Not quite a host, but…

Quote of the Day

”A machine learning algorithm walks into a bar. The bartender asks, ‘What’ll you have?’ The algorithm says, ‘What’s everyone else having?’ ”

• Chet Haase

This is a profound joke and it captures the essence of LLMs. In algorithmic culture, the right choice is always what the majority of other people have already chosen. So if you want the median view of what the Internet knows about anything, ask an LLM.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Divertimento No. 15 in B-Flat Major, K. 287: II. Andante grazioso con variazioni | Conducted by dear old Thomas Beecham

Link

Vintage recording, as you can tell from the audio quality. But lovely schmaltz all the same.

Long Read of the Day

Why are we mathematicians?

I’ve always thought that life is a Markov chain (or a random walk if you’re not a mathematician). I’ve never met anyone who had an interesting life that was planned — which is why I regard the term ‘planned career’ as an oxymoron.

Not surprisingly, then, I was much taken with this reflective essay by Keith Devlin, prompted in part by something I mentioned on March 24.

The fact is, life experiences can have a profound effect on our choice of career and how we pursue it, experiences that, on the face of it, have nothing to do with the work we choose to do and how we go about it. As instructors, we should be aware of the possible effects of the life-context that comes with every student we teach.

It was at Kings that I had an experience that completely changed my life and career as an academic mathematician; in particular, my approach to college-level mathematics teaching. But it was only when I was chasing down that philosophers and children puzzle that I became aware of that early influence. (That’s like a week ago!) In fact, it was more than “became aware”; it hit me like a thunderbolt.

What was that life-changing experience? I met a girl…

Do read it.

Books, etc.

A new novel is published amid a boom in dystopian fiction

Interesting review of The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami.

How do you concoct a plausible fictional near-future, in which people’s reliance on technology has gone too far? If you read “The Dream Hotel”, a gripping new novel, you can discern one recipe. First, take a big handful of “1984”, with Big Brother and the surveillance state reimagined with private-sector incentives. Sprinkle in the rational irrationality of Joseph Heller’s and Franz Kafka’s best works. Next mix in a dollop of “Minority Report” (2002), a film starring Tom Cruise in which law enforcement solves “pre-crimes” before people commit heinous acts.

So far, so Orwell. However, “The Dream Hotel” is intriguing and (mostly) satisfying, even if the ingredients feel familiar, for what the novel says about the creep of technology and the trade-offs people make for convenience.

Laila Lalami, a Moroccan-American novelist and former finalist for a Pulitzer prize and National Book Award, tells her dystopian tale by combining traditional storytelling with excerpts from a company’s terms of service, medical reports, meeting minutes and customer-service email chains from hell. The novel’s protagonist is Sara Hussein, an archivist at the Getty Museum who returns from a work trip to London and runs afoul of bureaucrats at immigration control, who say her “risk-assessment” score is too high and that she could pose a threat to her husband’s life. Sara becomes “Retainee M-7493002”, held at a facility for what is supposed to be 21 days of monitoring but stretches much longer.

What went so wrong? In retrospect it was a mistake to get the “Dreamsaver”, a small implant invented by a medical-tech firm in Silicon Valley that Sara agreed to have installed during a desperate period of sleep deprivation…

Brings Musk’s Neuralink to mind, does it not?

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Buying sunglasses in Brazil. Lovely essay by Christopher Sandmann on learning to bargain, which reminded me of how much I hate countries where haggling is a way of life.

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Gateway to Heaven?

Walking through Selwyn College the other day on my way to a conversation elsewhere with Audrey Tang (one of the most remarkable people I’ve met) I was struck by this framing of the college’s chapel as I went in through the gate.

Quote of the Day

”The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.”

• H.L. Mencken

Now of which prominent public figure(s) could this now be said?

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

George Gershwin Prelude No. 2 | Matthias Lang

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Imperialism Has No Clothes

Historian Timothy Snyder had a nice essay which I heartily recommend about J.D. Vance’s ludicrous foray to Greenland, .

I particularly liked this bit:

As a parting shot, Vance told Greenlanders that life with the United States would be better than with Denmark. Danish officials have been too diplomatic to answer directly the insults directed at them from their own territory during an uninvited visit by imperialist hotheads. Let me though just note a few possible replies, off the top of my head. The comparison between life in the United States and life in Denmark is not just polemical. Musk-Trump treat Europe as though it were some decadent abyss, and propose that alliances with dictatorships would somehow be better. But Europe is not only home to our traditional allies; it is an enviable zone of democracy, wealth and prosperity with which it benefits us to have good relations, and from which we can sometimes learn.

