Beached

Quote of the Day

”I don’t know what I’m doing, but my incompetence has never stopped my enthusiasm.”

• Woody Allen

(Me too)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan | Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (LIVE) –

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Looking Ahead To The 19th Century

As the post-war international order dissolves, the big question now is what will replace it. The most convincing idea is that we will move to a world in which several major powers will have ‘Spheres of interest’ with an implicit understanding that each can do what it likes within its zone. I can see four such Spheres: American, Chinese, Russian and (maybe) Indian.

All of which is by way of explaining why I liked this piece in Noema.

The rules-based liberal international order, underwritten and guaranteed for decades by American might, has been consigned to the ashcan of history by the summary defection of its founding architect from its terms and premises.

After only one month in power, Team Trump has fundamentally broken ranks with the long-standing orthodoxy of the Washington establishment on almost every front. Where free trade was once gospel, now it is tariffs. Europeans are considered valuable allies only if they can pay for their own defense, share the ideological disposition of the administration and open their over-regulated markets to make way for the digital dominance of American Big Tech.

Instead of expressing outrage at China’s plans to take Taiwan, Russia’s bloody attempt to seize Ukraine or Israel’s vision of annexing the West Bank, Team Trump is openly considering its own Anschluss of other people’s territory in Greenland, the Panama Canal and even Canada. From what we can tell so far, the president’s idea of any peaceful settlement to these conflicts entails giving the stronger power what it wants.

That the U.S. has now joined the other revisionist powers of China and Russia by baldly asserting sovereigntist self-interest unencumbered by the rules of others portends a world not unlike the 19th century when the great powers carved out exclusive domains of influence.

This is the prospect ahead envisaged by both historian Niall Ferguson and political theorist Francis Fukuyama in conversations last week…

Do read on.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

I read this book by the co-founder of Palantir over last weekend and have written a piece about it that will come out in next Sunday’s Observer. All I’ll say here is that I found it absorbing — and timely, given what’s going on just now.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Waymo is building genuinely autonomous cars (robotaxis) at scale. See this drone footage.

  This 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!

Les Misérables?

Surely not.

Quote of the Day

”Not all who wander are lost.”

• J.R.R Tolkien

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Humours of Ballyloughlin | Paul Brady & Arty McGlynn

Link

Traditional tune, usually played on Uileann pipes, beautifully rendered on guitars.

Long Read of the Day

 How Europe must respond

If you want a sobering read, then this leading article from the current issue of the Economist is it.

The past week has been the bleakest in Europe since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Ukraine is being sold out, Russia is being rehabilitated and, under Donald Trump, America can no longer be counted on to come to Europe’s aid in wartime. The implications for Europe’s security are grave, but they have yet to sink in to the continent’s leaders and people. The old world needs a crash course on how to wield hard power in a lawless era, or it will fall victim to the new world disorder.

Speaking in Munich last week, America’s vice-president, J.D. Vance, offered a taste of how the home of fine wines, classical architecture and welfare cheques faces humiliation, when he ridiculed Europe as decadent and undemocratic. Its leaders have been excluded from peace talks between the White House and the Kremlin, which began officially in Riyadh on February 18th. However, the unfolding crisis goes far beyond insults and diplomatic niceties.

Mr Trump appears ready to walk away from Ukraine which he falsely blames for the war. Calling its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator”, Mr Trump warned him that he had “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left”…

I’m a long-time subscriber to the Economist, despite its general penchant for neoliberal ideas, because its reporting is excellent. It’s not often that I agree with its editorial line, but I think it’s spot on about this.

I don’t think it’s behind the magazine’s paywall, but in case I’m wrong you can find a pdf here.

AI and IP theft

Yesterday’s Observer column…

There are decades when nothing happens (as Lenin is – wrongly – supposed to have said) and weeks when decades happen. We’ve just lived through a few weeks like that. We’ve known for decades that some American tech companies were problematic for democracy because they were fragmenting the public sphere and fostering polarisation. They were a worrying nuisance, to be sure, but not central to the polity.

And then, suddenly, those corporations were inextricably bound into government, and their narrow sectional interests became the national interest of the US. Which means that any foreign government with ideas about regulating, say, hate speech on X, may have to deal with the intemperate wrath of Donald Trump or the more coherent abuse of JD Vance.

