreement.

All of which is a reason for welcoming Caroline Elkins’s book, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. I’ve only read the reviews of it yet — it’ll go on the list of books I’ll bring to Provence in the Summer. But in the meantime, Sunil Khilnani’s terrific (and not uncritical) New Yorker review essay gives one a pretty good impression of the ground Elkins covers.

Here’s how his piece opens:

At the height of the British Empire, just after the First World War, an island smaller than Kansas controlled roughly a quarter of the world’s population and landmass. To the architects of this colossus, the largest empire in history, each conquest was a moral achievement. Imperial tutelage, often imparted through the barrel of an Enfield, was delivering benighted peoples from the errors of their ways—child marriage, widow immolation, headhunting. Among the edifiers was a Devonshire-born rector’s son named Henry Hugh Tudor. Hughie, as he was known to Winston Churchill and his other chums, pops up so reliably in colonial outposts with outsized body counts that his story can seem a “Where’s Waldo?” of empire.

He’s Churchill’s garrison-mate in Bangalore in 1895—a time of “messes and barbarism,” the future Prime Minister complained in a note to his mum. As the century turns, Tudor is battling Boers on the veldt; then it’s back to India, and on to occupied Egypt. Following a decorated stint as a smoke-screen artist in the trenches of the First World War, he’s in command of a gendarmerie, nicknamed Tudor’s Toughs, that opens fire in a Dublin stadium in 1920—an assault during a search for I.R.A. assassins which leaves dozens of civilians dead or wounded. Prime Minister David Lloyd George delights in rumors that Tudor’s Toughs were killing two Sinn Féinners for every murdered loyalist. Later, even the military’s chief of staff marvelled at how nonchalantly the men spoke of those killings, tallying them up as though they were runs in a cricket match; Tudor and his “scallywags” were out of control. It didn’t matter: Churchill, soon to be Secretary of State for the Colonies, had Tudor’s back.

Imperial subjects, of course, sometimes found their own solutions to such problems. A hard-line British field marshal, atop the I.R.A. hit list, was gunned down in Belgravia in 1922. Tudor, worried he would be next, made himself scarce. By the following year, he and his Irish paramilitaries were propagating their tactics for suppressing natives in the British-controlled Mandate of Palestine, Churchill having decided that the violence-prone Tudor was just the fellow to train the colonial police. A letter from Tudor to Churchill that I recently came across crystallizes all the insouciance, cynicism, greed, callousness, and errant judgment of empire. He opens by telling Churchill that he’s just commanded his troops to slaughter Adwan Bedouins who had been marching on Amman to protest high taxes levied on them by their notoriously extravagant emir. This tribe was “invariably friendly to Great Britain,” Tudor writes, a touch ruefully. But, he adds, “politics are not my affair.”

He also assured Churchill that “the Palestinians would be easier to pacify than the Irish”.

You get the idea.

My commonplace booklet What is this ‘poison pill’ that the Twitter Board is devising to stop Musk taking over the company?

Useful explainer from Quartz.

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Remembering Katherine Whitehorn Readers with long memories will recall my tribute to Katherine in 2018 when it became known that she had advanced Alzheimer’s. She died in January this year and yesterday I went to her Memorial Service in London.

It was held in St James’s church in Piccadilly, which I’ve always thought of as the parish church of the Old Money that inhabits that part of London when it’s not residing in its grand country houses. You get the picture when you notice that the church’s grand piano is a Fazioli. Katharine was a very long-term Observer columnist and one of the most distinctive journalists of her generation, but she had been at one time the paper’s Fashion Editor, and yesterday her friends from that period — all of them in their eighties or even older — turned out, in style. And I mean style. I’ve never seen such an assembly of beautifully coiffed and elegantly attired women in my life. So it was fitting that Rachel Cooke, an Observer colleague who gave a lovely tribute, reminded the congregation of how sharp an observer of the couture scene Katherine could be. Think, for example, of her observation that “there are three kinds of hats: offensive, defensive, and shrapnel”, the last referring to the kinds of hats that find themselves attached to ladies’ heads at posh weddings.

She was a wonderful woman. May she rest in peace.

Apropos Virginia Woolf and Keynes VW’s diary entry on Keynes yesterday prompted Andrew Curry (Whom God Preserve) to remind me about the famous Low cartoon of Keynes in his armchair, which captures the great man rather well.

Quote of the Day

”The wind of change, whatever it is, blows most freely through an open mind.”

Katherine Whitehorn

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Franz Schubert | Litanei auf das Fest Aller Seelen | Felicity Lott

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This was sung beautifully by the Choir of St James’s yesterday.

Long Read of the Day ”You want to write letters to your city”

This is a transcript of a remarkable conversation between Ezra Klein and Volodymyr Yermolenko, a Ukrainian philosopher and the editor of the 2019 book, Ukraine in Histories and Stories, a collection of essays by Ukrainian intellectuals offering insights not only on Ukraine’s history going back to the Middle Ages and the Cossack era of the 16th and 17th centuries, but also on its recent past.

This is the passage that initially caught my attention:

EZRA KLEIN: This is a strange question to know how to ask correctly. What is it like to go from living in a city that is peaceful, where you’re working and doing your writing and shopping for groceries and checking your Facebook page and tweeting, all of a sudden to a city that is being shelled? What of your life before remains? What doesn’t? What does passing through that barrier from normalcy to emergency feel like?

VOLODYMYR YERMOLENKO: Well, a lot of things have changed very quickly in our understanding. Things have changed their meaning. For example, a window is no longer a window because you’d better not approach to the windows, people say, because if there is a shelling, you can be wounded by the glass of the window.

The light is no longer the light because the light can be dangerous if there are airstrikes. So you better switch off the lights when you are — in the evening, for example. Therefore, when you’re traveling through Kyiv right now on car — and I do it regularly — you are traveling in the dark streets. So the lights from the streets are switched off. So you are in a very dark place, which never, never happened before, of course.

And if you enter — I several times took some families to volunteer to get them out of the city, and then we went to other villages, for example, and when there is dark, the villages are completely dark. There are no lights in the houses, because people are very careful enough not to give signs to artillery or to airstrikes, to jets — the Russian jets — that there are villages.

So the meaning of things have changed. Of course, your understanding of your house, of your home. For example, I relocated my family. I spent some time with my relatives in western Ukraine. It’s very hard, actually, to lose your home. So I have an impression that your home, your house, your apartment is like the dearest person to you. So you want to come back. You want to write letters to your city, for example. You want to hug it, et cetera.

My commonplace booklet A flyover view of Elon Musk’s new estate Link

Courtesy of Séan Doran and NASA.

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Stately home in the evening

Quote of the Day

”Went to Charleston for the night & had a clear sight of Maynard by lamplight — like a gorged seal, double chin, ledge of red lip, little eyes, sensual, brutal, unimaginative: one of those visions that comes from a chance attitude, lost so soon as he turned his head. I suppose though it illustrates something I feel about him. Then he’s read neither of my books — In spite of this I enjoyed myself: L. Came over next day and found me neither suicidal nor homicidal.”

Virginia Woolf, writing about John Maynard Keynes in her diary for 26 September, 1920. ‘L’ is her husband, Leonard.

At this stage Keynes was a world-famous public intellectual, largely on the back of his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a polemical attack on the Treaty of Versailles, in the negotiation of which he had for a time played a part as a member of the British delegation. But the Bloomsbury crowd always had ambivalent feelings about him, partly perhaps because he was the only one of them who had any role in public affairs. They were particularly pissed off because of the fact that as a young economist he joined the Treasury and played a significant role there finding ways of funding the war effort.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news David Lindley | Pay the Man

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Long Read of the Day Books Become Games

This is the kind of essay that will resonate with anyone who’s ever published a serious book. Justin Smith has just published such a volume, which I am now honour-bound to read — for reasons which will become clear in a moment). Its title: The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning. Here’s how it opens:

I have been saying “yes”, to virtually every podcast and radio invitation I’ve received. Sometimes I find myself doing some rather quick mental work, after clicking the Zoom link, to recall who exactly it is I’m talking to, and what is expected of me. Sometimes there’s a tell-tale hint —an Australian accent, say— that brings me back to the e-mail I received a week or so prior and that reminds me of the host’s general orientation and expectations. Sometimes I fly blind through the whole thing, still uncertain at the end whose show I’ve just graced with my presence.

Most of the podcasters I’ve encountered, if I may be honest, remind me of nothing so much as the classic Onion “advice column”, from back before that newspaper was generated by AI (as far as I can tell), that consisted in a book-report on Animal Farm by a kid who hasn’t read it. It’s “well worth the $5.99 purchase price,” he wrote. “It’s so good, in fact, that if I was in Canada, I would be happy to pay the higher price of $7.99.” Similarly, questions I’ve been getting on my book, I can’t help but notice, are often drawn entirely from the sheet of promotional copy that is included with it. This is text I was compelled to generate at a nearly-final stage of book-production, when I was completely exhausted by the project and just wanted it over. If I were a better player at the book-game I would take this part of the process more seriously. Instead I put most of my energy into writing the book itself, I crank out some hasty copy at the end, and then I pay for it when I have to hold forth, again and again, on the contents of that single page.

Smith’s point is that nowadays “the work of book-writing involves actual writing only in an initial phase, while subsequently the work becomes wrapped up in book-pumping, in technologically mediated promotions, branding of the self, bullet-pointing, after-the-fact elevator-pitching, and gaming of all possible metrics in the hope of going viral. In short, books, today, are a satellite of social media, operating according to the same logic, within the same empty economy of buzz and inevitable forgetting”.

It’s an engaging essay and I heartily recommend it.

What it brought to mind was an assignment I was given years ago when Jaron Lanier was in London publicising one of his books. I was asked to do a piece about him and an interview was duly set up in one of those posh hotels which seem to exist solely for PR purposes. When I arrived, his publicist apologised that Jaron’s previous interview was over-running. Would I mind waiting?

I didn’t. When we finally got to start I embarked on an opinionated stream of thought and we found ourselves in the middle of an interesting and lively conversation. And then he suddenly went silent. Had I said something to offend him, I asked. No, he replied, it’s just that he had suddenly realised that, of the 20 or so people who had interviewed him about the book in the previous two days, I seemed to be the only person who had actually read it!

When we finally finished talking I asked him if I could take a photograph.

Here it is:

Years later, I had a nice email from him asking if I still had the pic because he needed one for a gig he was doing! He’s a lovely man.

Diane Coyle on Thomas Piketty’s new book Characteristically perceptive review in the Financial Times of 12 April (and so behind the paywall). As usual, her summing-up gets to the heart of the matter:

Strip away the detail and what remains is an all-too-apparent underlying abstraction from the practical politics of change, an abstraction emphasised by the book’s very literal translation by Steven Rendall from intellectual French. If “r” really is greater than “g”, then perhaps inequality does have its own internal dynamics, but achieving a turn to “democratic, decentralized socialism” surely demands some attention to how it might come about?

The issue is that Piketty’s theory of change is motivated by ideology, so articulating a persuasive alternative ideology is enough. And surely a vision of a fair, green, participatory future is persuasive enough? Sadly, what convinces readers in the salon differs from what drives action on the streets, or even in the corridors of power, where Pessimistic Piketty is likely to prove more persuasive than this newly Optimistic Piketty.

To adapt a famous adage of Marx’s: the purpose of political economy is to understand the world, not to change it.

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Tulip mania

In the College garden on Saturday afternoon.

Johnson and the War

As far as I can discover, Boris Johnson is the first serving Prime Minister to be convicted of a crime while in office. If Putin had not invaded Ukraine and thereby enabled Johnson to posture as a Churchill tribute act, Tory MPs would be working out to defenestrate him. One of the arguments being tried for doing nothing about the ‘Partygate’ scandal is that it would be madness to change a Prime Minister in the middle of a war. Clearly none of the proponents of this line have read any history. Neville Chamberlain was the serving Prime Minister when Britain was actually in an existentially-threatening war, but he resigned on 10 May 1940 to make way for Winston Churchill.

Quote of the Day

”Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”

William Pitt, 1783

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Brahms | Intermezzo A Major Op 118 No 2 | Radu Lupu

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Long Read of the Day Gary Gerstle on the strange life — and possible death — of neoliberalism

Gary has a new book out – The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order — which is now on my reading list. Here is a transcript of a fascinating conversation between him and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins of The Nation. I was particularly struck by Gerstle’s observations on Obama:

What was it about Obama that compelled him to save rather than to resist the neoliberal political order, especially given what happened after his presidency?

GG: The election of Barack Obama in 2008 unleashed all kinds of hopes for the country’s future. Fourteen years later, we have the advantage of historical perspective. That perspective tells us (or me, in any case), that Obama is best seen as the last president of the neoliberal order, not the first president of a post-racial, progressive age.

To handle the economic crisis, Obama turned to a team of advisors, including Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Peter Orszag, and Michael Froman, quite similar in policy orientation to the Rubin team that had overseen the Democratic Party’s assent to the neoliberal order in the 1990s. They decided not to punish the large banks whose misdeeds had brought on the crisis but to focus instead on restoring them to financial health and security as quickly as possible. Thus, no banks were nationalized or broken up, and no bankers were sent to jail for their misdeeds. There was not even a public shaming that would have occurred had banking executives been forced to run the gauntlet of congressional hearings.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans were losing their jobs and their homes. The gap between rich and poor widened during Obama’s first term, with the income of the top 1 percent of American income earners increasing by more than 30 percent while the bottom 99 percent had to settle for a raise too small to matter. Main Street Americans noticed that elites had been restored to financial health and security while they had not.