So consider. The US is 24th in the world in the happiness rankings. Not bad. But Denmark is number two (after Finland). On a scale of 1 to 100, Freedom House ranks Denmark 97 and the US 84 on freedom — and the US will drop a great deal this year. An American is about ten times more likely to be incarcerated than a Dane. Danes have access to universal and essentially free health care; Americans spend a huge amount of money to be sick more often and to be treated worse when they are. Danes on average live four years longer than Americans. In Denmark university education is free; the average balance owed by the tens of millions of Americans who hold student debt in the US is about $40,000. Danish parents share a year of paid parental leave. In the US, one parent might get twelve weeks of unpaid leave. Denmark has children’s story writer Hans Christian Andersen. The US has children’s story writer JD Vance. American children are about twice as likely as Danish children to die before the age of five…

My commonplace booklet

Screenshot

The heading on Monday’s edition caused a flurry of nice emails. Some pointed out that Monday was in fact March 31. All were too polite to voice their suspicion that it might be a sign that I was losing what might loosely be called my mind. More suspicious readers wondered if it might be some kind of weird April Fool’s joke.

John Seeley was one of the latter. “So this is the joke,” he wrote, “given that it is March 31?”

This could operate at various levels …

• It was your mistake but was funny anyway.
• It was your joke and it was amusing that people did not notice and thought that it was April 1 … in turn making April 1 jokes incorrectly so the joke was on them …

Since my lips were sealed on the matter, he had the good idea of asking Claude.ai, the LLM that I mostly use, about it.

He prompted the machine thus:

Someone writes that it is April the first when it is not, but indicates that they think it is April the first. In how many different ways is that funny? Please explain.

Claude replied:

This scenario is funny in several ways, each playing on the confusion and implications of someone incorrectly believing it’s April 1st (April Fools’ Day):

Dramatic irony – The humor comes from us knowing something the person doesn’t. They think they’re being clever by acknowledging April Fools’ Day, but they’re actually mistaken about the date itself.

Meta-prank – They’ve inadvertently pranked themselves. While attempting to participate in a day of pranks, they’ve become the victim of their own confusion.

Misplaced confidence – There’s humor in someone confidently declaring “it’s April Fools’ Day!” when it isn’t, especially if they’re using it as justification for pranks or skepticism.

Role reversal – On April 1st, people expect to be fooled by others. In this case, the calendar has “fooled” the person about what day it is.

Temporal displacement – They’re celebrating a holiday on the wrong day, similar to putting up Christmas decorations in July.

Social awkwardness – The person might perform April Fools’ behaviors (pranks, jokes, skepticism) that make no sense to others, creating uncomfortable but amusing situations.

Unintentional honesty – If they announce “This is an April Fools’ joke!” when it isn’t April 1st, they’re accidentally telling the truth about their statement being false, creating a paradoxical layer of humor.

Misaligned expectations – The person might be extra vigilant against being pranked on a day when no one else is trying to prank them.

Each of these perspectives offers a different lens on why such a mistaken belief creates comedy through the collision of expectations and reality.

I don’t know about you, but I’m impressed by this. Thanks to John for thinking of it.

Satire rules OK

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The Hepworth View

The grounds of Churchill College, Cambridge with Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture in the foreground. Photographes last Friday afternoon during a break from the unmissable annual conference of the Bennett Institute.

Quote of the Day

“I felt it myself, the glitter of nuclear weapons; it’s irresistible if you come to them as a scientist, to feel it’s there in your hands to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding, to perform these miracles, to lift one million tons of rock into the sky. It’s something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is in some ways responsible for all our troubles I would say – this is what you might call technical arrogance that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

• Freeman Dyson in the film, The Day after Trinity.

I’ve been thinking about this after listening to the Sam Altmans of this world raving on about the hypnotic attractions that ‘AI’ has for them.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Low, Low, Northern Moon | from the Midnight Well album by Thom Moore, Janie Cribbs, Gerry O’Beirne and Mairtín O’Connor.

Link

Long Read of the Day

When the physicists need burner phones, that’s when you know America’s changed

My column from yesterday’s Observer :

At international academic conferences recently, one sees an interesting trend. Some American participants are travelling with “burner” phones or have minimalist laptops running browsers and not much else. In other words, they are equipped with the same kind of kit that security-conscious people used to bring 15 years ago when travelling to China.

So what’s up? Well, these academics have a finger on the pulse of Trump’s America, and are concerned about what might happen when they return home. They’ve read on Robert Reich’s Substack about the French scientist who was prevented from entering the country because US Border Patrol agents had found messages from him in which he had expressed his “personal opinion” to colleagues and friends about Trump’s science policies.

Or they’ve heard about Dr Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University who was trying to return to the US after visiting relatives in Lebanon. She was deported, reports Reich, “despite having a valid visa and a court order” blocking her removal. “Federal authorities alleged that they found ‘sympathetic photos and videos of prominent Hezbollah figures’ in her phone and that she attended the funeral for the leader of Hezbollah in February.”