The panic that this has induced in Europe is a sight to behold. Everywhere you look, political leaders are frantically trying to find ways of “aligning” with the new regime in Washington. Here in the UK, the Starmer team has been dutifully doing its obeisance bit. First off, it decided to rename Rishi Sunak’s AI Safety Institute as the AI Security Institute, thereby “shifting the UK’s focus on artificial intelligence towards security cooperation rather than a ‘woke’ emphasis on safety concerns”, as the Financial Times put it.

But, in a way, that’s just a rebranding exercise – sending a virtue signal to Washington. Coming down the line, though, is something much more consequential…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Tyler Cowen has an interesting blog post setting out his views on the likely adoption rate of AI technology. I asked Claude to summarise his views in a single 300-word paragraph.

Here’s what it produced:

Cowen argues that despite AI’s potential, several structural factors will slow its economic impact. He points to the Baumol-Bowen effect, where less productive sectors become a larger share of the economy over time, meaning many inefficient sectors (especially government-related ones) will adopt AI slowly. Human bottlenecks, particularly regulatory ones like FDA approval processes, will constrain AI’s benefits in areas like drug discovery. The “O-Ring model” suggests that in collaborative settings, the least capable participant (likely humans) will limit overall productivity, meaning AI’s superior capabilities won’t be fully utilized. Additionally, the historically modest correlation between IQ and wages suggests that adding more intelligence to systems may not dramatically boost productivity. Cowen notes that historical technology adoption, like electricity, typically takes longer than experts predict, and GDP growth has remained remarkably stable around 2% despite massive technological changes. Rather than viewing AI through traditional economic models of increased labor, capital, or productivity, Cowen sees it as an alien technology that society must gradually learn to integrate. While remaining optimistic about AI’s technical capabilities, he predicts it will only add about half a percentage point to annual economic growth rates, leading to significant cumulative changes over decades but not dramatic year-to-year transformations.

The key takeaway is that much of the current breathless hype about the transformative potential of the technology is overblown. Like any General-Purpose Technology it has great potential for the long term. Somebody should tell Starmer & Co that it won’t make all that much difference within in a single electoral cycle.

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Manuel

Manuel Castells, the first great sociologist of cyberspace, photographed in 2011 on one of his visits to Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won’t get much sleep.”

• Woody Allen

I thought of this when watching J.D. Vance speaking last Friday at the Munich Security Conference.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965)

Link

We went to Complete Unknown last night. I was blown away by it. The only problem is that I knew most of the songs and had to be discouraged by my companions from singing along!

This is the nicest version of ‘Baby Blue’ I’ve ever heard.

Long Read of the Day

 Machines of Loving Grace

An extraordinary essay by Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the AI company responsible for Claude, the LLM I use mostly. The essay is the best attempt I’ve found of a real expert in the field setting out an honest account of the potential upsides of the technology. If he’s a booster he’s the most credible one I’ve encountered.

Here’s how he sets out his pitch:

I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I’m the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a pessimist or “doomer” who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don’t think that at all. In fact, one of my main reasons for focusing on risks is that they’re the only thing standing between us and what I see as a fundamentally positive future. I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.

In this essay I try to sketch out what that upside might look like—what a world with powerful AI might look like if everything goes right. Of course no one can know the future with any certainty or precision, and the effects of powerful AI are likely to be even more unpredictable than past technological changes, so all of this is unavoidably going to consist of guesses. But I am aiming for at least educated and useful guesses, which capture the flavor of what will happen even if most details end up being wrong. I’m including lots of details mainly because I think a concrete vision does more to advance discussion than a highly hedged and abstract one…

Read on. And thanks to Seb Schmoller for reminding me of it.

Books, etc.

This is by an outstanding academic who is currently a visiting associate at our Centre. It puts a bomb under the Promethean myth that AI is here to liberate humankind from dull, dirty and dangerous work. It’s an admirable, sobering, thoroughly-researched account of how AI depends on precarious human labour in the Global South. In that sense, it continues the assault on the ‘immateriality’ of AI that was launched years ago by Kate Crawford in her wonderful Atlas of AI.

