No mist without fire?

I know, it looks like smoke, but it’s really an early morning mist.

Quote of the Day

”I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘Try being rich first.’ See if that doesn’t cover most of it. There’s not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job. . . . The only good thing about fame is that I’ve gotten out of a couple of speeding tickets. I’ve gotten into a restaurant when I didn’t have a suit and tie on. That’s really about it.”

• Bill Murray

Many years ago, when I was the Observer’s TV critic, I turned down a big TV job because I didn’t want to be recognised in the street. Best decision I ever made.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Rufus & Martha Wainwright | Sweet Thames, flow softly

Link

Long Read of the Day

How Brexit Created Britain’s New Political Tribes

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, this is a really insightful essay by James Tilley, who teaches Politics at Oxford, about the new book he’s written with Sara Hobolt: Tribal Politics: How Brexit Divided Britain, which is based on survey research indicating that Britain is as polarised as the US.

We find that Remainers and Leavers were consistently a lot more attached to their identity than were Conservative or Labour supporters. And those scores have been very stable over the last ten years. People like people like them. And they define ‘like them’ in terms of their Brexit tribe. All our measures also show that people not only disagree with, but really dislike, people on the other side and typically say that they have a ‘cold or unfavourable feeling’ towards their rival group. Again, this has barely changed since 2016.

Third, people engage in the same sort of motivated reasoning that we see for party identities. At the most basic level, any group identity that is strongly held will provide motivations to think that the other side is inferior and should be avoided. As our data shows, huge majorities say that their own Brexit group is intelligent, honest and selfless, while the other side is stupid, dishonest and selfish. In fact, when we asked people to describe the other side in their own words, a quarter simply listed bad things and another quarter did that in addition to other information (to give you a flavour, one of the pithiest responses was simply ‘selfish dicks’). However we measure it, we find widespread prejudice. And we also find lots of evidence of discrimination: people actively wanted to avoid everyday interactions with people on the rival team…

This is an interesting read for those of us who fondly imagine that the US has a monopoly on polarisation. It also helps to explain why the traditional UK political parties are losing their grip on — not to mention attractiveness to — voters.

Anthropic’s Mythos AI heralds a new era of cybersecurity warfare

My most recent Observer column:

Mythos, says Collins dictionary, is “the complex of beliefs, values, attitudes, etc, characteristic of a specific group or society”. It is also the name Dario Amodei’s Anthropic has given to its latest AI model – officially Claude Mythos Preview – which has arrived as a bombshell, and whose reverberations we will soon begin to notice.

How come? It turns out that Mythos, which is a general-purpose large language model (LLM), is also a world-class hacker. Or, to put it less luridly, it is striking for its ability to discover security vulnerabilities in networked systems and exploit them. Anthropic said that it has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some “in every major operating system and web browser”. It added: “Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely.” It also said: “AI have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities.”

Discovery of this capability persuaded Anthropic that it would be unsafe to launch Mythos on an unsuspecting world. Accordingly, the company decided on Project Glasswing; the codename for making the model available only to a number of large – and presumably trusted – corporate bodies…

Read on

pdf version: Anthropic’s Mythos AI heralds a new era of cybersecurity …

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Making a typeface with potatoes

A group of typeface designers decided to have a go.

Type design is mostly precisely drawing vector curves, printing proofs and judge the grey value with a minus lens. But it can also be a group of friends coming together to have an experimental typographic evening. We had the idea to make a Bodoni interpretation with potato stamps, so we bought 8kg of potatoes, some knifes and carved a long, long evening in the kitchen. When we finally had the full alphabet we stamped it on paper, made a font out of this and called it Bodedo.

Screenshot

Link

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The Doll’s House

Yesterday we walked to Hill Top House, the rural retreat of the writer Beatrix Potter, whose books were a staple of my childrens’ early lives. It’s an interesting and evocative place and though I’d been there once (after the pandemic) I thought it’d be nice to revisit, not least because of the huge (and beneficial) impact she had on the Lake District (where we’re on holiday).