By temperament, Obama was a cautious man. Moreover, the burden of restoring to health a shattered global financial system was immense. But the more important point to make here is a different one: namely, that the neoliberal order was still hegemonic, constraining Obama’s sense of the choices available to him…

He’s also good on Joe Biden.

Do read the whole thing.

Peter Thiel: the cut-price Cicero Yesterday’s Observer column:

Since powdered rhino horn has (rightly) been banned, only two aphrodisiacs remain: political power and great wealth. Of these, the second is the more interesting, partly because most humans, especially journalists, seem to be affected by it. It’s what leads them to assume that if someone is fabulously rich, then she or he must be very smart. That’s why the super-rich are invariably surrounded by fawning sycophants – and also why they eventually come to believe that they themselves are geniuses.

Which brings us neatly to Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s leading contrarian. With a net worth of perhaps $5bn (£3.9bn), he is undoubtedly rich, though not in the Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or even Bill Gates league. But since he is the only public intellectual that the tech industry has produced, there is a widespread belief that he must also be a deep thinker, which is why organisations ask him to give “keynote” speeches.

The function of such addresses is to give an elevated tone to what are otherwise sordid proceedings, which explains why Thiel was invited to address the 2022 bitcoin conference in Miami, which was billed as “a four-day pilgrimage for those seeking greater freedom and individual sovereignty”. Given that the attendees at this shindig were likely subscribers to the view that he is a genius, it was an easy gig for the great man. Think of it as Narendra Modi addressing the annual conference of the Bharatiya Janata party and you’ll get the general idea.

Thiel was there to tell the attendees that they were the Lord’s anointed…

Read on

Kevin Roose’s Latecomers Guide to Crypto: the annotated version You may remember that Roose’s NYT piece was Friday’s ‘Long Read’. Some experts were not impressed by it, and Molly White has produced a lovely critically-annotated version which provides an antidote to what critics saw as “a thinly-veiled advertisement for cryptocurrency”.

Thanks to Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve) for alerting me to it.

My commonplace booklet Mumurations of starlings. Extraordinary photographs. Link

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This is wonderful — an interactive online map of the blogosphere, which kind-of confirms my belief that the Web provides an instantiation of Habermas’s idea of the public sphere.

Click on the link to interact with it. (The picture above is just a static image.)

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Apple time

Our apple tree has, once again, exploded into blossom! Stand under it and all you can hear is a gentle hum — of bees doing their stuff.

Quote of the Day

“Errors are not in the art but in the artificers”

Isaac Newton‌

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news JJ Cale & Eric Clapton | After Midnight & Call me the Breeze

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Long Read of the Day The Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

Useful Long Read by Kevin Roose if you’re interested in, or baffled by, this stuff.

Until fairly recently, if you lived anywhere other than San Francisco, it was possible to go days or even weeks without hearing about cryptocurrency.

Now, suddenly, it’s inescapable. Look one way, and there are Matt Damon and Larry David doing ads for crypto start-ups. Swivel your head — oh, hey, it’s the mayors of Miami and New York City, arguing over who loves Bitcoin more. Two N.B.A. arenas are now named after crypto companies, and it seems as if every corporate marketing team in America has jumped on the NFT — or nonfungible token — bandwagon. (Can I interest you in one of Pepsi’s new “Mic Drop” genesis NFTs? Or maybe something from Applebee’s “Metaverse Meals” NFT collection, inspired by the restaurant chain’s “iconic” menu items?)

Crypto! For years, it seemed like the kind of fleeting tech trend most people could safely ignore, like hoverboards or Google Glass. But its power, both economic and cultural, has become too big to overlook. Twenty percent of American adults, and 36 percent of millennials, own cryptocurrency, according to a recent Morning Consult survey…

Not Your Father’s Art, Not Your Father’s Frauds And if you haven’t already had enough of crypto, then this marvellous post by Dave Birch (Whom God Preserve) about the racketeering that goes on around so-called non-fungible-tokens (NFTs) will cheer you up.

I bought a non-fungible token (NFT) the other day. I bought it on OpenSea, one of the major NFT marketplaces. In case you are interested in art, it is a cartoon from the talented artist Helen Holmes. In case you are interested in speculation, this is the one that I bought. It is from her “originals” collection and is now proudly on display in my crypto.com wallet for all to see.

I commissioned Helen to draw the cartoons that I use to illustrate my articles on Forbes, so I know for a fact that she is real, that the cartoons are originals created by her and that I have the right to use them due to our own agreement. And, I am happy to say, that if anyone buys one of her NFTs, the money goes to her, the deserving artist. As it turns out, this makes “my” NFT one of the small number of legitimate examples of some, because last month OpenSea said that over 80% of the NFTs created for free on the platform are “plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam”.

Do read the whole piece.

What I love about crypto is that its enthusiasts fervently believe that it’s a technical fix for an untrustworthy world.

LATER Interesting also that the Wikipedia Community has voted to stop accepting donations in cryptocurrencies.

The death of the gas station

From Vox:

Slowly but surely, electric cars and trucks are taking over American highways. The White House aims for half of new vehicles sold in the US to be EVs by 2030, and auto giants like GM and Volvo want to go all-electric in a similar time frame. As utility companies hurry to expand the number of charging stations — a critical step for the EV transition — the future of the gas station is in doubt.

Right now, gas stations are a regular part of American life, a place drivers go on a daily or weekly basis to fill up and sometimes grab a snack. But the fuel pump plus convenience store concept has much less to offer the country’s small but growing number of EV owners.

While some gas stations have taken the leap and installed charging ports alongside their pumps, people tend to do the lion’s share of their EV charging at home. And since EV chargers can be installed in almost any location that’s connected to the power grid — they’re now available in office garages and rest stops, and will soon be in some Starbucks parking lots — the gas station is increasingly unnecessary for some Americans.

And not just petrol stations either. There’s a huge, localised industry of smallish local garages and workshops whose livelihood is intimately connected with the internal combustion engine.

My commonplace booklet Ukraine Opens Russian Drone, Finds Canon DSLR Inside Link

And an old model, too. Secured with Velcro.

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The Empty Chair

Spotted on a beautiful beach in Kerry.

Quote of the Day

”Education is what survives when what has been learnt is forgotten.”

B.F. Skinner

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Mozart | Dove sono | The Marriage of Figaro | Dorothea Röschmann

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Long Read of the Day What It Costs to Live

Sobering reality check by Arianne Shahvisi.

Our bodies can only maintain homeostasis within reasonable bounds, however. Acute challenges lead to disease and death; chronic pressures wear us down. There is a Silicon Valley trend for toying with those limits. Intermittent fasting and icy showers are supposed to induce ‘positive stress’, allowing tech bros to spend more hours processing code. For everyone else, there’s just old-fashioned negative stress, both psychological and biological. Poverty is a major cause. Persistent food insecurity in children leads to a sustained stress response that pushes the body to extreme homeostatic responses, including prolonged and abnormally high levels of cortisol and continuous inflammation. The result is more frequent and prolonged childhood illness. That’s in addition to the direct effects of hunger and undernutrition: stunting, fatigue, poor working memory. These effects continue into adolescence, and are associated with a higher risk of depression and suicidal thoughts. Food insecurity in adults increases the risk of hypertension, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Long-term exposure to low temperatures strains the body’s equilibrium. More people die in the winter months because of respiratory virus epidemics, increased air pollution and cold weather, but studies correcting for these factors show that one in five excess winter deaths in the UK is attributable to low temperatures at home.

While the energy required to keep a body running remains unchanged, the price of doing so is higher than ever. Even before the instability caused by Putin’s war, gas markets were failing to meet post-lockdown energy demands. Reserves depleted during the cold winter of 2020-21 haven’t been replaced. The UK only imports a fraction of its gas from Russia (5 per cent, compared with 41 per cent for the rest of Europe), but that makes little difference when prices hike on the global market. Natural gas now costs twenty times what it did at the lowest point of the pandemic, and a third more than it did in January. The UK government has responded by lifting the energy price cap by 54 per cent, protecting companies from taking the hit despite the fact that the Big Six – British Gas, EDF, E.ON, npower, Scottish Power and SSE – have made £7 billion in profit over the last five years. With the new cap in place, household fuel bills will rise by £700 over the course of the year, but it won’t stop there. Another increase has already been announced for six months’ time.

There was a brief interlude — at the beginning of the pandemic in the Spring of 2020 — when the UK government appeared to break with the neoliberal habit of several lifetimes to put the well-being of its subjects ahead of the prosperity of corporations. Turns out it was just a blip.

On getting up and going to work Last Saturday, April 9, Heather Cox Richardson had a memorable post on her blog:

On April 9, 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant got out of bed with a migraine.

The pain had hit the day before as he rode through the Virginia countryside, where the United States Army had been harrying the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Robert E. Lee, for days.

Grant knew it was only a question of time before Lee had to surrender. After four years of war, the people in the South were starving, and Lee’s army was melting away as men went home to salvage whatever they could of their farm and family. Just that morning, a Confederate colonel had thrown himself on Grant’s mercy after realizing that he was the only man in his entire regiment who had not already abandoned the cause. But while Grant had twice asked Lee to surrender, Lee continued to insist his men could fight on.

So Grant had gone to bed in a Virginia farmhouse on April 8, dirty, tired, and miserable with a migraine…

Read on. It’s worth it.

My commonplace booklet A library of neglected books that deserve to be read

Lovely. I’ve already put two on my list. Link

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A message to the Russian People… … from, Guess Who? None other than the Terminator himself. Not many people can pull off a piece like this — and hold one’s attention throughout. It’s nine minutes long and, I think, worth it.

Here’s the Link.

Quote of the Day

”Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.”

Anthony Trollope

He would know. According to some reports, he

paid a servant an extra £5 a year to wake him up at 5:30 am every morning and get him a cup of coffee. Trollope would then work on a novel for three hours. The first half hour was spent reading over what he had already written, and after that he wrote at a pace of 250 words per 15 minutes. So, over three hours, he would write approximately 2,500 words.

And he did that while holding down a serious job in the Post Office. Infuriating, isn’t it?

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Strauss | Four Last Songs | No 4 – Im abendrot | Renee Fleming

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Strauss’s four songs were part of the programme at the Metropolitan Opera’s Concert for Ukraine the other night. This one is my favourite.

Long Read of the Day How Putin’s Oligarchs Bought London

Marvellous review essay by Patrick Radden Keefe on a number of courageous books which have revealed the extent to which the top layers of British UK have been compromised by the dirty wealth of Russians who are, in one way or another, obligated to Putin.

For the past several years, Oliver Bullough, a former Russia correspondent, has guided “kleptocracy tours” around London, explaining how dirty money from abroad has transformed the city. Bullough shows up with a busload of rubberneckers in front of elegant mansions and steel-and-glass apartment towers in Knightsbridge and Belgravia, and points out the multimillion-pound residences of the shady expatriates who find refuge there. His book “Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Oligarchs, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats, and Criminals,” just published in the U.K., argues that England actively solicited such corrupting influences, by letting “some of the worst people in existence” know that it was open for business.

Invoking Dean Acheson’s famous observation, in 1962, that Britain had “lost an empire but not yet found a role,” Bullough suggests that it did find a role, as a no-questions-asked service provider to the crooked élite, offering access to capital markets, prime real estate, shopping at Harrods, and illustrious private schools, along with accountants for tax tricks, attorneys for legal squabbles, and “reputation managers” for inconvenient backstories. It starts with visas; any foreigner with adequate funds can buy one, by investing two million pounds in the U.K. (Ten million can buy you permanent residency.)

It’s full of interesting stories. For example:

In 2014, the American political scientist Karen Dawisha submitted her book “Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?” to her longtime publisher, Cambridge University Press. After reviewing the manuscript, Dawisha’s editor, John Haslam, wrote to her praising the book but saying that Cambridge could not publish it. “The risk is high that those implicated in the premise of the book—that Putin has a close circle of criminal oligarchs at his disposal and has spent his career cultivating this circle—would be motivated to sue,” he explained. Even if the press ultimately prevailed, the expense of the proceedings could be ruinous, Haslam said.

It’s a terrific read. And also an infuriating one, not least because the sudden faux-outrage of the Tory party about the wealthy London concierges and legal pimps who service the needs of oligarchs is so nauseating.

Preparing for Defeat Francis Fukuyama in upbeat mode.

I’ll stick my neck out and make several prognostications:

1 Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine. Russian planning was incompetent, based on a flawed assumption that Ukrainians were favorable to Russia and that their military would collapse immediately following an invasion. Russian soldiers were evidently carrying dress uniforms for their victory parade in Kyiv rather than extra ammo and rations. Putin at this point has committed the bulk of his entire military to this operation—there are no vast reserves of forces he can call up to add to the battle. Russian troops are stuck outside various Ukrainian cities where they face huge supply problems and constant Ukrainian attacks.

2 The collapse of their position could be sudden and catastrophic, rather than happening slowly through a war of attrition. The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize. This is at least true in the north; the Russians are doing better in the south, but those positions would be hard to maintain if the north collapses.

There are ten more where they came from.

I hope he’s right. In the meantime, I liked Charles Arthur’s sardonic take on the piece. “Mr End Of History predicting End Of War. It’s probably as good an analysis as any.”

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St Patrick’s Day! (And it’s not true that he banished the snakes from Ireland, as a casual inspection of the country’s political elite will confirm.)