My commonplace booklet

Very interesting study of what people use LLMs for.

Here’s a snatch from the Abstract:

We leverage a recent privacy-preserving system … to analyze over four million Claude.ai conversations through the lens of tasks and occupations in the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET Database. Our analysis reveals that AI usage primarily concentrates in software development and writing tasks, which together account for nearly half of all total usage. However, usage of AI extends more broadly across the economy, with ∼ 36% of occupations using AI for at least a quarter of their associated tasks. We also analyze how AI is being used for tasks, finding 57% of usage suggests augmentation of human capabilities (e.g., learning or iterating on an output) while 43% suggests automation (e.g., fulfilling a request with minimal human involvement).

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Cycle path

London, May 2024

Quote of the Day

”In my next life I want to live backwards. Start out dead and finish off as an orgasm.”

• Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vaughan Williams | The Lark Ascending

Link

I’ve always loved this piece. Just scanning through the comments below the YouTube recording I came on this:

The first time I heard this exquisite piece of music, I was driving a lorry through the Berkshire countryside and it came on Classic FM, and it was requested by a mother who had just buried her four year old son. They used to listen to it together through his illness and he loved it… she said it was now how she imagined him, a beautiful free spirit flying up to heaven. Despite being a big burly trucker, I had to pull over and I sobbed my heart out for ten minutes. I just couldn’t hold it together. Even recounting the story now, sets me off! How can a world that produces such beautiful music be so cruel to such an innocent! Needless to say I have had a soft spot for this piece of music ever since. I can’t listen to it without thinking of that poor bereaved mother and the poor poor child!

Music reaches parts of us that nothing else can touch.

Long Read of the Day

The Great Social Media Diaspora

If you want to understand what has happened to the public sphere of our democracies, then this long, long essay by Renée Diresta is a good place to start. (Busyness alert: you need to give it time.) It’s the best exposition I know of how digital technology — and social media in particular — has irretrievably fragmented the public sphere. And it’s also a sobering explanation of why users fleeing from a particular platform they have come to detest to join another, apparently nicer, platform doesn’t solve the underlying problem of discourse fragmentation. Democracies no longer have any meaningful collective public opinion. They have innumerable publics, each with their own opinions. The social construction of ‘public opinion’ by Gallup — the first polling organisation — in 1935 no longer applies.

For the past two decades, most online discourse has occurred on a handful of social media platforms. Their dominion seemed unshakeable. The question wasn’t when a challenger to Twitter or Facebook might arrive but if one could ever do so successfully. Could a killer new app, or perhaps the cudgel of antitrust, make a difference?

Today, those same platforms still enjoy the largest user bases; massive breakout successes like TikTok are the rare exception, not the rule. However, user exodus to smaller platforms has become increasingly common — especially from X, the once-undisputed home of The Discourse. X refugees have scattered and settled again and again: to Gab and Truth Social, to Mastodon and Bluesky.

What ultimately splintered social media wasn’t a killer app or the Federal Trade Commission — it was content moderation. Partisan users clashed with “referees” tasked with defining and enforcing rules like no hate speech, or making calls about how to handle Covid-19 content. Principles like “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” — which proposed that “borderline” content (posts that fell into grey areas around hate speech, for example) remain visible but unamplified — attempted to articulate a middle ground. However, even nuanced efforts were reframed as unreasonable suppression by ideologues who recognized the power of dominating online discourse. Efforts to moderate became flashpoints, fueling a feedback loop where online norms fed offline polarization — and vice versa.

And so, in successive waves, users departed for alternatives: platforms where the referees were lax (Truth Social), nearly nonexistent (Telegram) or self-appointed (Mastodon). Much of this fracturing occurred along political lines. Today the Great Decentralization is accelerating, with newspapers of record, Luke Skywalker and others as the latest high-profile refugees to lead fresh retreats…

If you’re pressed for time, Nathan Garedels’s essay, “How Disinformation Deforms Democracy” provides an overview of Diresta’s argument.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

Just arrived!

