Dictionary Sam

The stained-glass portrait of Samuel Johnson in his house in Gough Square, just off Fleet Street, in London. (Which is well worth a visit, btw.)

Quote of the Day

”Whenever AI ‘generates’ something impressive, the first question we should always ask is: ‘What does the closest sample in the training data look like?’ LLMs are amazing interfaces for accessing the world’s information but they need to be treated as the ‘search and synthesis’ tools they are.”

• Chris Offner (of ETH Zurich)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Crosby, Stills and Nash | Teach your Children | 1970

Link

Vintage recording. One of my favourite songs. I often wonder what my kids make of it.

Long Read of the Day

Stop using generative AI as a search engine

In their increasingly frantic search for a business model, LLM providers are trying to move onto Google’s territory. Instead of Googling something, why not use, say, Perplexity. That way, instead of getting a list of sites in response to a query, you just get the answer. What’s not to like?

Plenty, says Elizabeth Lopatto in an interesting cautionary tale in The Verge.

How many presidents have pardoned their relatives? It turns out this is a tricky question to answer.

Following Hunter Biden’s pardon by his father, several commentators have looked to precedents — other pardons of relatives. Case in point: Ana Navarro-Cardenas, a commentator who appears on The View and CNN. On X, Navarro-Cardenas cited a pardon granted by President Woodrow Wilson of his brother-in-law Hunter deButts. That was news to me.

The official clemency records search only works for people who’ve applied since 1989, and a page of clemency recipients by president only stretches back to Richard Nixon. Such a pardon would have been controversial, yet it wasn’t mentioned on the bio page in Wilson’s presidential library. Find a Grave suggests Wilson didn’t even have a brother-in-law with that name — it shows nine brothers-in-law, but not our man Hunter deButts. I can’t prove Wilson didn’t pardon a Hunter deButts; I can only tell you that if he did, that person was not his brother-in-law…

You get the point. LLMs are useful, but you have to treat them as you would any eager, intelligent and industrious intern. You need to check their work before depending on it.

Later John Gruber had some useful observations (also worth reading) on Lopatto’s essay.

I want to make clear that I don’t think Lopatto is in any way a head-in-the-sand Luddite. But all of the arguments being made today against using generative AI to answer questions sound exactly like the arguments against citing web pages as sources in the 1990s. The argument then was basically “Anyone can publish anything on the web, and even if a web page is accurate today, it can be changed at any time” — which was true then and remains true today.3 But it’s just a new technology — one that isn’t going anywhere because it’s incredibly useful in ways nothing else is, but its inherent downsides will force us to adapt and learn new ways of sourcing, citing, and verifying information. The rise of the web didn’t make libraries go away. Generative AI won’t make web search go away.

The problem with conventional search engines (particularly Google) is that their remorseless descent into enshittification is making them increasingly annoying to use. I use Perplexity quite a bit, though never for search. What I like about it is that it provides sources for whatever response it produces.

After AI is photography dead?

On seeing the first daguerreotype around 1840, the French painter Paul Delaroche famously, declared that “From today, painting is dead.” He was wrong, of course, but the impact of the new medium was profound, nevertheless. As the art historian Caterina Bellinetti observed, photography initially developed by following, and then challenging, the themes that were commonly used by painters. But then the middle classes, who desired (but could not afford) family portraits by artists, took to photography and the rest is history.

But now photography has its own crisis moment: does the advent of generative AI mean the death of photography? The leading photography magazine, Aperture has a current issue specially devoted to the question.

Here’s one of the striking images that illustrates the problem.

It latches on to one of the more hallowed genres in photographic history — the work of photographers sent out into rural America by Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration to record the struggles of rural Americans during the Great Depression. One of those photographers was Dorothea Lange.

It’s good but not entirely convincing if you know her work. Below is one of her actual photographs of a farmer of the period.

Caption: A former tenant farmer who had become a tractor driver. Taken in Bell County near Temple, 1936. Looking at him and knowing how hot it gets here I can assure you that this was one hard-working man.

So photography ain’t dead. But Generative AI is now so good that serious practitioners will need to find ways of providing rock-solid authentication for their work. Alas, it doesn’t come cheap. The new Leica M11-P camera incorporates the ability to attach the digital Adobe Contact Credentials label to images at the point of capture to protect authenticity. The new system, which involves a physical chip, will be incorporated in most (if not all) future Leicas but it is not something that can be installed retrospectively in older models. The M11-P retails at £8000 just for the camera body. Authentication doesn’t come cheap — yet.