The flock

Lovely photograph taken the other day in Glencolumbcille by John Darch (Whom God Preserve). Note the symmetry of the group.

Quote of the Day

”Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted”

Groucho Marx‌

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Steve Cooney | O’Farrell’s Slip Jig

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You’ve got to have a slip jig on this day of all days.

Long Read of the Day The Channel 4 exposé of the Jeremy Kyle Show made me ashamed of the TV profession

Great piece by Dorothy Byrne, the former head of news and current affairs at Channel 4 TV.

Over two nights this week, millions of viewers watched the horror that was ITV’s Jeremy Kyle Show exposed. The two-part investigation, Jeremy Kyle Show: Death on Daytime, on Channel 4, suggested that the production team lied to vulnerable participants, some of whom had obvious mental health issues, with sometimes terrible consequences. The Jeremy Kyle Show was taken off air only after one victim, Steve Dymond, “failed” a lie detector test on the show and killed himself a week later. It was also revealed that at least one other participant had killed herself after appearing on the programme years earlier – and the investigation hinted there were potentially more cases.

But the programme’s greatest shock lay not in its content but in what – or who – was not on screen. It approached more than 200 people who had worked on the Jeremy Kyle Show over 14 years, and not a single one would go on camera…

I was a TV critic for 13 years and really enjoyed the medium but detested many of the people who worked in the industry. Dorothy Byrne was one of the shining exceptions.

The Jeremy Kyle show was one of the most obnoxious, cruel and exploitative shows ever to appear on British television. What was even more depressing, though, was that so many people tuned in to watch it.

Xi’s awkward dilemma From Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times ($)

A short, victorious Russian war would have suited China. Beijing’s favoured narrative about the inexorable decline of American power would have looked even more credible. The stage might have been set for a Chinese attack on Taiwan.

Instead, Russia has got bogged down. The western alliance has been revived, and the US and its allies have unveiled a new armoury of economic sanctions that will look very threatening in Beijing.

China is now having to digest the news that, as a result of western sanctions, Russia has lost access to most of its foreign reserves. As the economist Barry Eichengreen points out, one of the main reasons that countries hold foreign reserves is “as a war chest to be tapped in a geopolitical conflict”. But China, which has the world’s largest foreign reserves, has just discovered that it could lose access to its war chest overnight.

China is not nearly self-sufficient in either energy or food. It has worried for decades about the “Malacca Dilemma” — the threat that the US navy could blockade China by cutting off key shipping routes. China’s huge investments in its navy are partly aimed at averting that possibility. Now, however, Beijing has to consider the possibility that a freezing of the country’s foreign reserves, allied to other financial sanctions, could be just as threatening as a naval blockade.

Frustratingly for China, there is no easy way out of this. The obvious solution would be for it to trade increasingly in its own currency, the renminbi. But Beijing has shied away from making the RMB fully convertible, fearing that this would lead to destabilising capital flight.

The piece is accompanied by a brilliant cartoon showing Putin, with hands dripping with blood, embracing ‘Pooh Bear’, as Xi is known to Chinese dissidents.

The moral of the story is, I suppose, “don’t put all of your Faberge eggs in other people’s baskets”.

Later Noah Smith has an intriguing blog post suggesting that Xi suddenly has a lot on his plate — to wit: the Ukraine war, renewed Covid outbreaks, a stock-market crash and a real estate bubble that is now bursting.

My commonplace booklet Saturday Night Live does Amazon Go Lovely sketch. Link

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Quote of the Day

”Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.”

Garrison Keillor

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Bob Dylan & Van Morrison | And It Stoned Me | BBC Outtake, Athens 27.06.1989

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Two of my favourite singer-songwriters in the open air on a hill in Athens, with the Parthenon in the background.

I love outtakes. They show how the magical sausage is made.

Long Read of the Day In my Observer column last Sunday I wrote about DAOs — Distributed Autonomous Organisations, the latest crypto-obsession. I said that the Gadarene rush into this crypto wormhole reminded me of the 1960s and early 1970s hippie obsession with communes. “There’s something touching about the DAO idea”, I wrote.

It seeks to break the stranglehold of hierarchical organisations dominated by a few and replace them with more democratic structures. In that sense, they’re reminiscent of 1960s and 1970s attempts to create communes for breaking the grip of the nuclear monogamous family and creating more collegial structures for domestic life. Those experiments often broke up because the alpha males couldn’t hack real egalitarianism. And DAOs are now riven by similar conflicts. The only difference is that some members are more equal than other, not because of gender but because they own more of the cryptocurrency tokens and can therefore determine what happens. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

This struck a chord with Dave Birch (Whom God Preserve), who has an enviable talent for making complex ideas clear by finding material examples. In a lovely blog post he told the story of a British football team, Ebbsfleet United, a “proto-DAO” which was taken over by an online community of fans in 2008 and initially did well in the league in which it was located.

The fan voting evolved in what I imagine many social anthropologists would regard as an entirely predictable way. After the investment, the fans voted on who should pick the team, themselves or the manager: they chose the manager every time. This is exactly what I would do: If I had a vote in how Manchester City should line up at the weekend, I would inevitably delegate that vote to someone who knows what they are doing (in this case, one of the most successful managers in the history of the game, Pep Guardiola). Why on earth would I allow people like me to decide on something that they have no demonstrable aptitude for?

Will Brooks, who was behind the idea in the first place, later said that “one of my biggest conclusions is that perhaps the idea was more exciting than the reality”. I think this probably going to be true of any other DAO as well. Even if there was a wisdom of crowds to be tapped, people have other things to do. Such communities tend to evolve rapidly into groups where a small number of people co-ordinate action and the majority are happy to delegate responsibility. You get, in effect, cabals or councils who direct the organisation. Thus there is what SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce called “shadow centralisation”.

Dave’s point is that “truly decentralised systems just do not survive, they mutate into centralised systems (ie, representation and republic) or an anonymous oligarchy (whales and warlords)”.

I think he’s right, but his blog post is worth reading in its entirety for pleasure as well as wisdom.

Niall Ferguson on ‘Czar Vladimir Putin’ and MAFD Interesting interview in Nikkei Asia which is behind some kind of impenetrable paywall. But two things in it struck me as interesting.

First, Ferguson’s guesses about Putin’s misjudgement of the possibility of effective Ukrainian resistance:

These are miscalculations, not signs of madness. They’re the kind of miscalculations you make if you are very divorced from reality, because you lead the life of a czar, in vast — if hideous — palaces, surrounded by people who are terrified of you and tell you what they think you want to hear. If I put myself in Putin’s position, I don’t think he’s trying to resurrect the Soviet Union. He’s looking back even further and trying to bring back the Russian Empire, with himself as “Czar Vladimir.” It’s an ideology of conservative, orthodox nationalism that Putin offers, that has nothing to do with the Soviet legacy. A lot of people get this wrong.

Secondly, how will Putin’s difficulties be interpreted in Beijing? In particular, what are the implications for Taiwan?

Ferguson: Xi Jinping has, as his ultimate goal, to bring Taiwan under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, and I assume that he will conclude from observing the events in Ukraine that the West is weak, in military terms, and reluctant to fight, but it is strong in economic terms and prepared to use sanctions to punish aggression.

The question he will ask himself is: “Can they do to me what they are doing to Russia?”

And the answer will be no. Unlike Russia, China is a huge economy that is still, despite Cold War tendencies, deeply bound up with the U.S. economy, with very large U.S. investments in China. If you did to China what we’re currently doing to Russia, it would hurt us a lot more. That is what I’ll call the “mutually assured financial destruction” problem.

My commonplace booklet * Restoring and attributing ancient texts using deep neural networks An imaginative use of machine-learning. Nature report * People are being arrested in Russia for demonstrating with blank posters Link. This reminded Ben Evans of an old Soviet joke. A man hands out leaflets on Red Square, and the KGB arrest him. But when they get him to the station, they find that the leaflets are all blank. And he says “Well, everyone knows what the problem is, so why bother writing it down?”

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A picture for our time.

Farewell, painted by August Macke in 1914.

Quote of the Day

”Every country has its own mafia. Putin’s Russia is the first where the mafia has its own country.”

Garry Kasparov

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Bob Dylan | Visions of Johanna

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A bootleg recording of a wonderful song. Written during a black-out in New York while he was dating Joan Baez but was falling in love with his first wife Sara. “Visions of Johanna” is one of Dylan’s most enigmatic and loved songs. The message? He misses Johanna. Lyrics here.

Long Read of the Day Time for a Diplomatic Revolution

by Noah Smith

Really thoughtful essay by Noah Smith. The basic message is that Cold War 2 is here, and the U.S. needs all the allies we can get.

By way of a preamble, Smith writes:

I’m taking a brief break from posting about economics to offer some ideas on geopolitics and international relations. I’m not any kind of an expert on these things, so as always, take what I have to say with a grain of salt. But remember that lots of other people confidently writing about these subjects make no such disclaimers when they offer their opinions.

What I like about the essay is the way a non-specialist in the history of international relations goes about pondering our current moment.

In late 1940, Nazi Germany had conquered France and was allied with Japan, while the USSR had helped Hitler devour Poland. The U.S. was neutral, still hobbled by isolationism. It looked as if totalitarian powers would dominate the globe. But a year later, when Hitler turned on Stalin and Stalin allied with the U.S., the tables were entirely turned — the Allies now had a coalition that could beat the fascist powers.

In the Cold War, too, alliances played a role. When the USSR and China were communist allies during the Korean War, it was all the U.S. could do to hold them at bay; after the Sino-Soviet Split, the USSR had to worry about attack from China. The U.S. was able to exploit this by arranging a de facto alliance with China against the Soviets in the 1970s and 1980s. The Soviets probably would have lost the Cold War anyway, but the U.S.-China rapprochement probably hastened the end.

Now we find ourselves at another dangerous, potentially pivotal moment in history.

“Pragmatism in the defence of liberty is no vice”. And the ambiguities thereof. The best is always the enemy of the good.

Time to think about the unthinkable? We liberals have spent the last two decades being continually surprised and horrified by the ‘unthinkable’ things that have happened. It was unthinkable that the deregulated and globalised financial system would very nearly bring the world to its knees — that ATM machines wouldn’t dispense cash on a Monday morning. It was unthinkable that the criminals who presided over this catastrophe would not go to gaol. It was unthinkable that the costs of bailing out these criminals would be imposed on ordinary citizens. It was unthinkable that the UK would vote to leave the EU. It was unthinkable that the US would elect a crooked narcissist as its President. It was unthinkable that there would be a land war ever again in Europe.

And here we are. You’d have thought that by now we’d have wised up.

We haven’t, I think, which is really worrying because now there is one more unthinkable that we really need to think about — the thought that there might be a nuclear exchange in Europe.

Up to now we have been dismissing Putin’s putting his nuclear forces on a heightened state of readiness as the sabre-rattling of a madman, or the intimidatory bluff of a brutal gambler. I don’t see it that way, I’m afraid.

Nor does David Holloway, Professor of International History at Stanford. His books include Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (Yale University Press, 1994) and The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (1983). An essay of his in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists suggested that he might be someone who is indeed thinking about the unthinkable. Here’s the money quote:

On February 24—the day Putin invaded Ukraine—he warned that Russia would respond immediately to those who stood in its way, with consequences that “will be such as you have never seen in your entire history.” On February 27, he publicly ordered his minister of defense and chief of the general staff to transfer Russia’s “deterrence forces” to “special combat readiness.” Putin’s aim was evidently to deter outside intervention and to signal Russia’s determination to achieve its goals.

But another, more troubling, aspect to Putin’s recent comments has received little or no attention. It has to do with the circumstances under which Russia might use nuclear weapons.

In June 2020, Putin signed a decree—the Basic Principles of the Russian Federation’s State Policy in the Domain of Nuclear Deterrence—that specifies two conditions under which Russia would use nuclear weapons. The first is unsurprising: “The Russian Federation retains the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear weapons and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies…” But that sentence ends with an unusual statement: “… and also in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is put under threat” [emphasis added].

In his February 24 speech, Putin echoed that unusual language to describe his Ukraine invasion. The United States, he claimed, was creating a hostile “anti-Russia” next to Russia and in Russia’s historic land. “For the United States and its allies, it is a policy of containing Russia, with obvious geopolitical dividends,” he said. “For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation. This is not an exaggeration; this is a fact. It is not only a very real threat to our interests but to the very existence of our state and to its sovereignty” [emphasis added]. Putin has defined the current situation as one in which, in line with the principles of its deterrence policy, Russia retains the right to use nuclear weapons.

That’s the ‘unthinkable’ that we should be thinking about now. The concept of “de-escalation” embedded in current Russian military doctrine says that if Russia were faced with a large-scale conventional attack that exceeded its capacity for defence, it might respond with a limited nuclear strike, i.e. so-called ‘tactical’ nukes, or maybe neutron bombs.

And if that were to happen, what would NATO’s response be? Hopefully someone is thinking about that unthinkable back at Ramstein.

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Hello, neighbour

I spent a few hours last week trying — mostly unsuccessfully — to photograph the birds clustering round our bird-feeders. This is a poor photograph, technically speaking, but it’s the best of the bunch.

I set up my Nikon D700 on a tripod with a very good lens and remote control focused on particular feeders. It’s an excellent full-frame camera, but because it’s a single-lens reflex, it flips up the mirror before taking a picture. The blue-tits have such acute hearing and fast reflexes that they’re gone the moment the mirror starts to flip and there’s nothing to see when the shutter opens to take the picture!