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From Kevin Kelly’s 50 years of travel tips:

Here in brief is the method I’ve honed to optimize a two-week vacation: When you arrive in a new country, immediately proceed to the farthest, most remote, most distant place you intend to reach during the trip. If there is a small village, remote spa, a friend’s farm, or a wild place you plan on seeing on the trip, go there immediately. Do not stop near the airport. Do not rest overnight in the arrival city. Do not pause to acclimate. If at all possible proceed by plane, bus, jeep, car directly to the furthest point without interruption. Make it an overnight journey if you have to. Then once you reach your furthest point, unpack, explore, and work your way slowly back to the big city, wherever your international departure airport is.

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Anyone for music?

One of the joys of living in Cambridge is the amount of live music on offer every week.

Quote of the Day

”Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”

• Schopenhauer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn and Arty McGlynn | Water under the keel

Link

Long Read of the Day

Trump As Sovereign Decisionist

This is a perceptive summary by Nathan Gardels of how the world has changed as a result of Trump’s re-election.

The impact of this dramatic departure of the United States from being the leading promoter and defender of a liberal internationalist order to the chief architect of its demolition is only just beginning to register worldwide. By definition, if the guarantor of that order is out only to defend and promote its own interests by severing all ties of interdependence, everyone else must follow suit or foolishly expose themselves to vulnerability.

Worth reading because it hammers home that we need to adjust to new realities. If you have any doubt about that need, take a few minutes to read the transcript of J.D. Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference last week.

Europe’s long holiday from history is over.

AI Roundheads vs. Tech royalty

Yesterday’s Observer column…

An interesting fault line has opened up in the field of artificial intelligence. Felix Martin, a perceptive Reuters columnist, sees it as a forthcoming civil war. “On one side,” he writes, “are those who strive for artificial general intelligence (AGI), the point where machines match or surpass human capabilities. Let’s call them AI Cavaliers. Facing them are AI Roundheads who are focused on the more mundane goal of solving specific problems as efficiently as possible. Deciding which side to back in this AI civil war will be a defining decision for investors in the world’s hottest technology.”

It’s a colourful metaphor with more than a grain of truth.

Do read the whole article

Books, etc.

Screenshot

I loved Lyndal Roper’s book on Martin Luther, and so sat up when her new book came out, especially after reading Thomas Meaney’s review in the New York Times.

Here’s an excerpt that struck me:

For Roper, who lived in Berlin in the years after the wall fell, the history of the German Peasants’ War became, if anything, only more urgent in the wake of the revolutions of 1989, when the communist system of Eastern Europe collapsed. Whether “the people” of those revolutions ended up as beneficiaries, and were even the revolution’s prime movers, or whether the gains redounded to a new set of modern princes — in the form of oligarchs — depends on whom you ask.

In the 21st century, however, one thing remains clear: The legacy of the Peasants’ War is still being co-opted for opposite ends. Some of the most recent invocations of the Peasants’ War in Germany have appeared at rallies for the far-right political party, the Alternative for Germany…

Funny thing about history, it keeps coming back to bite us. Just like Trump’s mercantilism.

My commonplace booklet

 How to teach people how to work with AI

Tyler Cowen has had an idea.

Given them some topics to investigate, and have them run a variety of questions, exercises, programming, paper-writing tasks — whatever — through the second or third-best model, or some combination of slightly lesser models.

Have the students grade and correct the outputs of those models. The key is to figure out where the AIs are going wrong.

Then have the best model grade the grading of the students. The professor occasionally may be asked to contribute here as well, depending on how good the models are in absolute terms.

In essence, the students are learning how to grade and correct AI models…

If I were still teaching, I’d be doing something like this. And maybe reading Ethan Mollick’s book first. Oh, and listening to Alison Gopnik on LLMs.

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Blooming heck!

A truly amazing plant. We come down every morning and it’s done something new.

Quote of the Day

”If it’s sent by ship, it’s cargo. If sent by road, it’s shipment.”

• Dave Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Emily’s Reel | Mark and Maggie O’Connor

Link

Lovely Appalachian tune.

Long Read of the Day

Springtime for Scammers

Readers with long memories will remember Mel Brooks’s lovely film, The Producers, in which Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder come up with a scam involving putting on a sure-fire Broadway musical flop entitled Springtime for Hitler (which, surprisingly, becomes a hit). The headline on this blog post by Paul Krugman immediately brought the movie to mind, because it’s already clear that the Trump regime is opening the floodgates to scamming on an Olympic scale, with crypto at the heart of it. This post is not about cryptocurrencies but about simpler kinds of fraud. It was prompted by the news that Trump has shuttered the federal Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, which was created to protect Americans from financial predators.