My commonplace booklet

The slow-motion car crash that is the Intel corporation continues. In his commentary on it John Gruber remembers a famous aphorism of Andy Grove, the man who built Intel into a dominant corporate giant:

”Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”

Yep.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• The Economist’s word of the year for 2024 is… Kakistocracy: “the rule of the worst“. Now why would that be?

Errata

The fragmented rock in Friday’s edition might not be a glacial erratic, as I thought. Erratics are often rocks of a different type from their surroundings because they were delivered by a glacier. This one looks awfully like the local geology round the lake.

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Fine cuts

This huge rock is probably a glacial erratic that we encountered on a lakeside walk in Kerry. Note, though, the sharpness of the edges on the fragments. A stonemason would be proud of those cuts.

Quote of the Day

”The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.”

• Ronald Firbank

Note the punctilious grammar.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel: Semele – Act 2, Sc. 3 | Where’er You Walk | Rick Wakeman

Link

Long Read of the Day

 In Search of Sanity

This is a transcript of what the comedian and author Andy Horowitz said on Boston Public Radio last week in which he offered “unsolicited advice about getting through the next four years”. Given all the crap that’s currently emanating from the US — amplified by the country’s benighted mainstream media — I thought it came as a breath of fresh air.

During the election, the media just covered the horserace. They weren’t really covering any of the issues. They were covering the polls. They were saying, how does Nate Cohn differ from Nate Silver? Where’s Ann Selzer in this?

So they weren’t really focusing on what the candidates were going to do if elected. And as a result, we’re now at a point where we have this guy who is the president-elect, and the corporate media are still not giving us information that is valuable.

They’ve now sort of gone Jekyll-and-Hyde on us. A few weeks ago, Donald Trump was a senile guy who was bobbing to the music. Now he’s this master political genius along the lines of Talleyrand and Metternich.

Now, look, I think Trump is going to be a terrible president because he was terrible the first time. So I’m not denying or arguing with that. But what I am arguing with is this new characterization of him as competent. Because that is a media invention that I just find absolutely baffling—because there’s no proof of it anywhere. And day after day we have evidence that he is actually incompetent. And it may be our saving grace now…

Do read it.

My commonplace booklet

In praise of e-bikes

I’m biased because we’ve had e-bikes for years and they’re among the best purchases we’ve ever made. This piece spells out why they are are more important than conventional EVs.

On the world’s roads last year, there were over 20 million electric vehicles and 1.3 million commercial EVs such as buses, delivery vans and trucks.

But these numbers of four or more wheel vehicles are wholly eclipsed by two- and three-wheelers. There were over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles and three-wheelers on the road last year. Their sheer popularity is already cutting demand for oil by a million barrels of oil a day – about 1% of the world’s total oil demand, according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

What about electric vehicles, you ask? After all, EVs have been heralded as a silver bullet for car emissions and air pollution in cities, as their tailpipe emissions are zero. If charged with renewable power, they get even greener.

But to see them as an inarguable good is an error. They are cleaner cars, but…

Yep.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  Australian Dictionary Chooses ‘Enshittification’ As The Word Of The Year

Link

Remember when Facebook was just a useful website that helped you stay in touch with your friends? And Google did more than serve you half a page of ads? And Twitter ― well, let’s not go there.

There’s a word for this decline: enshittification.

The term, made famous by the tech critic Cory Doctorow in 2023, was just selected by Macquarie Dictionary ― Australia’s oldest! ― as its 2024 word of the year.

Here’s how they defined it:

noun Colloquial: the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.

The Macquarie committee politely described the phrase as “a very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectable.”

Don’t you just love the ‘almost’.

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Say ‘Cheese’!

The Little Cheese Shop in Dingle on Saturday night.

Quote of the Day

“God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”

• Bismarck

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Grace | The Dubliners & Jim McCann | from the group’s 40 Years Reunion in the Gaiety theatre in 2002.

Link

Extraordinary song written in 1985 by Frank O’Meara (melody) and Seán O’Meara (lyrics) which tells the story of Grace Gifford’s marriage to Joseph Plunkett in Kilmainham Jail, hours before his execution for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising.

Wikipedia has a wonderful, sombre photograph of Grace on the day of their wedding.

For a larger image click here

Long Read of the Day

 On the Coming Merger of Tech and State Power

Sobering and realistic assessment of our new reality by Taylor Owen. The only thing I disagree with is the word ‘coming’ in the title of the essay.