My initial conclusion: anyone who thinks wild-life photography is easy has never done it.

Our holiday from history is over A product of a weekend spent brooding on what’s happening in Ukraine…

Ever since Brexit and the election of Trump in 2016 I’ve had a sinking feeling that, in the long view of history, the post-war-era (the seven decades from 1946 to 2016) would come to be seen as a blip — a brief period in which democracy expanded and significant segments of the world (though of course not all — think Korea, Indochina, India & Pakistan, the Congo, the Middle East, just to name a few) came to regard peace, stability and some degree of prosperity as normal.

2016 was a pivotal moment because it highlighted the extent to which this comforting perception was the solipsistic illusion of a particular generation — mine. I’m a baby-boomer, a member of that lucky cohort of post-war Western babies who were the main beneficiaries of the period; we had free education, good jobs and careers, were able to own our own homes, had good healthcare and interesting lives, and wound up with generous pensions. And so when the Soviet empire imploded and disintegrated in 1989-1991 we complacently agreed with Francis Fukuyama that the world had indeed arrived at ‘the end of history’ with the future belonging to what we grandly called ‘liberal democracy’.

In the process, what we failed to notice was that that vaunted democracy hadn’t been so good for many of our fellow-citizens. The globalised economic system that had provided us with the good things in life had systematically and inexorably impoverished and excluded them, leaving them in post-industrial wastelands picturesquely called ‘rustbelts’. As Thomas Piketty rudely pointed out, this economic system had somehow managed to restore inequality to the levels it had before the First World War — an outcome that our politics had consistently failed to notice, or do much about. This was in part because Western political elites had been drinking the neoliberal Kool Aid since the 1970s and so allowed our democracies to morph into what John Kennith Galbraith, had he lived to see it, would surely have called The New Corporate State.

The political earthquakes represented by the Brexit vote in the UK and Trump’s election in the US should have dented our confidence in the triumphalist Fukuyama narrative (it certainly did that for me). A better reading of those shocks would have been to accept that history hadn’t come to an end and we were about to enter another phase. Or perhaps even a repetition of stuff that had gone before.

Which I fear is what we’re now seeing in Ukraine. The supposedly ‘smart’ super-integrated Russian military machine turns out to be not that smart after all, and is bogged down in a longer struggle than its dictatorial master envisaged. Which is why, in recent days, it is returning to type — or, more accurately, to a script we have seen before: a script that calls for the reduction of everything to smoking ruins, regardless of the collateral damage.

Those with long memories will recall that when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, a tiny (population 1.5m) Muslim republic in Southern Russia began agitating for independence. Boris Yeltsin launched an invasion of the country, with heavy artillery bombing everything in sight, but failed to quell the insurgency. So in 1996 Yeltsin signed a peace treaty with Chechnya, removed all Russian troops from the territory and granted broad autonomy to Chechnya, though not formal independence.

This ‘humiliation’ seems to have infuriated Vladimir Putin, who became Yeltsin’s Prime Minister in August 1999, and within months launched a renewed bombing campaign which bombed Grozny flat and this time succeeded in taking control of the little statelet and installing a puppet regime.

My fear is that what we’re seeing in Ukraine is this history repeating itself. But what do I know about these things? Interestingly, though, Thomas de Wall, an experienced journalist who does know about these things — and who covered the war in Chechnya, also sees the parallels. “There was a project,” he writes,

“to restore Chechnya to Russian control, and nowadays in 2022, to restore Ukraine to the Russian sphere of influence. And there was no Plan B. Once the people started resisting, which came as a surprise in Chechnya and is coming as a surprise in Ukraine, there was no political Plan B about what to do with the resistance.

There’s clearly no Russian Plan B for Ukraine. If that is indeed the case, then we know what’s likely to happen.

When Chechnya was being obliterated in 1999, most of us paid little attention. After all, it wasn’t a European country. But Ukraine is.

Our complacent post-1946 holiday has really come to an end.

Quote of the Day

”How smart is that? I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine, of Ukraine, Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful … And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. … There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right. … Here’s a guy who’s very savvy… I know him very well. Very, very well.

Donald Trump, two weeks ago.

Trump’s way of talking is weird. He always reminds me of the know-all drunks one used to meet in saloon bars.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Grateful Dead | Deep Elem Blues

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Long Read of the Day Putin’s Challenge To The American Right

Terrific blast from Andrew Sullivan.

Steve Bannon summed it up: “Putin ain’t woke. He’s anti-woke.” Congressman Madison Cawthorn took it further: “Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt, and it is incredibly evil, and it has been pushing woke ideologies.” That plucky little Zelensky, speaking live to the British House of Commons as bombs rained down on his country’s cities? An “incredibly evil” “thug.” Our old friend Dinesh D’Souza, in his usual temperate style, sees the Democrats as posing “a far greater threat to our freedom and safety than Putin.” And Bannon is still urging his minions to give “zero dollars to Ukraine,” even as the corpses of children lie on the streets. There’s an alt-right edginess to this moral perversity.

And over the years, this drumbeat of love for the Russian dictator shifted the views of many grassroots Republicans. In the wake of Trump’s personal infatuation with Putin, the murderer’s favorability among Republicans jumped from 10 percent in 2014 to 37 percent by December 2016. Until as recently as January this year, “62 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents considered Vladimir Putin a stronger leader than Joe Biden.” That’s the primrose path down which the GOP led its supporters — seeing Putin as a more legitimate president than Biden.

The last two weeks, to put it mildly, have pummeled this narrative…

Great essay. The problem with Putin, as Trump will eventually discover, is that in the end he will be a ‘loser’. And the thing we will all have to worry about then is the stupendous economic power that’s brought ruination to Russia.

The DAO of Blockchain Yesterday’s Observer column:

In 1982, a guy called Benjamin Hoff, who was then employed as a tree-pruner in the Portland Japanese Garden in Oregon, published a charming little book, The Tao of Pooh, in which he argued that AA Milne’s bear had ways of doing things that appeared to echo some of the principles of Taoism, the ancient Chinese philosophy. Taoism teaches the various disciplines for achieving perfection through self-reflection, and one of its central concepts is that of pu – the idea that you should always be open to, but unburdened by, experience.

The Tao of Pooh was a runaway success, spending 49 weeks on the New York Times’s bestseller list. This has given this newspaper columnist, whose occupation is even humbler than that of tree-pruner, an idea for a new, timely bestseller, the title of which – The Dao of Blockchain – neatly embodies two buzzwords for the price of one.

Let me explain…

Read on

My commonplace booklet * 27 Meaningful Ways You Can Help Ukraine Link * You can also donate to the Disaster Emergency Committee (My own preferred route.) * Other good ideas for support from The Ukrainian Institute in London

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Nothing is perfect

A gable-sized mural spotted yesterday in a Cambridgeshire village.

On reading, writing and reviewing I read too much. And then, the moment after typing that sentence, I think, No! I don’t read enough — because I’m continually humbled by regular discoveries of books I ought to have read, but haven’t. Since there are only 24 hours in the day I try to compensate by seeking out reviews of books that fall into that category. I try to be choosy — in terms of looking for reviews by people who are informed and whose judgement is sound. But finding such people is sometimes an imperfect science.

I’m current reading Helen Thompson’s new book — Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century.

It’s terrific — deeply serious and learned, but not something one can skim, because she thinks we need three different kinds of history to understand how we came to be in the mess we’re currently in — histories that she then provides in depth. And as I wend my way through it — currently resisting the temptation to read other people’s reviews of it — I found myself thinking, Thank God I’m not reviewing it!. Which suddenly reminded me of a thought that Virginia Woolf once confided to her diary, and so I went looking for that.

Ah, here it is! The entry for Saturday 18 February, 1922, when she is recovering from a long (six-week) bout of influenza that knocked her out for a while.

She’s been reading La Princesse de Cléves, which Wikipedia describes as “a French novel which was published anonymously in March 1678. It was regarded by many as the beginning of the modern tradition of the psychological novel and a great classic work. Its author is generally held to be Madame de La Fayette”.

Woolf thinks it’s wonderful but also hard going. And then she writes:

Thank God … I am not reviewing it. Within the last few minutes I have skimmed the reviews in the New Statesman; between coffee & cigarette I read the Nation: now the best brains in England (metaphorically speaking) sweated themselves for I don’t know how many hours to give me this brief condescending sort of amusement. When I read reviews I crush the columns to get at one or two sentences; is it a good book or a bad? And then I discount those 2 sentences according to what I know of the book & of the reviewer. But when I write a review I write every sentence as if it is going to be tried before 3 Chief Justices: I cant believe that I am crushed together and discounted. Reviews seem to me more & more frivolous. Criticism on the other hand absorbs me more and more.

I so love Woolf’s Diaries. But now I really need to get back to Helen’s book…

Quote of the Day

“Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow-creatures is amusing in itself.”

J.A. Froude, 1886

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Emmy Lou Harris and Mark Knopfler | Why Worry

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The song ends at 4’40” into the video — the remainder is just slow-scrolling titles.

Long Read of the Day Communities of Extraction

As panic about the implications of a boycott of Russian oil and gas increases, stand by for massive lobbying by the extractive industries for a more relaxed regulatory attitude towards fracking proposals.

This striking paper by Wyatt Sassman of the marvellous Law and Political Economy Project provides a graphic illustration of how the politics of fracking exacerbate local inequality and pollute politics. In Colorado, for example, those politics

concentrated harms closer to people without meaningful oversight of industry siting, raising obvious distributional risks. There is perhaps no better example than the massive project located behind the Bella Romero Academy’s middle school campus. Denver-based company Extraction Oil & Gas had originally proposed to drill dozens of wells next to Frontier Academy, a school serving a largely white community in Greeley, Colorado. When the community organized against the project, Extraction relocated it next to Bella Romero Academy—a school serving a comparatively low-income, Latino community outside of Greeley in unincorporated Weld County, Colorado.

As a patent example of environmental injustice, the project received national and statewide attention. In a story run in the New York Times, one Bella Romero parent explained: “It’s like they said, ‘Put it where the Mexicans live, over there it’s O.K.’” Supported by environmental and racial justice groups, parents and nearby community members organized to oppose the project. Yet Extraction maintained that this was its preferred location, and the socio-legal structures fell into place: permits were issued, hearings denied, lawsuits filed, injunctions denied, wells drilled, wells fracked, and appeals lost. Weld County commissioners unanimously approved the project, publicly “blistering” its opponents as alarmist and opposed to the county’s economic growth.

There’s more shocking detail in the piece, which is what makes it well worth reading.

Big Tech is racing to swallow other companies before the Biden regulators strike

Google’s $5.4 billion bid to buy cybersecurity firm Mandiant is the latest in a string of high-dollar acquisitions by Big Tech.

Microsoft announced a $68 billion deal for video game company Activision Blizzard in January.

Amazon is under regulatory review for its $8.45 billion purchase of Hollywood studio MGM, announced last year.

Meta (then Facebook) bought Kustomer for $1 billion and Giphy for $400 million in 2020, just a few months before the FTC sued the company over past acquisitions.

Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, says: “The new generation of antitrust enforcers will not be bullied.”

Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter warned in a January speech that he’s skeptical of conditions imposed by regulators that are meant to “fix” mergers — and instead will seek to block deals likely to reduce competition.

Why frantic Ukrainians are having such trouble getting British visas I thought it was just the Foreign Office’s incompetence. Turns out that’s not the whole answer. It looks as though a better explanation might be that the government outsourced the visa process to an outfit called TLSContact, another one of those ‘service’ corporations that leech off the public sector.

Here are a few excerpts from openDemocracy’s report on the scandal:

It was claimed yesterday in Parliament that TLSContact’s visa centre in Rzeszow, Poland, had turned away applicants who had queued in freezing temperatures for hours, saying it had no slots available until the end of April. Reports on social media claimed the firm had been pressuring Ukrainians to pay for extra services beyond its basic free appointments.

The Labour MP Clive Efford slammed the situation as “complete chaos”.

Now it has emerged that the home secretary was told by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration in November 2021 that TLSContact was so hell-bent on making profit that its use posed a risk of “reputational damage” to the UK. The firm has been handed government contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds since 2014.

I’ve just looked at the Report. Here’s a sample from its conclusions:

Inspectors recognised that AVS [Added Value Services], provided by the CPs [Commercial Partners], are an important revenue stream for those companies and provide customers with an element of choice within their application process. The Home Office made it clear to inspectors that AVS are optional for applicants. However, respondents to the CfE indicated that, due to the complicated nature of the available guidance and the way AVS are “packaged” on the website, they were uncertain as to whether they should purchase these services to ensure that the Home Office viewed their application favourably. This view was supported by stakeholders, who were particularly concerned about the vulnerability of customers who may pay more in an attempt to influence the process. Customers who are not represented by agents face further uncertainty as to what services they should be purchasing and may end up paying for services that they do not require, adding to their financial burden.

Now back to openDemocracy’s story…

Staff working in UK diplomatic missions overseas have also expressed concern about the reputational impact of this “upselling” of AVS, particularly considering this may be the first interaction an individual has with the UK immigration system.

“Its sole focus is income generation. The human aspect is not at all valued,” one British Embassy whistleblower told the chief inspector.

The whistleblower added: “There are applicants being persuaded to buy unnecessary additional services at the [visa application centres]… The most recent contract with external commercial partners has meant that it is through ‘upselling’ these additional services that partners make their money.”