Her house is now maintained by the National Trust (to which she bequeathed it) and is kept as it was when she died. This time I had a single objective — to photograph the doll’s house in one of the first-floor rooms.

Screenshot

The background story of the doll’s house is interesting. According to Wikipedia, her 1904 book, The Tale of Two Bad Mice, was inspired by the conjunction of two things: two mice caught in a cage-trap in her cousin’s home; and a doll’s house being constructed by her editor and publisher, Norman Warne, as a Christmas gift for his niece Winifred.

The tale is about two mice who vandalise a doll’s house. After finding the food on the dining room table made of plaster, they smash the dishes, throw the doll clothing out the window, tear the bolster, and carry off a number of articles to their mouse-hole. When the little girl who owns the doll’s house discovers the destruction, she positions a policeman doll outside the front door to ward off any future depredation. The two mice atone for their crime spree by putting a crooked sixpence in the doll’s stocking on Christmas Eve and sweeping the house every morning with a dust-pan and broom.

“The doll’s house contents are really important,” writes the National Trust’s Curator, “because they feature so strongly in one of Beatrix’s best loved tales but also because of the significance to her life and her relationship with Norman Warne” (who tragically died shortly after proposing marriage to her).

It took around 300 hours of work to conserve the doll’s house and 73 of the items it contains. The house needed work to stabilise part of the decorative roof edge as well as filling cracks and previous screw holes. Torn wallpaper was repaired, and areas of lifting vinyl floors were tackled along with carpet repairs. Many of the objects in the house needed work to stabilise and prevent further deterioration as well as reattaching broken or loose pieces before detailed cleaning. Silk cushion covers on the furniture were repaired and dry cleaned using micro-vacuum cleaners.

Clearly, one of the talents required in conservators is an infinite capacity for taking pains. This blogger would definitely not qualify.

Quote of the Day

“The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools of as many men as possible.”

• Bernard Baruch

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Byrds | Ballad Of Easy Rider

Link

Damn: if I’m not careful I’ll be re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance next.

Long Read of the Day

What if we just stopped hyperscaling?

Fabulous essay by John Quiggin, the economist.

The AI industry today is dominated by a relentless pursuit of scale—bigger models, more data, and ever-larger compute clusters. NVIDIA’s H100 GPU, the current gold standard for AI compute, exemplifies this trend. Each H100 consumes around 1 kilowatt of power and costs tens of thousands of dollars, yet the world’s tech giants deploy millions of these chips to train and run massive AI models. The energy footprint is staggering, the hardware costs are astronomical, and the environmental impact is growing. This hyperscaling model is unsustainable, but it’s the engine driving NVIDIA’s $100 billion data center business.

But what if we stopped hyperscaling? What if, instead of constantly training new, larger models, we focused on running the ones we already have—and made them smarter with real-time internet search? This is the world of inference-only AI, where existing models like Llama 3 8B or Mistral 7B are deployed at scale with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to keep them up-to-date. The implications are profound: hardware needs shrink by orders of magnitude, energy consumption plummets, and AI becomes a sustainable, affordable utility…

Read on. I suspect that if the AI industry is to become profitable in the long run, this is how it has to evolve.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

This looks really interesting: a book about where we might look for ways of revitalising democracy and running societies in ways that improve life for the majority of citizens. The Anglosphere (UK and US) is hopelessly introverted and solipsistic in this respect: their inbred exceptionalism blindsides them to the idea that the rest of the world might have something to teach them. John Kampfner has broken out of that straitjacket and gone looking for ideas — and finding them — in countries like Japan, Canada, Austria, Finland, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Morocco, Estonia and — Goddammit — even in Romania.

I’ve just downloaded it and begun reading. Looks promising. And thanks to Ivan Morris for suggesting it.