And they also know about Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, whom – though he is a legal permanent resident of the US and has not been charged with a crime – the government is trying to deport because he had participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia…

Read on

LATER Christina Pagel (a Professor at UCL who did great critical work during the Covid pandemic) has been casting a beady and informed eye on what the Trump regime is doing to universities. Her latest post provides a wider perspective on the topic of my column. Here’s how it opens:

A colleague and I would like to write an academic paper on the potential impact of US funding cuts to global health programmes. Our ideal co-author is an international expert newly based in the US, and they would like to do it. But we are all worried that doing so will expose them to the risk of having their academic visa cancelled, being detained and eventually deported – no matter how solid the science and how academic and dry our language. We are especially fearful because they are brown.

My colleagues who have been writing about the new administration, or the situation in Gaza, in academic journals, on substack or on social media are cancelling work trips to the US. I too would not feel safe to go now, given how openly I have criticised the administration. Even a 1% chance of being denied entry or shipped to a detention centre is too high.

When I said these words out loud to my husband today I had to stop for a moment to let it sink in. Foreign scientists in the US are scared to publish anything perceived as critical for fear of being bundled off the street to a detention centre. Foreign scientists abroad are scared to go to the US because they have voiced criticism of the state. The US is actively cracking down on perceived dissenters and foreigners are the most vulnerable to arbitrary detention and lack of due legal process. The vaunted first amendment guaranteeing free speech has become a bitter and twisted joke…

It has. Worth reading the whole thing.

Books, etc.

Reading stuff about how Generative AI systems sometimes regurgitate biases that’s implicit in the material on which they were trained reminded me of Safiya Noble’s pathbreaking book, which was published aeons ago (in 2018, to be precise) and yet remains pertinent. Time for a new edition, perhaps, this time with a different subtitle: “How Search Engines and AI reinforce racism and legitimise discrimination”?

Feedback

Tony Stevenson writes from Melbourne with a different interpretation of the ‘Signalgate’ affair.

I expect decisions were taken in person and orders executed over secure military channels.

The Frat Pack are running their own parallel channel that contains a subset of the Attack Orders. It wasn’t used for making decisions, just sharing them.

Info mainly relayed over Signal so that Hesgeth can pump up his own importance and relevance. Hardly necessary to include Secretary of the Treasury in Attack Plans. Even the poorest student of military planning would know that people are included on a need to know basis. Hesgeth to boost his own importance defies even that simple rule.

Joint Chiefs of Staff would have been across all details of the attack and in all relevant official top-secret comms.

Wisely these clowns didn’t invite him to their emoji laden insecure side-channel. I expect if the Admiral had been invited he would have refused due to OpSec.

I do wonder if the ‘desire’ for the Frat Pack to have this on their personal devices is due to the way we’re all ‘wired’ now; expecting real-time feeds of ‘everything’. Going to a secure location and logging into a secure terminal to maintain OpSec would be so much less convenient for Frat Pack and those who want to spy on them.

My interpretation of the Signal chat was that it provided evidence that — as I put it — “the monkeys were running the Zoo”. Tony’s view seems to be that they’re boasting that they’re running it. Either way, the Trump shitshow is still a Zoo.

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St Pancras

My favourite railway station.

Quote of the Day

”I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”

• Hunter S. Thompson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Neil Young | The Loner

Link

Long Read of the Day

Heather Cox Richardson’s deep dive into the Signalgate affair

This is a brilliant Substack post by a prominent historian who was one of the first big Substack stars, and who has continued to cast a beady and informed eye on what’s happening in Washington.

Monday’s astounding story that the most senior members of President Donald Trump’s administration planned military strikes on Yemen over an unsecure commercial messaging app, on which they had included national security reporter and editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg, has escalated over the past two days.

On Monday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth looked directly at a reporter’s camera and said: “Nobody was texting war plans.” Throughout the day Tuesday, the administration doubled down on this assertion, apparently convinced that Goldberg would not release the information they knew he had. They tried to spin the story by attacking Goldberg, suggesting he had somehow hacked into the conversation, although the app itself tracked that National Security Advisor Michael Waltz had added him.

Various administration figures, including Trump, insisted that the chat contained nothing classified…

It’s a genuinely long read and I was wondering whether I should compose a TL;DR summary for it. As an experiment I outsourced that task to Claude.ai — an LLM that I sometimes use.