A British man who fled Kyiv with his Ukrainian family told openDemocracy he had been given a waiting time of 13 days for a visa appointment at TLSContact’s Budapest centre.

So how much does TLSContact get paid for their ‘services’?

It turns out that its parent company, Teleperformance Ltd, was awarded a £167m contract by the Home Office in 2014 to run the UK’s visa centres across Europe under the TLSContact brand.

And if you think that name rings a bell, then it should: The company was also paid nearly £259m by the UK Department of Health to run call centres for its dysfuntional Test and Trace programme during the pandemic.

It’d be nice to think that this was just an outlier, but actually it’s the new normal for a British state whose capacity has been hollowed out by decades of neoliberal outsourcing of critical tasks to private corporations.

My commonplace booklet Cognitive Dissonance Rules OK

I sometimes think that the biggest single problem with us humans is our capacity for cognitive dissonance — the ability to believe two (or more) contradictory things at the same time. For example:

A recent Pew survey reveals that a majority of Americans want to be carbon neutral but are unwilling to back the economic and political steps needed to achieve that.
Likewise many if not most Internet users say they are worried that their privacy is being undermined by social media. But they continue to use said media. When challenged, they shrug and say they don’t have any alternative.
Similarly, the claim that nobody who learns how animals are slaughtered for human consumption would ever eat meat again seems to be false.
People (including British ex-pats) who voted for Brexit are infuriated when it turns out that their freedom to own houses and take vacations in the EU is severely curtailed.

And so on and so on.

As they say in Yorkshire: There’s nowt so queer as folk.

(Oh — and since you ask, I too suffer from cognitive dissonance.)

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Venice by night

Quote of the Day

“All the clever people end up in the Cabinet Office, all the ****s end up in the Foreign Office and all the brain dead morons end up in the Home Office.”

An unnamed UK government official, in a text to Politico yesterday on the Home Office’s catastrophic failure to address the needs of Ukrainian refugees seeking entry to ‘global Britain’.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Beethoven | Symphony No.9 | Ode an die Freude (Ode to Joy)

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The Kyiv Classic orchestra played this in Maidan Square yesterday. I couldn’t find a recording of the entire performance, but I thought that this flash-mob performance from (I think) Spain fitted the mood. And of course it’s also the EU’s anthem, which makes it extra poignant. Watch the video and marvel at the children’s responses to the performance.

Long Read of the Day The Dawn of Uncivilization

Remarkable essay by Peter Savodnik about Western (and particularly US) hubris, post-1989.

Here’s a sample from his time as a post-Soviet-collapse American reporter in Russia.

On one of those reporting forays, I wound up in Khabarovsk, seven time zones away from Moscow, where I’d gone to write about a Ukrainian stripper and her husband, an American G.I. who’d gotten himself in trouble. On my last night in town, I went to a dinner party in a microscopic, poorly lit Khrushchyovka, one of the countless apartments built under Nikita Khrushchev.

Toward the end, after all the vodka, the herring, the soup, the dumplings, more vodka, black bread, more vodka, one of my hosts, an older gentleman who had been a professor of literature, told me, as so many Russians had, “You can give up writing philosophical articles about Russia. You will never know it.” Ah, yes, this again. My outsiderness. “My sunny disposition doesn’t prohibit me from writing about your country,” I said, a bit too earnestly, in very stilted Russian that I had spent years slaving away at. Speaking slowly to make sure I didn’t miss anything, he replied: “It’s not your sunny disposition. It’s your frame of reference. Your frame of reference is America. But Russia does not want to be America. Russia exists in a parallel universe.”

At the time, I thought, Russia doesn’t know what it wants. There was little doubt by then about Vladimir Putin’s orientation, but Russians were another matter. It wasn’t just that they liked American popular culture—everyone did. It was that there was too much interaction between us and them. Too much business, cultural exchange, hop-scotching between New York and Moscow and Los Angeles and Vladivostok. We were connected now. Was that not validation of the Great American Promise?

In retrospect, the professor saw something—everything—that I did not.

We were not at the start of something brilliant and beautiful, but in the middle of a very short in-between…

There’s lots more like that. It’s a very interesting piece. And it has a chilling closing para:

Vladimir Putin knows how much daylight there is between hard geopolitical reality and American rhetoric. But we prefer to hew to the old platitudes. They make us think that we can rewind or undo or make things better if we just say the right things. It is time to imagine what our president seems incapable of: a new order, jungle-like, shot through with the fevers and hatreds of the world as it had always been before. Uncivilization.

The new Silent Majority — people who don’t tweet In the findings of a fascinating survey by the Pew Foundation on social media use in the US there’s one amazing discovery: only 23% use Twitter — which means that over three-quarters of American Internet users have never tweeted.

This has all kinds of interesting implications, of which the most important is that old and new media should stop treating what appears on Twitter as representative of society as a whole. It’s actually a weird and unrepresentative subset of humanity — the part of it that has short attention spans and a tendency to outrage, over-excitement, virtue-signalling and sometimes hysteria. And the fact that something is ‘trending’ on Twitter tells us nothing other than that particular subset of humanity is excited about it.

I’ve used Twitter a bit ever since it first appeared (I’m @jjn1), and for a time I celebrated it as the newswire service for the ordinary person, not just the mainstream media. I understand that some of my friends and colleagues put it to very good and serious uses, and admire them for that. But most of the time I can only tolerate Twitter in short purposeful bursts. And I found my feed became a good deal less annoying when I found a way of turning off retweets.

More on the Victorian “gauge wars” One reader was unimpressed by Patricia Fara’s piece that was yesterday’s Long Read. He writes:

Patricia Fara’s ‘History Today’ piece badly exaggerates the duration of the dispute over railway gauges. She herself says: ‘The 1846 Act decreed that future tracks should all be narrow gauge, but it permitted the broad track ones to remain and – crucially for Brunel – to be extended.’ The only new broad gauge lines built after that were contiguous with the existing routes. Making them narrow gauge would have inserted two extra changes of gauge, for example crossing from Plymouth into Cornwall. She continued, ‘Brunel kept building and kept fighting, although by the end of the century he had admitted defeat.’ Actually, he died in 1859. From then on, the difference of gauges was a problem for the GWR, which spent 30 years and a lot of money changing its tracks and its trains to standard gauge. It thus fell behind other railways in improving its routes and services for the growing traffic of the 1860s-1880s. And she fails to make a crucial point about lessons for today, that HS2, by being built to different standards (but not a different gauge) is not properly compatible with the existing network. As for Queen Victoria, the only reason for going from Portsmouth to Aberdeen via Gloucester could have been that she wanted to enjoy the scenery: it would have been (and still is today) shorter and quicker to go via London – all on standard gauge.

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Redirection done right

Seen on a wall in Aups.

Quote of the Day

”Fighting fire with fire only gets you ashes.”

Abigail van Buren

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Liam O’Flynn | Limerick’s Lamentation

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This is a very old Irish tune which derives its title from the siege and fall of the city of Limerick to the English forces of Ginkel in 1691, at the end of the Williamite Wars. The tune is sometimes known as “Sarsfield’s Lamentation” from the name of the commander of the Irish forces at Limerick. Seems appropriate to a day spent watching footage of Ukrainians being forced from their homes by Russian shelling.

Long Read of the Day The Battle of the Gauges

A nice diversionary piece of railway history by Patricia Fara in History Today:

Queen Victoria was definitely not amused. Whenever she travelled from her estate on the Isle of Wight to her castle at Balmoral, she encountered the inconvenience of twice changing trains, once at Basingstoke and again at Gloucester. She had no choice: even royalty was obliged to mind the gap between railway tracks of different widths. Stations were regularly plunged into chaos as angry passengers and their cumbersome luggage were transferred between two sizes of train, while disgruntled manufacturers repeatedly protested about the delays and expense caused by the transition from one gauge to another. The Railway Clearing House estimated that each track shift added the equivalent of 20 miles to transport costs, but the business titans in charge refused to yield. By 1866, despite numerous attempts to impose conformity, there were still around 30 stations in Britain where the rails abruptly altered width.

This clash of wills and technologies – soon dubbed the Battle of the Gauges – lasted for decades. The major conflict was between supporters of narrow gauge and broad gauge tracks, which might sound as farcical as the episode in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, when the Lilliputians argue about whether boiled eggs should be opened at the big end or the little one…

Personally I always open mine at the larger end and regard anyone who does otherwise as potentially a bad egg.

The essay calls to mind the age-old dispute over VHS and BetaMax. And the Victorian dispute was resolved the same way. Sometimes history does repeat itself.

Does Wordle prove that we can have nice things on the Internet? I’d seen the fuss about Wordle but had paid no attention to it until the New York Times paid its developer, Josh Wardle, a million bucks for it. Yesterday, I dug it out on my phone and played the game for the first time. I can now see why it’s popular and a bit addictive. But I won’t be playing it for the simple reason that life’s too short.

Still, I was interested in its developer, so when when I came on this New Yorkerpiece by Andrew Marantz, I stopped to read.

The first time I met Josh Wardle—four years before he invented the simple game that would make his last name, or a slant rhyme of it, unexpectedly famous—he was in Reddit’s San Francisco headquarters, in a state of near-panic, wondering whether one of his online experiments was about to descend into chaos. It was March 31, 2017. Wardle’s experiment was called Place: a blank canvas, a thousand white pixels by a thousand white pixels, which Reddit users could digitally deface in any way they pleased. I was on assignment for this magazine, reporting a story about Reddit, where Wardle then worked as a product manager. The central question of my story was also the central question of Wardle’s work, if not of the Internet itself: Can online spaces be designed so that the benefits of frictionless mass participation outweigh the costs?

Wardle had run such experiments before, and he’d learned a few lessons, the simplest of which was “keep things simple.” He had designed Place with a time constraint—each participant could change the color of one pixel every five minutes, no more—which would, he hoped, encourage collaboration. Other than that, there were essentially no rules. When such unbounded experiments go well, we tend to describe them using words like “democracy” and “freedom”; when they don’t, we more often invoke “entropy” or “mayhem.”

Do read the whole thing. Wardle is an interesting chap.

My commonplace booklet How To Best Use Twitter. Useful advice from Zvi Mowshowitz.

My own tip is to turn off retweets. Luca Hammer (Whom God Preserve) has a guide to how to do it.

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Open Vincent

The gates to the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh in Arles.

Quote of the Day

”Everything is funny, so long as it’s happening to someone else.”

Will Rogers

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Sting | Russians

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Sting has resurrected this song, written under the shadow of another nuclear confrontation. Fits the mood of the present perfectly.

Many thanks to Neil Sequeira for alerting me to it.

Long Read of the Day Space and Time

This is an unmissable analysis of the current state of the Russian invasion by Lawrence Freedman, one of the foremost scholars of warfare. The basic thrust of the essay is that Putin is running out of options as the ($500m to $1B a day) costs of the war mount and his army is apparently in disarray, at least in the North.

The decisions of numerous individuals will determine how this war ends. Can Ukrainian civilians remain steadfast in the face of merciless Russian bombardment? Can the apparently high Ukrainian morale be sustained through a major setback? And on the Russian side, what happens as people realise that they have been misled about the war’s purpose and that their young men have died in an exercise in futility? How are soldiers, many conscripts, responding to the frightening and unexpected situation in which they find themselves? What about officers, alarmed about their lost men and equipment and lack of reserves, unable either to fulfil their orders or to retreat? How do Putin’s courtiers, aware that the war is going badly, explain to their leader the dire consequences of the current strategy? And then there is Putin. At some point will it dawn on him that he has failed in the greatest gamble of his career?

If Freedman is right and Putin is ultimately destined to be cornered, that’s not necessarily good news for the world, though. Not all cornered animals have their paws on a nuclear button.

On the other hand… Politico had this interesting take on it yesterday:

Former Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Andrei Kozyrev tweeted a fascinating assessment of Putin’s military objectives and rationale last night. Kozyrev believes Putin “is a rational actor” who made three major “miscalculations”: he “started to believe his own propagandists” that Ukraine was led by Nazis … his military advisers lied to him about the state of the Russian army … and he believed his own propaganda that U.S. President Joe Biden is “mentally inept” and the EU “weak.” This leads Kozyrev to argue that Putin is not mad, but “wrong and immoral.” He adds: “Given that he is rational, I strongly believe he will not intentionally use nuclear weapons against the West … The ultimate conclusion here is that the West should not agree to any unilateral concessions or limit its support of Ukraine too much for the fear of nuclear war.”

And another thing… All those speculations about whether Putin is unhinged may actually be suiting his purposes. As Tim Harford observed at the weekend, Thomas Schelling’s book The Strategy of Conflict contains this interesting thought:

“It is not a universal advantage in situations of conflict to be inalienably and manifestly rational in decisions and motivation.”

And for once… I find myself agreeing with Ross Douhat:

We don’t need to take wild nuclear risks to defeat Putin in the long run. The voices arguing for escalating now because we’ll have to fight him sooner or later need to recognize that containment, proxy wars and careful line-drawing defeated a Soviet adversary whose armies threatened to sweep across West Germany and France, whereas now we’re facing a Russian army that’s bogged down outside Kyiv.

We were extremely careful about direct escalation with the Soviets even when they invaded Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan, and the result was a Cold War victory without a nuclear war. To escalate now against a weaker adversary, one less likely to ultimately defeat us and more likely to engage in atomic recklessness if cornered, would be a grave and existential folly.