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Zoombini

A photograph of the most remarkable and intelligent cat I’ve ever known, taken in 2012. She died five years ago, and I miss her still.

Quote of the Day

”A perfect martini should be made by filling a glass with gin then waving it in the general direction of Italy.”

• Noel Coward

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Cello Suite 1 | Pablo Casals

Link

Long Read of the Day

You Are Not a Function

If, like me, you think that universities are heading into deep trouble, then this thoughtful essay by Brendan McCord might be helpful — especially given the way the Humanities are being marginalised. It starts back in 1809 when Prussia was trying to rebuild after a traumatic defeat by Napoleon and the task of designing the new system of education fell to a thirty-two-year-old diplomat named Wilhelm von Humboldt. He proposed a university where professors and students would be joined in the pursuit of knowledge, unconstrained by political demands. In a defeated nation hungry for officers and administrators, he argued for ‘formation’ before function. In other words, he came up with the idea that a human being is more like a tree than a steam engine (as John Stuart Mill put it). And the modern research university, with its union of teaching and inquiry, its seminar culture, and its commitment to academic freedom is a direct descendant from that idea. But it’s now losing the plot by forgetting the question that Humboldt asked: What is a human being, that education should serve it?

In a world where your economic value can evaporate overnight, “Become a whole person” sounds like advice from someone who has never worried about next month’s rent. The utilitarian case for education has the force of necessity behind it. For millions of people, making yourself useful is what responsibility to their families demands.

Yet if the response to being replaceable is always to train for a different function, you have entered a race you structurally cannot win. The principle that makes your education valuable is the same principle that makes you disposable the moment the function migrates.

The scramble into computer science was an early sign of the trap: students rushed toward the field that seemed safest, and then AI began destabilizing the very functions it trained them to perform. The flight to function looks rational from inside it; that is what makes it a trap.

Why?. Because once you define what the formed person looks like, you have replaced formation with training.

AI has some grim lessons in store for such malformed graduates.

Tech bros, beware: resistance to AI moves from theory to direct action

Yesterday’s Observer column

On the morn­ing of 10 April, a guy threw a molotov cock­tail at the exter­ior gate of the man­sion of OpenAI boss Sam Alt­man in San Fran­cisco. Two days later, two people tried a spot of drive-by shoot­ing at the house. Also this month, an Indi­ana­polis city coun­cil­lor was woken by 13 gun­shots and found a note on his door­step say­ing: “No data cen­ters”. It turns out that, days before the lat­ter shoot­ing, the coun­cil­lor atten­ded a met­ro­pol­itan devel­op­ment com­mis­sion meet­ing to advoc­ate for the rezon­ing of a prop­erty where the developer Met­robloks was seek­ing to build a data­centre.

Mean­while, Maine is poised to become the first US state to pass a tem­por­ary ban on data­centre con­struc­tion. It’s just the first of at least 11 more states – Geor­gia, Mary­land, Michigan, New Hamp­shire, New York, Oklahoma, South Car­o­lina, South Dakota, Ver­mont, Vir­ginia and Wis­con­sin – that have pro­posed to restrict or ban data­centre devel­op­ment.

What we’re see­ing are the first stir­rings of anti-AI pop­u­lism, a volat­ile move­ment driven by eco­nomic des­per­a­tion and a dis­trust of tech elites. In that con­text, the attacks on Alt­man’s home and a coun­cil­lor who advoc­ated for a data­centre look like early sig­nals of a seis­mic shift from cri­tique to dir­ect action.

Even as they beef up their per­sonal secur­ity, the tech bros are baffled and hurt by this devel­op­ment. But, really, they only have them­selves to blame. From the out­set in 2022, their mes­saging about the tech­no­logy has been infant­ile…

Read on

(Pdf version here).

My commonplace booklet

Two caveats on Orban’s defeat.