Here’s what it came up with:

• The document describes a significant national security breach involving Trump administration officials using Signal, an unsecure messaging app, to discuss military strikes on Yemen

• Key details of the breach include: – Officials including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth uploaded precise attack details on a Signal chat – The group chat included national security reporter Jeffrey Goldberg, who was added by National Security Advisor Michael Waltz – Multiple high-ranking officials initially denied sharing classified information, including Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe

• Significant revelations from the leaked screenshots: – President Trump was not part of the strike discussion – Vice President J.D. Vance expressed concerns about the strategic messaging – Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller ultimately green-lit the operation – The former Joint Chiefs Chairman, Charles Q. Brown Jr., was controversially fired by Trump, with Hegseth suggesting his appointment was based on race

• Potential security vulnerabilities exposed: – NSA warned in February 2025 about Signal’s vulnerability to Russian hackers – Some officials’ personal contact information and passwords were found to be publicly accessible – Officials were using non-government communication systems, potentially violating record-keeping laws

• Consequences and reactions: – American Oversight filed a lawsuit against several administration officials – The Atlantic published the screenshots, revealing the officials’ previous denials as false – Senator Tammy Duckworth called for Hegseth’s resignation – House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries demanded Trump fire Hegseth

• The administration attempted to create distractions, including signing a controversial executive order about elections and announcing new car tariffs.

That’s not bad: it spotted that the President was never involved in the decision-making about the attack. But it misses one important point, namely that the Signal group did not include Admiral Christopher Grady, who is currently acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In other words, the US’s highest-ranking military officer was excluded from the group planning a US military operation.

This last point led me to my own TL;DR summary:

In Washington the monkeys are now running the Zoo.

Books, etc.

This arrived yesterday and looks interesting. David Mindel is the Professor of Aerospace Engineering at MIT, but he’s also the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing at the same institution. Since AI is now on its way to becoming the latest General Purpose Technology (GPT) that humans have invented — a technology that may underpin most of what comes next — he’s had the idea of using the history of the very first GPT — steam power — as a way of thinking about how to remake a reindustrialised future.

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Light, shade, colour

I tried this in black and white, but it works better in colour.

Quote of the Day

”People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?”

H.L. Mencken

I used to think that Mencken was too cynical about governments. But now he seems spot on — at least in relation to his own country.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Gerry Mulligan | Night Lights A

Link

After two intense days at a conference on technology and the hollowing out of democracy, I needed a soothing antidote to the current madness. This did the trick.

Long Read of the Day

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

A truly astonishing article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic.

U.S. national-security leaders included him accidentally in a group chat on Signal about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. He didn’t think it could be real — until the bombs started falling.

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining…

It sure does, and he does a pretty good job.

Worth your time. I found it riveting.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

My colleague Diane Coyle is one of the wisest people I know. She’s also an amazingly prolific writer. Her new book comes out on April 1, but she gave a talk about it last week in Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab which provides a useful preview.

The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940s, when the urgent economic problems were entirely different from those of today. In The Measure of Progress, Diane Coyle argues that the framework underpinning today’s economic statistics is so outdated that it functions as a distorting lens, or even a set of blinkers. When policymakers rely on such an antiquated conceptual tool, how can they measure, understand, and respond with any precision to what is happening in today’s digital economy? Coyle makes the case for a new framework, one that takes into consideration current economic realities.

Coyle explains why economic statistics matter. They are essential for guiding better economic policies; they involve questions of freedom, justice, life, and death. Governments use statistics that affect people’s lives in ways large and small. The metrics for economic growth were developed when a lack of physical rather than natural capital was the binding constraint on growth, intangible value was less important, and the pressing economic policy challenge was managing demand rather than supply. Today’s challenges are different. Growth in living standards in rich economies has slowed, despite remarkable innovation, particularly in digital technologies. As a result, politics is contentious and democracy strained.

Coyle argues that to understand the current economy, we need different data collected in a different framework of categories and definitions, and she offers some suggestions about what this would entail. Only with a new approach to measurement will we be able to achieve the right kind of growth for the benefit of all.

I’ve pre-ordered it. GDP/GNP are absurd ways of measuring a modern economy. And running it is like driving a car while looking only into the rear-view mirror.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Astronomers discover 128 new moons orbiting Saturn Link Now comes the problem of choosing names for them.

Errata

Many thanks to all the readers who tactfully emailed to point out that my little reminiscence about a favourite French Chambre d’hote in Monday’s edition revealed that I didn’t know the difference between a fir tree (Sapin) and a rabbit (Lapin)… Just goes to confirm that there is no limit to my ignorance. But I do try to learn from my mistakes.

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Inhumanity in numbers

This striking table greets one at the entrance to the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Rise Up exhibition which explores the battle to abolish the British slave trade and end enslavement between 1750 and 1850, as well as the aftermath, its legacies and the ongoing struggle for equality and social justice today. It’s a brilliantly curated and sobering exhibition which we went to on Saturday. I need to go back for a second look, because it needs time for thought and reflection. And it powerfully reinforces my scepticism about the idea of ‘European Civilisation’.

Fittingly, before you enter the show, the museum has a prominent notice which admits that the wealth of the man whose bequest of his library, art collection and £100,000 enabled its founding in 1816 — Richard FitzWilliam, the seventh Viscount FitzWilliam — probably derived from one of his ancestors, who had been a slave-owner. This interesting fact, however, doesn’t seem to be mentioned on the institution’s Wikipedia page.