First, the relationship between tech companies and Washington is transforming into something we haven’t seen before. While Silicon Valley has always wielded influence in American politics, what’s emerging now is different – a world where the interests of select technology companies become indistinguishable from US government policy.

Look at Elon Musk’s growing empire. Tesla, Starlink, X, and Neuralink all stand to benefit substantially from this new alignment. They won’t be alone. Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril are perfectly positioned to collect expanded defense contracts, while major venture capital cryptocurrency investments are likely to see favorable regulatory treatment. The concentration of power in these companies’ hands isn’t just about market dominance, it’s about shaping the very rules of our digital future…

Yep. Do read it.

If AI can provide a better diagnosis than a doctor, what’s the prognosis for medics?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

AI means too many (different) things to too many people. We need better ways of talking – and thinking – about it. Cue, Drew Breunig, a gifted geek and cultural anthropologist, who has come up with a neat categorisation of the technology into three use cases: gods, interns and cogs.

“Gods”, in this sense, would be “super-intelligent, artificial entities that do things autonomously”. In other words, the AGI (artificial general intelligence) that OpenAI’s Sam Altman and his crowd are trying to build (at unconscionable expense), while at the same time warning that it could be an existential threat to humanity. AI gods are, Breunig says, the “human replacement use cases”. They require gigantic models and stupendous amounts of “compute”, water and electricity (not to mention the associated CO2 emissions).

“Interns” are “supervised co-pilots that collaborate with experts, focusing on grunt work”…

Read on

Chart of the day

A neat graphical summary of the UK’s problem.

My commonplace booklet

ChatGPT was two yesterday. So I asked it how it would be feeling if it could feel.

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Bee welcoming

Even in B&W you can see why a bee would be interested.

Quote of the Day

You cannot have a political system without disagreement, but the point of democracy is to channel that disagreement into politics, rather than into violence.”

• Danielle Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Brahms | Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77 (3rd movement) | Itzhak Perlman

Link

Phew! Great performances put musicians through emotional and physical wringers.

Long Read of the Day

Let the Bad Times End (4): The Soviet Union

Timothy Burke is a thoughtful and interesting historian, and at the moment he’s embarked on a series of essays which try to put what’s happening now in context. This essay is #4 in the sequence, and it’s especially relevant for me today because later in the afternoon I will be having a conversation with three distinguished colleagues in the Ireland’s Edge discussion strand of the Other Voices festival on topics that are on everyone’s mind just now.

At one point in his essay, Timothy writes:

I’m grappling in this series whether bad times ever do end. I think it’s important to imagine that they can and sometimes have. I do think the Bolshevik Revolution, one of the most heavily studied and discussed events in modern global history, was a real change—that there was political and social novelty to the Soviet state that it created. For the same reason, I think the Soviet Union really did end, and some of the specific bad times that were deeply encoded into it ended with it. Putin’s Russia is deeply oppressive, but its oppressions have different emphases, different techniques, different ideological precepts. Moreover, while you might hire the Wagner Group to kill your enemies, no other country is going to adopt Putinism as a transnationally salient ideology.

So if the Soviet Union did end, why? It’s becoming hard to remember how astonishing and momentous the years 1989-1992 really were, and how unheralded they seemed. In 1998, few of us realized that apartheid would start to crumble in 1990, that the United States would lead a multinational coalition with restraint to successfully undo Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait, that the Berlin Wall would fall in 1989 and the Soviet Union itself would end only three years later. Looking back, you can forgive some of the hubris of Fukuyama’s The End of History, since these were all developments that seemed impossible, that many of us were raised to think simply wouldn’t change in our lifetimes —none more so than the sudden and peaceful end of the Soviet Union after so much proxy struggle in the Cold War, after so many moments of near-catastrophe for the entire planet…

Do read it. Worth your time.

Books, etc.

I’m a third of the way through this. I got it because I keep running into two ‘isms’ — Anthropocene antihumanism (argues that our climate destruction has doomed humanity and we should welcome our extinction), and Transhumanism (the belief that genetic engineering and AI will lead to new forms of life superior to humans) — which strike me as ludicrous, but which seem have a grip on folks in Silicon Valley and in a certain ancient university located near Reading. This scathing analysis by a good literary critic looked attractive, and it’s enjoyable — so far, anyway.