Overall, Project 2025’s attack on the CFPB bears a family resemblance to Elon Musk’s claim that USAID is a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” It’s a bit milder, but equally absurd, and is clearly not the real reason for killing the agency.

So what is the real reason? It seems fairly obvious. CFPB was created to protect Americans from financial predation, and has done a very good job of doing so. But now we have government of, by and for financial predators. Trump has famously left behind a trail of bankruptcies and unpaid contractors, and is furiously grifting even now. Musk has faced multiple lawsuits from vendors and former employees over unpaid debts.

There’s lots more to come on this topic. It’s nice to have Krugman on Substack rather than behind the NYT paywall.

Books, etc.

I’m an avid notebook user, partly because I want to keep my handwriting from atrophying, but mainly because it enables me to keep track of fleeting thoughts. So I was a sucker for Roland Allen’s book when it came out. I’m about halfway through it, and enjoying it. Notebooks have a much more interesting history than I had imagined.

Feedback

My puzzlement about the neon inscriptions on the Portico of the Fitzwilliam the other night prompted Kevin Cryan to email:

The poem quoted in neon is – in the unlikely case you did not know – is “Waiting for the Barbarians” (Περιμένοντας τοὺς Bαρβάρους) an 1898 Greek poem (published in 1904) by Constantine P. Cavafy (1863 – 1933). I came across it when I was studying Modern Poetry with the OU, and it has remained one of my favourite “political” poems ever since

Of course I didn’t know. Which is why being an ignorant blogger is such a joy!

This 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!

Poetry in Neon

The Portico of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge the other night. The illuminated quotes are a part of the work of the American contemporary artist Glenn Ligon which can be found in galleries throughout the building. If you’re interested, here’s a video.

Quote of the Day

” We stand at a crossroads. One path leads to despair, the other to destruction. Let’s hope we make the right choice.”

• Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bonnie “Prince” Billy | Our Home

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The End of Programming as We Know It

Tim O’Reilly is one of the sharpest observers of the tech industry around, and this long essay is an example of what he does best — to escape from “the sociology of the last five minutes” that plagues coverage of the industry. You don’t have to be a programmer to appreciate it.

Sample:

AI will not replace programmers, but it will transform their jobs. Eventually much of what programmers do today may be as obsolete (for everyone but embedded system programmers) as the old skill of debugging with an oscilloscope. Master programmer and prescient tech observer Steve Yegge observes that it is not junior and mid-level programmers who will be replaced but those who cling to the past rather than embracing the new programming tools and paradigms. Those who acquire or invent the new skills will be in high demand. Junior developers who master the tools of AI will be able to outperform senior programmers who don’t. Yegge calls it “The Death of the Stubborn Developer.”

My ideas are shaped not only by my own past 40+ years of experience in the computer industry and the observations of developers like Yegge but also by the work of economic historian James Bessen, who studied how the first Industrial Revolution played out in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts during the early 1800s…

TL;DR. AI is not the end of programming. But what programming is will change.

My commonplace booklet

Screenshot

From “Could the world decouple from US Trade?” in the FT

The answer, oddly enough, is that apart from poor Mexico and Canada, is “yes”. So why are governments all over the world quaking in their handmade boots?

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• “In the Machiavellian sense, corruption is not just about illegal and legalized bribery, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined.”

From “Corruption, Tariffs, and US Renewal” by Eric Schliesser on the Crooked Timber blog.

This 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!

Patience

Everything comes to those who wait… Well, almost everything.

Quote of the Day

”Like trying to pan gold in a sewer.”

• Charles Arthur, writing about the challenge of moderating newspaper readers’ comments.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Arlo Guthrie and Emmylou Harris | Deportee

Link

Appropriate for our times.

Long Read of the Day

 Elon Musk Weaponizes the Government

Another angle on Musk’s Coup d’Etat from Henry Farrell and Abe Newman.