Quote of the Day

“Problems are like toilet paper. You pull on one and ten more come.”

• Woody Allen* 

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mendelssohn | Songs Without Words | No. 1 In E Major, Op. 19: Andante Con Moto | Daniel Gortler

Link

Leaves one speechless.

Long Read of the Day

 A curious tendency among Western philosophers?

Intriguing essay on the wonderful Crooked Timber blog by Doug Muir.

Here are two groups of Western philosophers. We’ll call them Group A and Group B. Here’s Group A:

Plato, Epicurus, Plotinus, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, David Hume, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Schopenhauer, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Jeremy Bentham, Alan Turing, Saul Kripke.

And here’s Group B:

Aristotle, Socrates, Descartes, Bishop George Berkeley, Rousseau, Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, Frege, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, John Rawls, Willard Quine.

Okay, so: what distinguishes these two groups?

Read on to find out. I failed the test.

Did AI mania rush Apple into making a rare misstep with Siri?

Yesterday’s Observer column was about Apple’s announcement that the promised ‘AI’-enhanced to its Siri personal assistant tool would be significantly delayed. I was alerted to this by John Gruber’s wonderful Daring Fireball blog, and my column ended thus:

For Gruber, who knows more about Apple than anyone I know, this was like a red rag to a bull. The announcement meant, he wrote, that “what Apple showed regarding the upcoming ‘personalized Siri’ at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis”. And because he has a long memory, it reminded him that the last time Apple had screened a concept video – the so-called “Knowledge Navigator” video – it was heading for bankruptcy. And it never made anything like it again once Steve Jobs had returned to turn it into the most profitable company in history.

Until – says Gruber – now.

Is he overreacting? Answer: yes. Apple isn’t in crisis, but this mini-fiasco with Siri and Apple Intelligence looks like the first serious misstep in Tim Cook’s stewardship of the company. If there’s one thing Jobs’ Apple was famous for, it was not announcing products before they were ready to ship. It’s clear that the company grossly underestimated the amount of work needed to deliver on what it promised for Siri last June. If it had stuck to the Jobs playbook, the time to have launched the enhancement would have been June 2025 at the earliest. The company had clearly forgotten Hofstadter’s Law: Everything takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Do read the whole thing.

Later. A reader emailed me suggesting that there was one significant moment when Steve Jobs presented a device that worked in demo mode but wasn’t actually anywhere near ready for sale — the first iPhone. The story is told in a 2013 New York Times article

My commonplace booklet

I came on this old postcard in a book the other day and it triggered a whole stream of memories.

We have been going to Provence every Summer (except for a two-year Covid break) since 2003. When the kids were young we used to fly to Toulon and rent a car, but as they grew up my wife and I realised that we were now free to drive down, and thereby discovered one of the nicest road movies there is — a leisurely (three-day) drive through rural France, avoiding motorways and staying in small hotels and chambres d’hote. The first day of the journey takes us from Calais to northern Burgundy. The second to central France, near Thiers. And the final day takes us to Arles, which is still one of the wonders of the world (and a delight if you happen to be a photographer).

The first year we did this trip, we stumbled on a lovely hilltop Bastide near Thiers as a Day Two stopover. It had the improbable name of Le Sapin Bleu and had been beautifully restored by pair of ex-pat Brits. It was one of the loveliest houses I’ve every been in, and over the years our hosts became friends, to the point that sometimes they would ask us to bring stuff that ex-pats love but are unobtainable in rural France.

And then Covid struck and they decided that the game was up, even for a lovely rural B&B, so they sold up and left to seek their fortunes (and maybe also their widely dispersed families) elsewhere. Even though we eventually found a nice alternative on the outskirts of Thiers, we still feel a pang when driving past the sign to the road that leads uphill to it.

Feedback

My pic of the learned sign forbidding that attachment of bikes to railings sparked some lovely emails, for which many thanks. But Euan Williamson’s response, summarising the Scottish approach to such prohibitions, rally takes the biscuit!

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 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Caveat bicyclist

Translation (from Latin): TWO WHEELS LEFT HERE WILL PERISH

Not sure about the Greek. Only in Cambridge could you see a notice like this to deter cyclists from locking their bikes to a railing. (I wonder if there are similar notices in The Other Place?)

Quote of the Day

”It is harder to summon, even among friends and allies, the vital unity of purpose amidst the perplexities of a world situation which is neither peace nor war.”

• Winston Churchill in 1958

A pretty good summary of the problem facing EU countries at the moment.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

In a Mellow Tone | Ben Webster

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The News: Believe That The Worst Is Possible — But Not Inevitable

Look, I know that “hindsight is the only exact science”, etc. etc., but I’m fed up with the extent to which people are still shocked by what’s happening. Some aspects of what’s now going on in Washington (for example, Musk’s end-run into the heart of government) might have been unforeseeable, but the Project 2025 blueprint was out in the open and I was astonished that liberals didn’t seem to be taking it seriously all through last year.