WAR 101 If, like me, you’ve been wondering what it must be like to suddenly become a soldier, then this guidance from an American combat veteran might be helpful.

You’re a 22-year-old Ukrainian who has just been handed a Kalashnikov, four magazines of thirty rounds, a helmet, and body armor. Last week you were studying architecture at Kyiv National University. Now you’re standing in the lead rank. An officer counts off and puts a hand on your shoulder. “You’re a fire team leader.” He points at the next three people in your rank. “That’s your team.”

There are three people behind you. You’ve never seen them before. They await your command.

Generals are not, contrary to popular belief, the most critical decision-makers on a battlefield. The leaders of the fire teams are. The fire team is the smallest unit in battle, usually made up of three people and a leader…

Read on. It’s an eye-opener.

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The intruder

This handsome bird photographed on one of her regular visits to our garden.

She comes daily to nibble and peck under the bird-feeders, from which the Blue Tits, Robins, Great Tits and the occasional Starling dislodge fragments of seeds and peanuts.

It’s back to the future, with a vengeance The ‘back’ in this case is 1939. The thought was triggered by an insightful piece by Neal Acherson in today’s Observer.

Putin isn’t Hitler. He will die a disappointed old nuisance in exile somewhere, rather than by Heldentod suicide in his bunker. Both men qualify as psychopathic dictators, swaddled from reality in fantasies of geopolitical revenge. But Putin’s grip on the Russian imagination is weaker than Hitler’s on the Germans. And his use of police terror against his own people, though horrifying, is distinctly less effective.

All the same, that wise historian Margaret MacMillan sees one desperately important parallel. Both men have meant what they said. And in both cases they were not taken seriously until it was too late. Hitler raved on in public about getting rid of the Jews and conquering Lebensraum in eastern Europe. But the “other Hitler”, in private, could sometimes talk quite charmingly and constructively about possible agreements. Obviously, foreign visitors concluded, the public stuff was just for show while the “serious” Hitler was revealing his real mind. Diametrically wrong! The crazy speeches gave his true intentions; the sober reflections over coffee were all lies. With Putin, the west wrote off his increasingly wild talk about breaking Nato’s encirclement and restoring Russia’s dominion over post-Soviet space. He couldn’t be serious. Under the bluster, wasn’t there still that shrewd, cautious Putin with whom one could do business? But Ukraine proves the opposite. The imperial dream is what he means. The meetings with western leaders across that long table, hinting at terms for a bargain, were all fake.

That’s why we’re back to 1939. The big difference is that there were no nuclear weapons then — which is why those of us who remember the Cuban Missile Crisis are so alarmed by the present crisis. Especially when one recalls that the two main actors in that drama — JFK and Kruschev — were both rational beings. (The irrational ones on the US side were the military, led by Curtis LeMay and Kennedy’s great achievement was to keep them under control.) But if Acherson’s parallel with Hitler is accurate, then apocalyptic irrationality may be on the cards. Indeed, one of the most important questions may be whether the Russian nuclear command would actually implement an order from Putin to launch a strike. (See this thread for some interesting commentary on the Russian chain of command.)

Putin’s been ranting that Western economic sanctions constitute “acts of war”, implying that they justify massive retaliation. But although they are doubtless inflicting pain on Russians, there is one overlooked aspect that may make them easier to bear, as Adam Tooze points out on his blog: Russian gas continues to flow into Europe,

with European customers now paying even more exorbitant prices, Russia is benefiting from a staggering surge in revenue. According to Javier Blas of Bloomberg, at the start of the year, Russia was earning $350 million per day from oil and $200 million per day from gas. On March 3 2022 Europe paid $720 million to Russia for gas alone.

So every day at the moment, Russia’s income from gas alone is $720m a day. And it’ll probably increase even more in the coming weeks. We’re in for a long haul.

Quote of the Day

”Love is not the distant moan of a dying violin — it’s the triumphant twang of a bedspring.”

S.J. Perelman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Chad Lawson | When the Party’s Over | Live At Wigmore Hall

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Given that our post-WW2 party is definitely over, I thought this might be appropriate for today.

Long Read of the Day I Can See It (But I Can’t Feel It)

Lovely essay by Drew Austin on “the Millennial Aesthetic“ and how the Internet (and Instagram in particular) has transformed the physical world. It’s an elegant rant against “the Instagram-optimized settings that have proliferated in cities during the past decade — places that the Blackbird Spyplane blog describes as

a “high-efficiency, low-humanity kind of eatery where you point yr phone at a QR code and do contactless payment before eating a room-temp grain bowl under a pink neon sign that says ‘Living My Best Life’ in cursive.”

The world is increasingly divided between people who are addicted to Instagram and those who are not. I belong to the latter — which often surprises people, given that I’m a keen photographer. They are not convinced by my reply — that I have a life to live and work to do.

Anyway, hope you enjoy this essay.

Ukraine’s victories in the ‘TikTok war’ won’t stop the missiles Yesterday’s Observer column:

So is the conflict in Ukraine – as some of the world’s media seem to think, the “TikTok war” – or, more generically, “the first social media war”? As Russian tanks rolled into the country, videos of frightened people huddling together, explosions blasting through urban streets and missiles streaking across Ukrainian skies suddenly replaced TikTok’s usual fare of memes, jokes, fitness and dance videos. “Ukrainian social media influencers,” reported Reuters, “uploaded bleak scenes of themselves wrapped in blankets in underground bunkers and army tanks rolling down residential streets, juxtaposed against photos of blooming flowers and laughing friends at restaurants that honoured more peaceful memories of their home towns. They urged their followers to pray for Ukraine, donate to support the Ukrainian military and demanded Russian users in particular to join anti-war efforts.” TikTok users across the country began livestreaming the war and the buildup of Russian forces, denying Vlad the Invader the ability to dominate the narrative about what was happening.

All of which is impressive. It was a light (sometimes the only light last week) shining in the darkness. What we were seeing, wrote Chris Stokel-Walker on Vice, was the “meme-ification of the Ukraine invasion”. In a networked world, this is supposedly a big deal because memes can be used to dominate the information space – now believed to be an important element of any conflict. The strange thing is that, up to now, we thought that the Russians were the Olympic champions of this stuff…

Read on

My commonplace booklet I Booked an Airbnb in Kyiv

Lovely, imaginative act of solidarity by Alex Tabarrok. Link

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Tulip Mania

Quote of the Day

”All men are brothers, but, thank God, they aren’t all brothers-in-law.”

Anthony Powell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Randy Newman | Sail Away | Live in London, 2011

Link

Long Read of the Day Putin has taught us a brutal lesson

By Frank Bruni in the New York Times:

What I see on the faces and hear in the voices of so many of the people around me is sheer disbelief about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and a brutal war in Europe: Aren’t we supposed to be past this? Didn’t history move on? The Wall came down, the Cold War ended, and democratic liberalism was the wave of the future, which wouldn’t be so kind to strongmen like Vladimir Putin.

Well, Putin didn’t get the message. Nor did plenty of others around the world. Our notions about history were innocent and disregarded most of it. They also depended on a solipsistic projection of Western — and, especially American — culture and beliefs onto nations that share neither.

Rueful wisdom of hindsight.

Madeleine Albright on Putin In the piece above, Frank Bruni mentioned her recollection of meeting Putin when he was Acting President of Russia. Here’s the money quote:

In early 2000, I became the first senior U.S. official to meet with Vladimir Putin in his new capacity as acting president of Russia. We in the Clinton administration did not know much about him at the time — just that he had started his career in the K.G.B. I hoped the meeting would help me take the measure of the man and assess what his sudden elevation might mean for U.S.-Russia relations, which had deteriorated amid the war in Chechnya. Sitting across a small table from him in the Kremlin, I was immediately struck by the contrast between Mr. Putin and his bombastic predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.

Whereas Mr. Yeltsin had cajoled, blustered and flattered, Mr. Putin spoke unemotionally and without notes about his determination to resurrect Russia’s economy and quash Chechen rebels. Flying home, I recorded my impressions. “Putin is small and pale,” I wrote, “so cold as to be almost reptilian.” He claimed to understand why the Berlin Wall had to fall but had not expected the whole Soviet Union to collapse. “Putin is embarrassed by what happened to his country and determined to restore its greatness.”

And this invasion is the latest instalment of that project.

My commonplace booklet * A Twitter stream aggregating material from Ukraine Link * Robert Reich: Eight sobering realities about Putin’s invasion Link

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Two Little Horses

A Citroen Deux Cheveaux: perfect car for a Provencal summer.

Quote of the Day

“For several months, the West has been threatening Vladimir Putin with massive economic consequences should he escalate aggression towards Ukraine. In the last 24 hours, Western allies have had an opportunity to live up to this threat and have failed, instead issuing sanctions as a form of punishment, punishment that will not deter further action. The Kremlin only respects strength and the response of the West has been weak; arguing that the West needs to keep its powder dry for further action is not going to deter Vladimir Putin. We’ve taken a peashooter to a gunfight. The whole point of the sanctions has been to deter Putin and if at the first chance you get to use these sanctions you only tickle his feet, what’s the point?”

Tom Keatinge of the Royal United Services Institution

Much as I enjoyed the colourful turn of phrase, it’s worth remembering that RUSI is the UK military’s favourite think tank. I wonder if “taking a peashooter to a gunfight” is original. It sounds American to me.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Van Morrison | Days Like This

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When I have a crazy work day, I play this in the evening.

Long Read of the Day The US is unmasking Russian hackers faster than ever

If it’s accurate, this article in the MIT Technology Review is interesting because it suggests that there have been significant developments in the technology. Attribution has, up to now, being the biggest impediment to rapid, accurate and proportionate responses to cyberattacks.

Just 48 hours after banks and government websites crashed in Ukraine under the weight of a concerted cyberattack on February 15 and 16, the United States pointed the finger at Russian spies. Anne Neuberger, the White House’s deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, said that the US has “technical information that links the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU)” with the DDoS attack that had overloaded and brought down the Ukrainian websites. “GRU infrastructure was seen transmitting high volumes of communication to Ukraine-based IP addresses and domains,” she told journalists on February 18. It’s believed that the cyberattack was meant to sow panic in Ukraine as over 150,000 Russian troops massed at the border.

EVs make it harder to quell fire on cargo ship From Quartz:

The cargo ship Felicity Ace is aflame from bow to stern with a lithium-ion battery fire that can’t be put out with water alone.

The fire has been burning since Wednesday (Feb. 16), as the ship drifts in the Atlantic about 200 miles southwest of Portugal’s Azores Islands. Its 22-person crew abandoned ship and was rescued on Thursday.

The ship left Germany on Feb. 10 and headed for the US with about 4,000 Porsches, Bentleys and other luxury cars aboard, and some of those were electric vehicles. It’s not clear if the batteries contributed to the fire starting in the first place—a greasy rag in a lubricant-slicked engine room or a fuel leak are the usual suspects in ship fires—but the batteries are keeping the flames going now. A forensic investigation will take months to determine the cause.

It seems that large quantities of dry chemicals are needed to smother lithium ion battery fires, which burn hotter and release noxious gases in the process. And pouring water onto the ship wouldn’t put out a lithium-ion battery fire and the added water weight could make the ship more unstable.

The only consolation (for this EV owner, anyway) is that they were Porsches, not Teslas!)

My commonplace booklet Donald Trump’s crowd have launched a new social media platform. It’s called Truth Social and seems basically to be a clone of Twitter — except that users will exchange ’Truths’, not Tweets. So will they be able to Retruth Truths, then?

And of course there’s the difficult question of UnTruths.

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A new map of Ukraine?

Europe’s sanctions nightmare From Politico

In a public show of alignment with Washington, the Europeans have been talking tough on sanctions against Russia, even before Putin sent “peacekeepers” into the east of the country on Monday night. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has vowed to cut Russia out of the international banking system and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson says that Russian companies won’t be able to conduct transactions in U.S. dollars and British pounds.

Imposing those financial sanctions could hit Putin hard, but the EU’s position is hazy when it comes to squeezing his all-important hydrocarbon revenues, which provide more than a third of Moscow’s budget. It remains unclear whether banking sanctions would prevent EU payments to Russia’s state-run gas company Gazprom. As things stand, the energy money looks highly liable to keep flowing to Moscow, even during a Russian war against an EU ally.

I’ll believe they’re serious if they do stuff (like cutting Russia out of the SWIFT inter-bank system) that’s effective enough to prompt retaliation Putin by throttling or shutting off the gas supply to Germany. So I’m not holding my breath.

Quote of the Day

”There never was a good war, nor a bad peace.”

Ben Franklin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Torelli | Trumpet Concerto in D Major | Voices of Music and Dominic Favia

Link

Voices of Music is a fine outfit trying to release one new video per week and also pay their musicians and staff. They sponsor free house concerts that pay musicians a full fee; give detailed presentations on how to take music online at music conservatories; and release videos from their extensive performance catalog. There’s a ‘donate’ link on their videos. I’ve clicked on it because I often link to their work.

Long Read of the Day How Facebook twisted Canada’s trucker convoy into an international movement

Nice piece of analysis by Ryan Broderick of how a labyrinth of Facebook groups and right-wing media turned the trucker protest into an international story and eventually prompted a heavy crackdown by the Canadian government. If you wanted a case-study of the exploitation of Facebook by right-wing activists, ingenious free-riders and Fox News, then this would be hard to beat.