It’s hard for politicians and journalists to grasp what Musk and his team are doing, still less to explain it to the public. These efforts involve technical systems that are incomprehensible and boring to outsiders, few of whom even know that the Office of Personnel Management exists, let alone what it does. But even if no one pays much attention to these systems, they are the sinews of government—key parts of the infrastructure that hold the federal state together and manage its relationship to the outside world.

We are highly familiar with such systems and how they can be used. Our academic research, and our recent book, “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy,” explain how the U.S. quietly took control of similar technical systems that hold the world economy together and used them to exercise domination over allies and enemies alike. Now, Musk is seemingly doing to the U.S. government what the U.S. government once did to the rest of the world: refashioning the plumbing of the federal government into a political weapon against his adversaries…

This is a perceptive take on what’s happening. The authors’ book, book  is very good, btw.

While Trump blathers about tariffs and Gaza, Musk is executing a coup d’état

Yesterday’s Observer column

Way back in 2019, Steve Bannon, then a Trump consigliere, outlined in a TV interview a strategy for managing information. “The opposition party is the media,” he said, “And because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time… All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang.”

Since his re-election, Donald Trump has been following this script to the letter, and the media, not to mention the entire world, are feeling punch-drunk. Which is, as Bannon pointed out, enabling other members of the Trump crew to get their stuff done. Really bad stuff too, to which the world has not been paying enough attention.

Prime suspect in this respect is Elon Musk, whom Trump has chosen to slash $2tn off US government spending.

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Papering over history

Screenshot

This photograph, courtesy of National Public Radio, shows how the NSA Museum papered over plaques devoted to women and people of colour who served the National Security Agency.

The NPR report says that,

Responding to President Trump’s order that terminated diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across the federal government, the National Cryptologic Museum taped sheets of paper over plaques that celebrate women and people of color who had served the National Security Agency, which intercepts overseas conversations and breaks foreign government codes.

The honorees are described as “Trailblazers in U.S. Cryptologic History,” and the plaques hang in the museum’s Hall of Honor…

Later, in a phone interview, NSA Executive Director Sheila Thomas — the No. 3 person in the agency — told NPR that papering over the exhibits was a mistake.

”There was absolutely never an intention to cover up parts of our history,” said Thomas, who was at the museum to greet the retirees and has worked at the NSA for just over four decades. “As soon as we became aware, we said, ‘Oh, that was not what was intended.’”

This is a small but revealing example of how an authoritarian regime erodes freedom — not by issuing orders but by creating an atmosphere where individuals and institutions try to second-guess what’s permissible and what’s not.

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Floral contrasts

Our Amaryllis has suddenly burst magnificently into flower. Photographed yesterday with Robert Mapplethorpe’s ‘Orchid’ (1989) in the background.

Quote of the Day

”He talked about those politicians who were always against everything new: “We used to have folks like that around the store in Johnson City,” he said. “We called them dispeptics. When they put the railroad through town for the first time, one old man stood there and looked at-‘ it and said, ‘They’ll never get the damn thing started.’ The girl came up with a great wine bottle and hit it across the snoot of the locomotive and it started going out about 15 or 20 miles an hour. And they went up to him and said, ‘What do you think now, Uncle Ezra?’ And he said, ‘They’ll never get the damn thing stopped.’”

• LBJ in a speech to Democratic Candidates for Congress in the White House* 

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder & David Lindley | All Shook Up

Link

Song title resonates with the current state of the (Western) world.

Long Read of the Day

Musk’s Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government

Nice satirical piece of satire by Garrett Graff prompted by an interesting thought. “I’ve long believed that the American media would be more clear-eyed about the rise and return of Donald Trump if it was happening overseas in a foreign country, where we’re used to foreign correspondents writing with more incisive authority. Having watched with growing alarm the developments of the last 24 and 36 hours in Washington, I thought I’d take a stab at just such a dispatch. Here’s a story that should be written this weekend.”

Here’s how it opens:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — What started Thursday as a political purge of the internal security services accelerated Friday into a full-blown coup, as elite technical units aligned with media oligarch Elon Musk moved to seize key systems at the national treasury, block outside access to federal personnel records, and take offline governmental communication networks.