Timothy Burke seems to have felt much the same. As he writes in this sobering essay,

The lack of anticipation by interests and organizations who are already suffering enormous damage is precisely a sign of how beholden they were to an unwarranted belief in their own inevitability. The Democratic Party ran on being a bulwark against a fascism, but we have now discovered that most of them never believed that fascism could really happen. It was just a campaign message that tested well with their voters. They assumed that most of those voters were just overwrought.

Institutions that ought to have been urgently laying the groundwork for a hard fight as early as 2015 instead just pretended that it wasn’t going to happen, that it was all just bluster, that they’d be able to use the same tried and true forms of lobbying and lawyering and risk aversity to divert and deflect some modest pressures on their ordinary operations…

Yep. And even now many Europeans (and maybe also Canadians) are in denial about the new reality. Trump, as Burke, points out,

thinks less like Bismarck and more like Leopold II: other countries are for looting, and not by the relatively sophisticated methods of multinational corporations. It’s only beginning to dawn on Americans, Canadians, Europeans and the rest of the world that Trump is perfectly serious about annexing Canada, Greenland and perhaps other territories by forceful means.

This is a sobering piece, worth reading. What’s needed now is a variation on Gramsci’s famous aphorism: what we need now is realism of the intellect and optimism of the will.

My commonplace booklet

When JFK ran for President in 1960, the fact that he was a Roman Catholic was of significant public concern. The country had never had a Catholic president; people openly questioned whether his religion would influence his decision-making. Would he be taking is orders from the Pope? The issue was so important that JFK addressed it directly in a famous speech in Houston in September 1960 when he said: “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.”

And he went on to win the election.

Consider where the US is now, though. Six of the current Supreme Court justices are Catholics: John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. That’s a comfortable majority of the Court.

The Vice President, J.D. Vance, is a convert to Catholicism. So if Trump were to kick the bucket, the US would have a Catholic president once more.

And I have a suspicion that Steve Bannon may also be a Catholic. At any rate he seems to have ‘embraced’ Catholic spirituality.

So what exactly is going on over there?

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• If you have access to the BBC iPlayer, I really recommend Birdsong, a remarkable documentary about Irish ornithologist Seán Ronayne’s mission to record the sound of every bird species in Ireland – nearly 200 birds. Unexpectedly, it’s also a very reflective film about autism and the extraordinary capabilities of humans.

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Building for Global Britain

Can this really be the site office for one of the incessant central Cambridge construction projects?

Quote of the Day

”Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.”

• Ernest Hemingway* 

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fáinne Geal an Lae (The Dawning of the Day)

Link

Lovely version of an old Irish song by na Casaidigh

Long Read of the Day

 ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving

I can’t understand why some many teachers in the Humanities seem to be panicking about LLMs. At least some of the panic is centred on the way the technology makes it difficult to assess student performance. But surely the question we should be asking: what’s the big deal about essays (other than they’re easy to grade)? And what is it about writing that’s important?

In my view this question was answered many decades ago by E.M.Forster, when he wrote (somewhere — can’t find the reference) that “There are two kinds of writer: those who know what they think and write it down; and those who find out what they think by trying to write it”. Since the vast majority of us fall into the latter category, the real case against using LLMs to write your essay is that it you’re denying yourself the opportunity to figure something out for yourself, and the educational benefits thereof.

All of which is a long-winded way of explaining why I’ve been so taken with John Warner’s essay, in which he asks (and answers) the awkward question: “If an algorithm is the death of high school English, maybe that’s an okay thing.”

Do read it.

English can now be a programming language. Oh yeah?

Last Sunday’s Observer column:

Way back in 2023, Andrej Karpathy, an eminent AI guru, made waves with a striking claim that “the hottest new programming language is English”. This was because the advent of large language models (LLMs) meant that from now on humans would not have to learn arcane programming languages in order to tell computers what to do. Henceforth, they could speak to machines like the Duke of Devonshire spoke to his gardener, and the machines would do their bidding.

Ever since LLMs emerged, programmers have been early adopters, using them as unpaid assistants (or “co-pilots”) and finding them useful up to a point – but always with the proviso that, like interns, they make mistakes, and you need to have real programming expertise to spot those.

Recently, though, Karpathy stirred the pot by doubling down on his original vision. “There’s a new kind of coding,” he announced, “I call ‘vibe coding’, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs … are getting too good…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

From Niall Ferguson:

”It is exactly a century since John Maynard Keynes published “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill,” a devastating takedown of the policies of the Conservative government in which Winston Churchill served as Chancellor of the Exchequer—the British equivalent of Treasury Secretary.