Based on Facebook metrics, the core of the Freedom Convoy was never really anything more than a small collection of local conspiracy theorists who were then suddenly given a megaphone by America’s powerful right-wing disinformation machine. Their campaign was first supercharged by Facebook’s algorithm, which currently favors content shared within local groups, and was then blasted out into every feed and screen possible by ravenous conservative tabloids. American right-wing publisher The Daily Wire, founded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, latched on to the story at the end of January and published 66 articles featuring the keyword “convoy” between January 28th and January 31st. And the most popular story of theirs from this time period actually promotes a Facebook group that would eventually get shut down by the platform after barely four days for repeatedly violating Facebook’s policies around QAnon.

Thanks to David Garcia for alerting me to it.

My commonplace booklet Need to explain what a ’typewriter’ was/is to your grandchildren?

Why not try this?

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Raptor and Friend

Quote of the Day

“In baiting a mouse trap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.”

‘Saki’ (H.H. Munro)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Shaun Davey | The Parting Glass

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Davey’s imaginative twist on a beautiful Irish song.

Interestingly, General Martin Dempsey, the 18th Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, sang it on his retirement in September 2015. Which may puzzle some people until they realise that Dempsey is a good old Irish name!

Long Read of the Day Russia’s got a point: The U.S. broke a NATO promise

Interesting OpEd from May 2016 by Joshua Itzkowitz Shifrinson in the Los Angeles Times.

Moscow solidified its hold on Crimea in April, outlawing the Tatar legislature that had opposed Russia’s annexation of the region since 2014. Together with Russian military provocations against NATO forces in and around the Baltic, this move seems to validate the observations of Western analysts who argue that under Vladimir Putin, an increasingly aggressive Russia is determined to dominate its neighbors and menace Europe.

Leaders in Moscow, however, tell a different story. For them, Russia is the aggrieved party. They claim the United States has failed to uphold a promise that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe, a deal made during the 1990 negotiations between the West and the Soviet Union over German unification. In this view, Russia is being forced to forestall NATO’s eastward march as a matter of self-defense.

The West has vigorously protested that no such deal was ever struck. However, hundreds of memos, meeting minutes and transcripts from U.S. archives indicate otherwise. Although what the documents reveal isn’t enough to make Putin a saint, it suggests that the diagnosis of Russian predation isn’t entirely fair. Europe’s stability may depend just as much on the West’s willingness to reassure Russia about NATO’s limits as on deterring Moscow’s adventurism.

This was written two years after the Russian annexation of Crimea.

The academic article on which it’s based is here.

What real transparency looks like Molly White is one of the sharpest and technically informed critics of the current crypto bubble. She also has an exemplary ‘full disclosure’ page on her blog. It goes like this:

I strongly believe in clear disclosures by journalists and others writing about cryptocurrencies and related topics.

I own no cryptocurrencies or NFTs. I have no particular financial interest in whether web3 takes off or not, though I have plenty of non-financial interests; after all, I do have to live on this planet, and I spend enough time engaging with the tech industry and online to care about the futures of both.

I am not paid to write about cryptocurrencies or related topics, nor am I paid to create my Web3 Is Going Great project. I don’t post sponsored content on that website, its associated Twitter account, this website, my blog, my personal Twitter account, or anywhere else. A few generous people have sent money to me via Twitter tips with comments about Web3 Is Going Great; I have earmarked that money for cloud hosting costs, which I otherwise pay out of pocket. I don’t run ads or otherwise make money in any way off the project or my blog.

I hold no long or short positions pertaining to cryptocurrencies or crypto-related companies. I do have some investments in the stock market and other traditional forms of finance, which I pay someone much smarter about and more interested in finance than I am to handle.

For those who think it is crucial to have interacted with crypto to write about it: 1) you are wrong, but 2) you will be pleased to know that I went through the process of signing up for a Coinbase account and buying one popular cryptocurrency and one shitcoin towards the end of 2021, around when I was starting my deeper research into this space. I sold all of them a week and a half later and closed the account. I made a whopping profit of $16.90 off the whole endeavor (pre-tax).

I wish more people writing about this stuff were as forthcoming.

War in Europe is unthinkable — until it isn’t Funny how complacent we’ve become. This from the New York Times…

But just how far Europe is prepared to go in shifting from a world where peace and security were taken for granted remains to be seen. For decades Europeans have paid relatively little in money, lives or resources for their defense — and paid even less attention, sheltering under an American nuclear umbrella left over from the Cold War.

That debate had begun to shift in recent years, even before Russia’s menacing of Ukraine, with talk of a more robust and independent European strategic and defense posture. But the crisis has done as much to expose European weakness on security issues as it has to fortify its sense of unity.

Ms. Franke, 34, a senior fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, is not convinced that anything short of a major Russian invasion of Ukraine will very much alter public opinion.

“We’re having in Europe and Germany a status quo problem,” she said in an interview. “We’re very comfortable with this version of European security, and most people don’t realize that to defend this status quo we need to act.”

The elite feels the cold wind from Russia, she said, but “on the level of public opinion, people want to be left alone and for nothing to touch them.”

My commonplace booklet How insulated glass changed architecture

Interesting 8-minute video Insulated glass shaped the look of the 20th century. Big but poorly insulated glass windows went out of fashion as electricity enabled artificial lighting. Builders needed a new way to install windows that let in natural light, but also controlled heat. Insulated glass was that solution. Link

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The Boss

Imagine if your boss always looked at you like this. Well, mine does.

Quote of the Day

”Not in the clamour of the crowded street

Nor in the shouts and plaudits of the throng

But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Muddy Waters and The Rolling Stones | Baby Please Don’t Go | Live at the Checkerboard Lounge

Link

Chaotic and unforgettable.

Long Read of the Day The German Bind

Nathan Gardels, the Editor of Noema magazine, has written an interesting essay about the standoff between Russia and the West. As I read it I kept thinking of Keynes’s famous 1919 polemic, The Economic Consequences of the Peace — in particular his insight into what the Allies’ determination to humiliate and punish Germany would do to that country.

Here’s the passage that caught my eye:

In 1996, well before Putin’s ascent to power, Alexander Lebed, a popular former Russian general and presidential candidate critical of the bibulous Boris Yeltsin, wrote an essay for my Global Viewpoint newspaper syndicate. Already then, the resentment at being played by those with the upper hand was gestating. As he framed the issue: “When politicians and military planners, who were so used to the lengthy ‘struggle of position’ against the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, found themselves in a very favorable position, it proved too difficult for them to give up the temptation to, finally, at long last, implement their former plans.”

For Lebed, this steady advance of a hostile military alliance into the space its own allied forces had just abandoned rubbed in the ignominy of defeat. “If this sense of loss and humiliation that comes with defeat is allowed to fester in the Russian mentality, it may lead to an inferiority complex that can only be overcome by gaining new victories, preferably over old rivals,” he warned, invoking the lesson of Hitler’s rise in the wake of Germany’s sense of humiliation after the Versailles Treaty that ended WWI. “Territories come and go,” Lebed wrote, “but humiliation of a nation’s dignity remains in the minds of the people. … It injects the virus of vengeance into the defeated nation.”

Presciently, he went on: “I doubt very much that pushing Russia to the backyard of Europe will increase the sense of stability and certainty, or make Russia more democratic and predictable. This approach by the West is destined, at best, to place both sides peering at each other suspiciously from across the fence, fists in our pockets.” And so it has.

Perhaps miscalculating, Putin seems to have sensed a weakness in the West relative to Russian strength and saw a chance to finally push back. He took his fists out of his pockets and moved massive military force to the Ukrainian border, in the process achieving the very opposite of his aim by fortifying the resolve of an alliance that was on its way to obsolescence.

Talk about unintended consequences.

DIY surveillance est arrivé Yesterday’s Observer column:

Once upon a time, intensive surveillance was a prerogative of states. After the arrival of the internet, and especially the rise of companies such as Google and Facebook, ISPs (internet service providers) and mobile networks, it became a prerogative shared between the state and private companies – corporations that log everything you do online. Surveillance became a kind of public-private partnership. The companies do much of the work and readily cooperate with security agencies when they come armed with a warrant.

Way back in 2009 the German Green politician Malte Spitz went to court to obtain the data that his mobile phone operator, Deutsche Telekom, held on him and then collaborated with the newspaper Die Zeit to analyse and visualise it. What emerged was a remarkably detailed timeline of his daily life, a timeline that would have been readily available to state authorities if they had come for it with appropriate legal authorisation.

But in internet time 2009 was aeons ago. Now, intensive surveillance is available to anyone. And you don’t have to be a tech wizard to do it…

Brexit = ‘buy from Europe’ Coruscating column by Simon Jenkins.

A massacre is occurring. More than 35,000 healthy British pigs have been slaughtered and buried on farms since September, with an estimated 200,000 languishing in a backlog.

The reason is that abattoirs lack the staff to process them, largely due to Britain’s exit from the pan-European labour market. In October, the environment department offered 800 six-month visas for foreign butchers. But it insisted they go through its laborious scheme for seasonal workers: barely 100 turned up. Whitehall also refuses to curb imports of European pork – which now makes up 60% of the UK market and rising. To the National Pig Association, Brexit means buy from Europe.

And, later,

Leaving the EU had some arguments for it. Leaving the single market had none. “Soft” Brexit within that market would have been far been easier to negotiate. Leaving it has meant wrecked supply chains and terminated scientific collaboration. It has undermined recruitment patterns and destabilised Northern Ireland. It has crippled the fish industry and impeded billions of pounds of UK trade. Its consequences have wavered between nuisance and disaster.

So is Brexit a ‘success disaster’? Actually no: a success disaster is where something is so successful that it overwhelms its creator. Brexit is just a disaster.

My commonplace booklet What it’s like having the Russian army around Interesting Twitter thread. Impossible to verify, though. Link

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This morning’s Observer column:

Once upon a time, intensive surveillance was a prerogative of states. After the arrival of the internet, and especially the rise of companies such as Google and Facebook, ISPs (internet service providers) and mobile networks, it became a prerogative shared between the state and private companies – corporations that log everything you do online. Surveillance became a kind of public-private partnership. The companies do much of the work and readily cooperate with security agencies when they come armed with a warrant.

Way back in 2009 the German Green politician Malte Spitz went to court to obtain the data that his mobile phone operator, Deutsche Telekom, held on him and then collaborated with the newspaper Die Zeit to analyse and visualise it. What emerged was a remarkably detailed timeline of his daily life, a timeline that would have been readily available to state authorities if they had come for it with appropriate legal authorisation.

But in internet time 2009 was aeons ago. Now, intensive surveillance is available to anyone. And you don’t have to be a tech wizard to do it…

Read on

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Crocuses

Seen on a walk yesterday.

Quote of the Day

“The knives of jealousy are honed on details”

Ruth Rendell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Richard Strauss | Four Last Songs | TrV 296 – 4 | Jesse Norman

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I like all four, but this one is my favourite.

Long Read of the Day The myth of tech exceptionalism

Wonderfully acute essay by Yaël Eisenstat and Nils Gilman in Noema magazine.

Silicon Valley in recent decades has managed to build an anti-regulatory fortress around itself by promoting the myth — rarely stated plainly, but widely believed by tech practitioners — that “tech” is somehow fundamentally different from every other industry that has come before. It is different, the myth says, because it is inherently well-intentioned and will produce not just new but previously unthinkable products. Any micro-level harm — whether to an individual, a vulnerable community, even an entire country — is by this logic deemed a worthwhile trade-off for the society-shifting, macro-level “good.”

This argument, properly labelled “tech exceptionalism,” is rooted in tech leaders’ ideological view both of themselves and government. This ideology contributes to the belief that those who choose to classify themselves as “tech companies” deserve a different set of rules and responsibilities than the rest of private industry.

Exceptionalism is a strategy for avoiding regulation and it’s based on two rhetorical strategies.

Whatever harms technology creates, it is more than outweighed by the good in the present.
The claim that hypothetical future innovations will more than offset any harms of today’s technology.

This fine piece provides a useful antidote to tech BS, and is worth your time.

How many words does it take to make a mistake? Characteristically thoughtful LRB essay by Will Davies on the mechanisation of learning.

In the utopia sold by the EdTech industry (the companies that provide platforms and software for online learning), pupils are guided and assessed continuously. When one task is completed correctly, the next begins, as in a computer game; meanwhile the platform providers are scraping and analysing data from the actions of millions of children. In this behaviourist set-up, teachers become more like coaches: they assist and motivate individual ‘learners’, but are no longer so important to the provision of education. And since it is no longer the sole responsibility of teachers or schools to deliver the curriculum, it becomes more centralised – the latest front in a forty-year battle to wrest control from the hands of teachers and local authorities.

Among other things, the pandemic seems to have speeded up the neoliberal conquest of education.

My commonplace booklet The best riposte to those who are rude to, and dismissive of, people who believe in fairies is that since 1970 particle physicists — those archetypal sober citizens — have been devout believers in the existence of neutrinos — subatomic particles that are so small that they can pass right through the earth without pausing.

Not only do physicists believe in these blighters, but they are now claiming to be able to weigh them. Exhibit A is this article, ”How Light is a Neutrino?”, which has appeared in Nature, no less. It doesn’t actually come up with an answer, though — just says that the latest effort to weigh the elusive particle produces a more precise estimate of its upper limit. And apparently this is progress.

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PJ O’Rourke RIP Even when one disagreed with him about politics (which I certainly did), he was great fun and often a joy to read.