My commonplace booklet

From John Thornhill in yesterday’s FT:

The default assumption of successful founders seems to be that their expertise in building tech companies gives them equally valuable insights into the US federal budget deficit, pandemic responses, or the war in Ukraine. For them, fresh information plucked from unfamiliar fields sometimes resembles God-given revelation even if it is commonplace knowledge to everyone outside their bubble.

One young American tech billionaire, a college dropout who had just returned from a trip to Paris, once asked me with wide-eyed wonder whether I had heard about the French Revolution. It was incredible, apparently.

“Inevitably,” says John, “this leads to questions about the fungibility of Elon Musk’s IQ given his omnipresence in the US economy and now politics. “

It sure does! And how.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

An interesting exchange on Bluesky…

Molly Jong-Fast asked;

“One of the things I still don’t understand is how these tech bros can be pro-technology and anti science.”

To which Mar Hicks replied:

“Science is ostensibly about the study of natural phenomenon. It’s not unbiased, ofc, but that’s the ideal at least. Tech is about power—centralizing, amassing & wielding power, building ever more tools & infrastructures to design the world you want, not describe or study it.”

Which nails it nicely.

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Waiting, waiting…

… for a train which did turn up — eventually.

Quote of the Day

”If you feel pain, you are alive. If you feel other people’s pain, you are a human being.”

• Leo Tolstoy

(Which neatly rules out Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ennio Morricone | Theme from Cinema Paradiso | Renaud Capuçon

Link

From the soundtrack of one of my favourite films.

Long Read of the Day

I stopped using Twitter when Musk bought it in October 2022. Like many people I then tried tried Mastodon but was unimpressed and only recently joined Bluesky — like millions of other refugees from Twitter/X.

And when I say millions I mean it. There’s a fascinating online counter that’s updated every second. As I write this (in the evening of 21 November), the service now has over 21 million subscribers, and they’re joining at the rate of 4.22 users per second! So something’s definitely going on.

Which is why I found this NYT column (gift article) by Paul Krugman, the American economist and Nobel laureate, interesting, especially because of the way he contrasts the fate of Twitter/X with that of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Pre-Elon Musk, Twitter was the place people in my business had to be. I know different people used it for different purposes — nothing against Katy Perry, but not all of her nearly 106 million followers are on social media platforms for the same reasons I am. What I used Twitter for was to learn from and interact with people possessing real expertise, sometimes in areas I know pretty well, sometimes in areas I don’t, like international relations and climate policy.

I won’t go through the litany of ways the platform has changed for the worse under Musk’s leadership, but from my point of view it has become basically unusable, overrun by bots, trolls, cranks and extremists.

But where could you go instead? In the past couple of years, there have been several attempts to promote alternatives to X, but none of them really caught on. To some extent this may have reflected flaws in their designs, but a lot of it was simply lack of critical mass: Not enough of the people you wanted to interact with could be found on the alternative sites.

Then came this year’s presidential election, which seems to have sparked an exodus (“Xodus”?) from Muskland. From my point of view, Bluesky, in particular — a site that functions a lot like pre-Musk Twitter — quite suddenly has reached critical mass, in the sense that most of the people I want to hear from are now posting there. The raw number of users is still far smaller than X’s, but as far as I can tell, Bluesky is now the place to find smart, useful analysis…

Broadly speaking, his experience mirrors mine. It’s worth a read, especially if you are thinking about signing up for Bluesky. (For a second opinion, try Ian Bogust’s essay.)

Behind all this, of course, is a bigger question: does this ‘Xodus’ signal the beginning of the splintering of social media?

Books, etc.

For those seeking an understanding of what sliding into fascism is like, then Paul Lynch’s prizewinning novel of how it might happen might be hard to beat.

Here’s the blurb:

The explosive literary sensation: a mother faces a terrible choice as Ireland slides into totalitarianism

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, Larry, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling. Soon, she must decide just how far she is willing to go to keep her family safe.

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-winning novel is a devastating vision of a country falling apart and a moving portrait of the resilience of the human spirit when faced with the darkest of times…

My commonplace booklet

 In Grandpa’s footsteps

This week I discovered — to my delight — that the actor David Suchet is a passionate photographer, and that he uses the same kit as I do (Leica cameras). His grandfather, James Jarché, was a press photographer, and Suchet set out to retrace Grandpas’s steps and photograph some of the places James had recorded. Here is a charming video of his trip to the former coalfields of South Wales. It’s 14 minutes long and (IMO) worth every second.

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