Keynes predicted—correctly—that the government’s decision to return the pound to the gold standard would lead to “unemployment and industrial disputes,” “great depression in the export industries,” and “credit restriction.”

“It will not be safe,” he ironically advised Churchill, “politically to admit that you are intensifying unemployment deliberately in order to reduce wages. Thus you will have to ascribe what is happening to every conceivable cause except the true one. … About two years may elapse before it will be safe for you to utter in public one single word of truth.”

Interesting, isn’t it, how history sometimes repeats itself. The Trump crowd are already in denial mode about what’s happening. I’m looking forward to the moment when a Wall Street analyst is arrested for spreading “fake news” about the ‘booming’ Trump economy.

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Letting sleeping cats lie

The view from the front garden of the Fitzwilliam museum on Friday afternoon. Note the snoozing lions on the left.

Quote of the Day

”The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog.”

• Ambrose Bierce

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tom Waits | Picture in a Frame

Link

Really wonderful.

Long Read of the Day

 AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End?

Text of a truly remarkable lecture by Stephen Fry. It’s long, but unfailingly thoughtful and perceptive. If you read nothing else this week, read this.

Here’s a sample to whet your appetite:

I’ll take you back fifteen or so years to a time when I found myself being invited to a perfectly extraordinary number of corporate, governmental and media talks, conferences, summits and suchlike gatherings. I would be asked to address delegates and attendees on the subject of a new microblogging service that had only recently poked its timorous head up in the digital world like a delicate flower but was already twisting and winding itself round the culture like vigorous bindweed. Twitter it was called. I had joined early and my name seemed permanently associated with it. What an evangel I was. Web 2.0, the user-generated web, was going great guns at this point. Tick off the years. 2003 MySpace began. 2004 Facebook launched. 2005 YouTube. 2006 Twitter. 2007 the iPhone. 2008 the App Store and later that year, Android and then Instagram. Bliss was it in that dawn, etc. etc. I confidently predicted that this new kind of citizen-led computer and internet use would help build a brave and beautiful new world. “Local and global rivalries will dissolve,” I said. “Tribal hatreds will melt away. Surely,” I cried, “Twitter and Facebook and this new world of ‘social media’ will usher in an age of universal brotherhood and amity.” Two years later as Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Syria rose against their dictators, the Arab Spring bloomed. How right I had been. How clever and percipient I was.

But…

Just a year or so on and that blissful dawn had turned into the darkest of nights. Libya leapt out of the frying pan of Gaddafi into the fire of anarchy and chaos, Egypt into a military coup, Yemen into brutal civil war, Syria into a bloodbath. Elsewhere — Brexit, Trump, TikTok, COVID, the rise of nationalist populism and populist nationalism, state sanctioned and criminal cyber terrorism, epidemics of anxiety, depression and self-harm amongst our children and young adults, and a cloud of disappointment, pessimism, mistrust and despair over us all. Pandora had opened her box and the ugly horrors had flown out to infect us all. With Hope left trapped inside.

Welcome to today.

What a whistleblower’s exposé of the cult of Zuckerberg reveals

My OpEd in yesterday’s Observer.

There’s nothing more satisfying than watching a corporate giant make a stupid mistake. The behemoth in question is Meta, and when Careless People, a whistleblowing book by a former senior employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams, came out last week, its panic-stricken lawyers immediately tried to have it suppressed by the Emergency International Arbitral Tribunal. This strange institution obligingly (and sternly) enjoined Wynn-Williams “from making orally, in writing, or otherwise any ‘disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments to any person or entity concerning Meta, its officers, directors, or employees’ ”. To which her publisher, Macmillan, issued a statement that could succinctly be summarised thus: “Get stuffed.”

Clearly, nobody in Meta has heard of the Streisand effect, “an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove or censor information, where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information”. The company has now ensured that Wynn-Williams’s devastating critique of it see our review in the New Review will become a world bestseller.

Among the many delicious ironies here is that Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s Supreme Ruler, who has recently become a loud advocate of “free speech” – or at least free speech as understood by the Trump regime – is trying to suppress Wynn-Williams’s troublesome speech. The old-fashioned term for this is hypocrisy. But then her six years spent in the Supreme Leader’s inner circle will have inured her to that…

Read on

Books, etc.

 How not to build a nation

Screenshot

Simon Kuper’s New Statesman review of Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s new book. He quite likes it.

In November 2021, Joe Biden passed what his government called “the biggest infrastructure bill in generations”, worth $1trn. Part of the idea was to convert the US to green energy, an essential step in the battle against climate change. To cite just one of countless line items: the government provided $7.5bn to build 500,000 charging stations for electric vehicles. Here’s the problem: by March 2024, the number of charging stations actually built and working was seven.