With rapidity that has stunned even longtime political observers, forces loyal to Musk’s junta have established him as the all-but undisputed unelected head of government in just a matter of days, unwinding the longtime democracy’s constitutional system and its proud nearly 250-year-old tradition of the rule of law. Having secured themselves in key ministries and in a building adjacent to the presidential office complex, Musk’s forces have begun issuing directives to civil service workers and forcing the resignation of officials deemed insufficiently loyal, like the head of the country’s aviation authority…

Read on. It’s a hoot — except that when you get into it it begins to look like actual reporting of what’s going on.

Books, etc.

This arrived the other day. I welcomed it because I loved Margaret Heffernan’s earlier book, Wilful Blindness — about a condition that plagues our political and corporate world. Her new book is about the way that artists not only cope with uncertainty better than the rest of us, but how they positively embrace it.

My commonplace booklet

 AI company says to job applicants: ‘Please don’t use AI’

When I first saw this in the FT, I immediately filed it away in the “You Couldn’t Make This Up” folder. Anthropic is the company that makes Claude, one of the LLMs that I use regularly.

Here’s what it tells job applicants:

While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate ‘Yes’ if you have read and agree.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Pot calls the Data Centre black

From New Scientist

More than 60 per cent of the 24,000 tonnes of cannabis grown each year in the US is cultivated in indoor farms that rely on large arrays of lights as well as heating and cooling systems. Those controlled conditions enable the production of more potent flowers and for crops to be grown in more places with more security – or secrecy. But they come with a large environmental cost.

Mills used data on both the legal and illegal US cannabis industry to estimate the total energy use and emissions generated by these indoor plant factories. He found they use around 596 petajoules per year. That’s a “remarkable” amount of energy, equivalent to about a third of current energy demand from US data centres, says Mills.

Generating that electricity, as well as the carbon dioxide pumped into indoor operations to fertilise cannabis plants, produces emissions equivalent to 44 million tonnes of CO2 per year – about the same as 6 million homes. For the average daily cannabis user – more than 17 million of whom live in the US – that would mean cannabis accounts for half their personal CO2 footprint.

Jeez. And here am I, someone who has never smoked weed in his long life, fretting about the carbon footprint of data centres!

Thanks to Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) for spotting it.

Feedback

• John Seeley read my claim that LLMs, like libraries, “help humans to access and utilise the accumulated knowledge of previous generations” and was reminded of something that George Jackson wrote in Soledad Brother when referring to libraries : “We, the humble representatives of future generations, have all the accumulated knowledge and thinking of previous generations to build our thoughts. “

• A good friend who used to be a Blue Guide in Cambridge was struck by my piece on Wednesday about the statue of Henry VIII on Trinity’s Great Gate. “My stories about it,” she writes,

are that the original sceptre was removed by a student in May Week and a chair leg put in its place. The original sceptre (I understand) was never returned. Many years later, also in May Week, a student climbed up in the dark and replaced the chair leg with a bicycle pump. The following morning he telephoned the Porters’ Lodge anonymously and asked if ‘they had seen Henry this morning’. A reply in the negative prompted to ask the porter to go and look. A weary Porter returned to the telephone and said; “I’ve seen Henry” to which the student asked if he could go to the Master and tell him that the students thought a bicycle pump was more appropriate than a chair leg (Cambridge is after all a city for cyclists).

The Porter duly went to the Master who gathered a number of Fellows to discuss this problem. I was told by someone that it was discussed for 50 minutes and the conclusion was that the chair leg was to be replaced as their Great Gate with a chair leg had become an official sight in Cambridge and a photograph was in all the guide books. Not so many years ago I had a group with me at the Great Gate in May Week and found that Henry’s right hand was empty. I asked the porter what had happened to the chair leg. He drew himself up to a great height and said: “That’s what we all want to know”!

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HenryGate

A group of Chinese tourists I noticed yesterday contemplating the Great Gate of Trinity College — and no doubt wondering who is the cove in the alcove half-way up the structure. He is none other than Henry VIII, who, taking time off from murdering his wives, founded the college. The sculpture originally showed him holding a sceptre in his right hand and an orb in his left, but it now shows him wielding a different symbol of power — a chair leg!