The NYT ran a good Obit. Sample:

He was a proud conservative Republican — one of his books was called “Republican Party Reptile: The Confessions, Adventures, Essays and (Other) Outrages of P.J. O’Rourke” — but he was widely admired by readers of many stripes because of his fearless style and his willingness to mock just about anyone who deserved it, including himself. In “Republican Party Reptile” he recalled his youthful flirtation with Mao Zedong.

“But I couldn’t stay a Maoist forever,” he wrote. “I got too fat to wear bell-bottoms. And I realized that communism meant giving my golf clubs to a family in Zaire.”

In 2010, The New York Times invited him and assorted other prominent people to define “Republican” and “Democrat.” He offered this:

“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer and remove the crab grass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then get elected and prove it.”

They (the Republicans) don’t make them like that any more.

Quote of the Day

”A spin with P. J. O’Rourke is like a ride in the back of an old pickup over unpaved roads. You get where you’re going fast, with exhilarating views but not without a few bruises.”

Signe Wilkinson, reviewing PJ’s Parliament of Whores in the New York Times.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush | Don’t Give Up

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Extraordinary duet. It’s had more than 40m views on YouTube, so they’re doing something right.

An obituary for coal Every year at this time, subscribers to The Economist (of whom I’m one) get sent a copy of The World Ahead — supposedly looking forward to the coming year.

Given that 2022 is the year when burning coal in a domestic fire will be outlawed, Anne Wroe, the Economist‘s Obituaries editor, contributed “Ashes to Ashes”, an elegant Obituary for the natural resource that made Britain great. I read it aloud to a friend who was busy doing something else at the time and thought that readers who are not Economist subscribers might enjoy it. So here it is:

https://memex.naughtons.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Obituary-for-coal.mp3 Link

Everything you need to know about that Andrew Windsor business Can’t imagine anyone bettering this dispatch in yesterday’s edition of Politico’s London Playbook newsletter.

SHAMING OF PRINCE ANDREW

ROYAL WRONG ‘UN: Queen Elizabeth II will help her son Prince Andrew pay an out-of-court settlement of more than £12 million to a woman who accused him of raping her when she was a child, in exchange for her silence and to prevent him from facing a jury trial. The sordid deal is the final disgrace for the queen’s third child and ends his prospect of ever salvaging his reputation or returning to public life. It raises searching questions about why Britain’s monarch is funding a settlement that saves Andrew from having to defend himself against Virginia Giuffre’s sexual abuse allegations in court. Andrew always claimed he had never met Giuffre and only weeks ago vowed to prove his innocence at a trial. Instead, he got his mum to pay her off. There is also the grim reality that since the queen, Andrew and the royal family derive much, if not all, of their wealth from the British public, it is essentially us who are paying for Andrew to buy his escape from justice. All in all, Tuesday was probably the most humiliating and damaging day for the royals in their recent history.

OUR NOBLE QUEEN: The story splashes most of today’s newspaper front pages. The Telegraph’s Victoria Ward and Josie Ensor report the queen will “partly fund” the settlement, which they are told “exceeds £12 million.” They say the terms of the deal require both Andrew and Giuffre not to discuss the case or the settlement in public. The Times’ Charlotte Wace, Will Pavia, Jonathan Ames and Mario Ledwith hear Andrew settled after pressure from Prince Charles as the case threatened to overshadow this year’s Platinum Jubilee. Playbook is not sure the queen paying off an alleged sexual abuse victim so she can have a party is as good a look as the royals think. The Sun’s Tom Wells say Andrew will never return to the front line of public life. The Mail calls it his “final humiliation.”

Long Read of the Day Peter Thiel, the Right’s Would-Be Kingmaker

Long, long piece by Ryan Mac and Lisa Lerer in the New York Times on the current political plans of Silicon Valley’s most disruptive libertarian. There’s no good news in it, except for Republican extremists and maybe Trump supporters. And it provides further confirmation of the extent to which dark money and personal wealth are destroying American democracy.

Realism about Quantum computing Given that our entire digital world increasingly depends on strong and virtually unbreakable encryption, there have been lots of doomsday conjectures about the computational power that will supposedly be provided by ‘quantum’ computers — i.e. those that work with Qubits rather than binary bits. The belief is that quantum machines will be so powerful that they will do in minutes calculations that would take conventional machines millions of years.

This interesting paper seems to throw cold water on this. Here’s the Abstract:

Note the number of physical Qubits required: 317 million to break the Bitcoin encryption in a time period small enough to be operationally useful.

Reality check: At the moment, the biggest working quantum computer (IBM’s) has the princely number of 127 physical Qubits.

Tentative conclusion: Conventional encryption looks a good bet for the time being.

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Harbingers of Spring?

Seen on a woodland walk the other day.

Quote of the Day

”Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of the war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.”

Milo Minderbinder in Catch 22

Drone manufacturers have the same idea.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Eels | Mr E’s Beautiful Blues

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Long Read of the Day The case for defending Ukraine

A counterweight by Natia Seskuria to the essay I posted yesterday asking (sceptically) why the US was so bothered about Ukraine and Putin. Ms Seskuria is an Associate Fellow at the British Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). Since the tensions appear to be easing as I write this (late Tuesday evening), maybe all this stuff will be moot in a week. But here’s a sample.

The current crisis is not only about Ukraine’s sovereignty. It is about protecting the values that the U.S. stands for against Russian attempts to erase the rules-based international order. By issuing non-starter ultimatums on the U.S. and its allies—demanding that they take Russia’s so-called security concerns into consideration and change long-standing NATO policies—Russia is directly challenging America’s influence in Europe.

Until now, the West has largely underestimated or turned a blind eye towards the Kremlin’s malign activities. In many instances this approach has been motivated by the economic benefits of cooperation with Russia: the German government is still reluctant to scrap the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, despite Russia’s use of its energy resources as a geopolitical weapon. American leaders have done little better. Barack Obama held off on providing some lethal weapons to Ukraine to avoid provoking Putin. Although his successor Donald Trump ultimately authorized the purchase of anti-tank Javelin missiles to Ukraine and Georgia, his ambiguity and reluctance to criticize Putin further encouraged the Kremlin to play the game by its own rules.

Interesting piece but basically it’s the same argument ever since Chamberlain signed the deal with Hitler about Czechoslovakia. Giving in to bullies only encourages them.

Happy Valentine’s Day from Facebook. Here’s a Photo of You and Your Ex Lovely piece by Emily Kling.

Happy Valentine’s Day! Just logging in for a quick scroll? Take your time.

You’re not on here as much as you used to be. Still, we’ll never forget you. In fact, we at Facebook love celebrating the moments and people you’ve worked really hard to forget. So now that you’re here, please enjoy this picture of you and your ex-boyfriend from five years ago.

You really loved that wine bar. Look at how happy you were. And is it just us or is your body snatched in this pic? Do you still own that blouse? Oh, right, it doesn’t fit anymore. Just like your ex, it’s gone now.

What happened anyway? I mean, we’re Facebook; we, of course, know what happened. We’ve read the private messages between your ex-boyfriend and your best friend. Pretty steamy. But also, what happened to you? Bummer that you never fully moved on.

Lovely satire. Do read the whole thing. And then delete your account.

How a journalist used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch her husband’s every move (with his permission, btw)

Kashmir Hill is a terrific journalist who has been covering the tech industry for a long time. A few years she conducted a remarkable experiment to see whether she could live a normal life without using the services of the tech giants. You can guess the result, but it made an interesting and sobering story.

Her latest investigation involved putting various consumer tracking devices on her long-suffering husband to see how effectively he could be tracked.

In mid-January, my husband and I were having an argument. Our 1-year-old had just tested positive for Covid-19 and was occasionally grunting between breaths. I called urgent care and was told we should take her to the emergency room. But, because I had been up all night with her, I was too exhausted to drive.

“I’m worried,” I told my husband. “I want you to take her to the hospital.”

“Doctors always tell us to take the baby to the E.R. whenever we call about anything,” he replied, exasperated. (This was true.) “She is fine. She is eating and playing and happy. This is not an emergency.”

He eventually caved and set out for the hospital a half-hour away. Knowing he was already annoyed by me, I did not want to pepper him with questions about how it was going.

Instead, I turned to the location-monitoring devices that I had secretly stashed in our car a week earlier.

I put a quarter-sized Apple AirTag in a seat pocket; a flat, credit card-shaped Bluetooth tracker made by Tile in a dashboard pocket; and a hockey-puck-like GPS tracker from a company called LandAirSea in the glove compartment.

It’s a fascinating story, well told. And sobering if you’ve bought Tiles or AirTags. I have one of the latter, but it’s only attached to my house keys. (Thinks) Hmmm… But since I never leave home without my keys doesn’t that mean…?

My commonplace booklet * Nissan is going to stop making internal combustion engines (ICEs) Link. I’m not surprised. With the Nissan Leaf they were early into the EV game.

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The selfie is older than you think

The era of the selfie didn’t begin with smartphones. Here are two fashionable dames posing against a background of a city devastated by an earthquake and in flames. In 1906.

So why exactly is the US willing to risk a nuclear war over Ukraine? This piece on Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion blog, by ‘Herbert Reed’ (a pseudonym for a “former US State Department official”) makes sense, at least to me. Here’s the bit that particularly struck a chord.

Ukraine matters a lot more to neighboring Russia than it does to the faraway United States. Russians have long been complaining about Ukraine’s bid to join NATO and its defense ties with the West. As Vladimir Putin has made clear, Russia sees the issue of Ukraine as absolutely existential. It is not hard to understand why: Ukraine is Russia’s neighbor and deeply intertwined with Russian history. If Russia threatened to form a military alliance with Mexico, the United States would probably have a similarly fierce reaction.

So what is the United States defending at such great risk in Ukraine? Do most Americans have any idea? There is no doubt Russian President Vladimir Putin is a bully, but preventing bullying is not a U.S. national security interest. According to Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, America “will not allow anyone to slam closed NATO’s ‘Open Door’ policy.” In other words, America is defending the right of Ukraine to join an alliance of its choosing—even though we currently have no plans to even start the process of admitting Ukraine to NATO. So, in essence, to defend the abstract right of a country few Americans care about to join an alliance that has no intention of admitting it, the United States is willing to risk an economic calamity and war with a nuclear power. That certainly doesn’t sound like a foreign policy for the middle class.

Indeed, the indifference of the American middle class toward Ukraine shows a certain strategic rationality that the foreign policy elite seem to lack. Ukraine, after all, is no geopolitical prize. The last time Moscow controlled Ukraine, the Soviet Union conspicuously failed to win the Cold War. This time, the effort to occupy or control a Ukraine that has become economically dysfunctional, endemically corrupt and deeply anti-Russian would substantially weaken Russia.

This brings two things to (my) mind: (i) NATO’s foolish expansion eastwards (under US pressure) after the collapse of the USSR in 1989; and (ii) the equally-crazed determination to invade IRAQ in 2003.

And I’ve yet to see a Western government publish a candid assessment of the economic and other chaos that a new war would bring.

Quote of the Day

”There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens.”

Desmond Morris

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news The Gartan Mother’s Lullaby | The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin

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I suppose one shouldn’t highlight lullabies in the morning. But then some readers may work the night shift.

Long Read of the Day Getting to Yes

Terrific New Yorker essay by Merve Emre on “the seductions of Ulysses” which is hopefully not paywalled.

“Ulysses” is all about wandering, of course, and about the loneliness that attends it. While running errands that same morning, Leopold Bloom summons a memory of his wife, Molly, thrusting into his mouth a crushed seedcake on the day he proposed to her: “I lay, full lips open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: Joy.” Yet the sweetness of his memory is soured by a sudden recollection. This is the day, he suspects, that Molly is going to have sex with the businessman Blazes Boylan, the “worst man in Dublin.” Bloom is adrift from his wife, adrift from his past self, and alone with his memory—just as readers, devouring the novel with pleasure, look up to realize that they are alone and adrift on its thrashing sea of references. “The anxiety which ‘Ulysses’ massively, encyclopedically struggles to transcend,” [the critic] Bersani writes, “is that of disconnectedness”—the “traumatic seductions” of desiring to read all one would have to read to master those references. How many people have read not just Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Sterne, Fielding, Blake, Goethe, Wilde, and Yeats but also Irish, Indian, and Jewish folklore? How many are proficient in French, German, Spanish, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin? Whom do you share these connections with?

Answer: Fellow Joyceans, I suppose, of whom there are an awful lot.

Great essay, which ventures into territory that many literary scholars might tactfully avoid.

Why Proust was right A nice little essay about memory by Peter Hitchins in The Lamp Magazine. He had no madelaines as a lad but…

The smell of really good coffee will always evoke my first visit to Paris, by train and boat, aboard the vanished Golden Arrow Express. Just the hint of it brings back the freezing day, the bare officious customs shed at Calais, and my family picking our way worryingly across the tracks (this was never allowed in Britain in those days). Then came the most delicious meal I had ever eaten ending with actual real coffee, as we rumbled across northern France. I also especially recall one of those enormous black French steam locomotives, like prehistoric monsters, which emitted an incongruous thin “peeeep!” like a bird startled on a pond. That France, now so easily recalled, has wholly vanished since.

It has, but in the case of the trains, that peeeping steam-belching locomotive has been replaced by the TGV, and a damn good thing that is too. Still, this is a nice piece.

My commonplace booklet The changing room illusion

Try it. And then feel as embarrassed as I did. Makes you realise why eyewitness accounts can be unreliable. Link

Memex 1.1: Recent Episodes

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