Abundance reminds us that the UK isn’t the only country that has forgotten how to build. But given that American dysfunction outdoes that of any other developed country, there is reassurance here for British readers. Whereas American politics has become a contest of insanity versus non-insanity, the UK’s governing classes have at least begun asking the right questions: how to build millions of homes and a new green infrastructure?

Ezra Klein, a columnist and podcaster at the New York Times, and Derek Thompson, a staff writer at the Atlantic, are journalists with bigger brains and internal databases than is common in our profession. They have sidestepped the current American political horror show to produce something original: a left-liberal manifesto for deregulation, or as they call it, “a liberalism that builds”. Only that can create green-fuelled abundance…

My commonplace booklet

Truth and Falsity in AI

Erik Larsen has been reading a chapter in a forthcoming book by the psychologist Martin Seligman who has been interacting with LLMs and had been puzzled by an ‘hallucination’ that the AI produced at one point. Why had it done that when it had no need to confabulate?

At which point Larsen steps in with a useful insight. LLMs have to base all their responses on what the have already ‘read’. Here’s his argument:

Philosophers distinguish between two fundamental theories of truth: correspondence and coherence. Under the correspondence theory, a statement is true if it accurately reflects reality—“the cat is on the mat” is true if, in fact, the cat is actually on the mat. The coherence theory, by contrast, holds that a statement is true if it fits within a system of other accepted truths. For example, “I am the only son of my parents” is true under coherence if it aligns with other known facts: I have no brothers, I’m not adopted, and so on.

In both cases, the question is the same: Under what conditions is this proposition ‘p’ true? But the answers are radically different. The correspondence theory demands external verification—truth is discovered by checking against the world itself. The coherence theory, on the other hand, stays internal—truth emerges from consistency with prior knowledge. One seeks reality; the other seeks logical harmony.

This philosophical distinction has been debated in academic circles for centuries, but Seligman instinctively grasped its relevance to AI. When he asked Anthropic’s Claude which of these theories better describes how it “knows” things, it responded—quite plausibly—that it operates on coherence. This is unsurprising: a large language model (LLM) exists entirely in cyberspace, disconnected from the world. It cannot directly verify anything against external reality; it can only produce statements that fit within the linguistic and statistical patterns it has absorbed.

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Das Boot

We often go walking on the North Norfolk coast, and this abandoned boat used to be a landmark on one of our favourite paths. It was fascinating and somehow graceful in its slow decay — and irresistible for a photographer.

Quote of the Day

”If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.”

• Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jackson C. Frank | The Blues Run The Game

Link

Long Read of the Day

Elon Musk and the Decline of Western Civilization

A short essay by Francis Fukuyama.

Insightful and topical, as usual.

Back in 2021, I wrote a blog post for American Purpose on “Silvio Berlusconi and the Decline of Western Civilization.” In it I argued that when historians 50 or 100 years from now investigate how and why Western civilization collapsed, they would point to Silvio Berlusconi as the chief villain. The former Italian Prime Minister was the inventor of the modern form of oligarchy, in which a rich individual uses his money to buy his way into political office through the purchase of media properties, and then uses his political office to protect his business interests. The fact that Berlusconi used this strategy so successfully in the 1990s was why Italy was never able to engage in a reform of its institutions as it could have done following the collapse of its old political order after the Cold War. This pattern was then taken up by oligarchs all over the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, from Igor Kolomoisky and Rinat Akhmetov in Ukraine, to Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic (who may return to power this coming year). All of them used their business incomes to buy up declining legacy media companies, companies which in turn helped them protect their businesses. These oligarchs have threatened democracy in a very basic way, by exerting undue political influence and promoting corruption.

Well, guess what, we now have our own home-grown American oligarch in the Berlusconi mold: Elon Musk…

Read on.

Entre nous: I’m temperamentally suspicious of the ‘Western civilisation’ trope. Would that be the civilisation that launched two devastating world wars, by any chance? And colonised and looted half the world?

Screenshot

My favourite story in that context is about Mahatma Gandhi’s arrival in Tilbury Docks in 1931. Dressed as usual in a loincloth, he was greeted by a horde of Fleet Street’s finest — half-pissed hacks with ‘PRESS’ cards in their hatbands. The story goes that one of them said, “Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilisation?” To which the great man smiled benevolently and replied: “Ah, Western Civilisation; now that would be a good idea.”

Books, etc.

Carl Linnaeus’s Note-Taking Innovations

Jillian Hess runs an intriguing blog about notebooks, note-taking and history.If, like me, you’re an inveterate paper-notebook user (despite all the affordances of purely electronic ones) then it’s full of interesting stuff. Like this post on Carl Linnaeus’s record-keeping techniques. He found that he had to break loose from the format of the bound notebook because new discoveries required interleaving. He wouldn’t have been the first to come on that problem. Proust had it too, as I realised the other night when watching 102 Boulevard Haussmann, Alan Bennett’s masterly film about the great novelist.

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!