There wqs a nice story about this in the Cambridge News some years ago. Apparently in the 1980s a cleaner working on the windows next to the statue noticed that the sceptre had gone missing and replaced it with a leg from a broken chair on the landing inside the tower. You may think (as I did) that the story is too good to be true. I tried zooming in on the image, but Henry became too pixelated, and so I went looking for a higher-resolution pic and found this one in a 2023 BBC report.

Quote of the Day

”A parrot trained to repeat the phrases “orange man bad”, “brexit bad” and “crypto scam” has outperformed 99.9% of professional analysis over the last decade.”

• Alex Hern

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Strauss | Four last songs | Im Abendrot | Kiri Te Kanawa

I love these songs and keep coming back to them.

Long Read of the Day

LLMs are not a Flawed Design, they are the Completion of a Flawed Paradigm

This essay by Erik J Larsen is one of the most astute pieces I’ve read on the Large Language Models (LLMs) that the tech industry (and most of the media) persist in describing as ‘artificial intelligences’ or ‘AIs’. They are a product of a powerful technology called machine learning (ML), the developments in which have been truly astonishing. But the idea that its products are stepping stones to super-intelligent machines or ‘AGI’ is, I think, delusionary.

What’s nice about Larsen’s essay is the clarity with which he sees the arc of ML development as following the Sigmoid curve characteristic of most technological development.

Here’s a sample:

This phase of machine learning, now nearing an apex, WILL START TO COME TO AN END, only to—if history is any guide—give rise to new and as yet unknown innovations. Critique all you want. But get the bigger picture, too.

Not Heading To AGI

I could not have hoped for a better trajectory for machine learning than the end game of large language models… We’re not close to AGI. We’re further away. But we couldn’t see it before, and so speculation and futurism ran wild.

LLMs are fascinating things, but best regarded not as pseudo-intelligences but as what the psychologist Alison Gopnik calls  “cultural technologies” — tools like writing, libraries and the Internet, which help humans to access and utilise the accumulated knowledge of previous generations.

Hope you enjoy the essay as much as I did.

Books, etc.

I enjoyed the book and reviewed this for the Observer on Sunday.

The enduring mystery about William Henry Gates III is this: how did a precocious and sometimes obnoxious kid evolve into a billionaire tech lord and then into an elder statesman and philanthropist? This book gives us only the first part of the story, tracing Gates’s evolution from birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft in 1975. For the next part of the story, we will just have to wait for the sequel.

In a way, the volume’s title describes it well. In the era before machine learning and AI, when computer programs were exclusively written by humans, the term “source code” meant something. It described computer programs that could be read – and understood, if you knew the programming language – enabling you to explain why the machine did what it did.

So what can we learn from inspecting Gates’s code? Broadly speaking, the message is that he was a very lucky lad. He was born in the right place at the right time to parents who gave him, he writes, “the precise blend of support and pressure I needed: they gave me room to grow emotionally, and they created opportunities for me to develop my social skills”. His account suggests, though, that it was an uphill battle at times. Bill Snr and Mary Gates discovered that they had a boy who was a strange blend of high IQ, arrogance, rebelliousness and insecurity…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Price matching Lidl

Nice blast by Jonty Bloom:

Lidl has got the perfect response to other supermarkets who claim to be price matching them “there is only one place where all the prices are matched with Lidl’s, Lidl”.

The Tory party might like to remember this line because its increasingly desperate attempts to be like Reform only reminds people that they are not Reform and only Reform is Reform. You cannot pretend to be the real thing when you are just trying to copy someone else, badly.

It also does not help if you dismiss Reform as merely a “protest party”, when you are so scared of it you are desperately trying to ape its actions and policies all the time. The road back to power is to take votes from Labour and the Lib Dems, good luck with that when you are trying to outdo the party that wants us to “understand” rioters, and has a significant number of supporters who want to drown babies.

Interesting thought. Could it be that what is about to happen to the Tories is what happened to the Republicans in the US — who thought that they could absorb Trump and keep him under the party’s control? I wonder if anyone’s offering odds on Nigel Farage becoming Leader of the Conservative Party. You think I jest? At one stage — not so long ago — the odds of Jeremy Corbyn becoming Leader of the Labour Party were 1000 to one. I was too stupid to take the bet. Sigh.

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