The first from John Quiggan:

Most important, but less clear, are the implications for Trumpism in the US. The result is a double-edged sword. By showing that even an entrenched regime like Orban’s can be defeated in a democratic election, it gives us hope. But the lesson for the Trumpists is that democracy must be suppressed as soon as possible. An Orban-scale defeat in the 2026 midterms would make it very difficult to steal the presidency in 2028. Looking at the polls that’s quite likely unless the 2026 elections are suppressed, as Trump has previously suggested.

The second from Simon Wren-Lewis, who also has a nuanced take on the Hungarian result.

Trump’s actions could actually add to the support of right wing populist parties outside the US if those parties are not in government. In particular Trump’s Iran war is leading to lasting increases in the price of energy and food, similar in scale to the increases seen after the end of the pandemic. We know that the latter was associated with a period where incumbent governments fell around the world, perhaps because many voters blamed those governments for the hit to their prosperity. In that respect Trump’s actions could provide a boost to right wing populists in the years to come.

For this reason alone Orbán’s defeat should not be seen as a turning of the tide against right wing populism. I argued here that ever since advocating extreme socially conservative views has become normalised, there will always be at least a third of the electorate that will be attracted by parties that make immigration and overt nationalism their main issues. Hard economic times, and in particular cuts to public services, will boost that number, as many voters begin to believe that immigrants are responsible for their stagnant real wages and their difficulty in accessing public services. These are the circumstances that offer right wing populist opposition parties the chance to gain power, and in Trump’s case and perhaps in Orbán’s case to regain power.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• A perfect gift for someone who makes an annoying number of smartphone calls?

Screenshot

A 1950s-style handset that plugs into the phone. Link. Sadly, no use to me.

Feedback

Ivan Morris (himself a formidable golfer) was not impressed by this passage from Elizabeth Nelson’s account of Rory McIlroy’s final round in the Masters golf tournament:

Standing on the 18th tee, following a week of wild fluctuations in his game that had nevertheless vouchsafed him a two-shot lead over Scottie Scheffler’s posted 11-under, he only needed to find fairway to functionally call game on the tournament.

But that is not Rory’s MO. Instead, he pulled his drive so far right that my editors and I briefly had to reconsider whether we’d still be writing a Rory-repeat story.

Ivan points out that, for a right-handed golfer, a “pull” involves a ball swinging left. Rory did exactly the opposite — he pushed the ball right.

Tut,tut.

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Regime change

This Private Eye cover made my day.

Quote of the Day

”What is the difference between a Nazi and a dog? The Nazi lifts his arm.”

• Viktor Borge

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Clannad | Tá’ Mé Mo Shuí (I am Awake)

Link

Eerily beautiful Irish love song about a lad who can’t sleep because he’s missing his lass.

Long Read of the Day

The Boiling Point

A sobering post by Mike Brock

There is a concept in the sciences known as a phase transition. It describes the threshold at which an otherwise stable system suddenly rearranges itself into a completely different stable pattern. Water freezes. Not gradually — at a precise threshold, the molecular structure reorganizes and something categorically different exists where something else was before. The same phenomenon governs the lifecycle of stars: our Sun has been in its main sequence phase for five billion years, burning hydrogen in a stable equilibrium, and one day that equilibrium will fail and the Sun will become something entirely unlike what it has been — not a gradual decline but a reorganization into a different state.

I am watching a phase transition in American society. And I am not sure the people responsible for producing the conditions that are driving it understand what they are looking at.

…

In the sciences, a system approaching a phase transition shows specific signatures before the transition occurs. It becomes increasingly sensitive to perturbations. Small inputs produce large outputs. The fluctuations grow. The system’s behavior becomes harder to predict from its prior behavior. Scientists call this critical slowing down — the system is losing its ability to return to equilibrium after disturbance.

On TikTok and social media, something that was once rare has become common: men crying on camera. Sharing their economic fears. Talking about what it feels like to not be able to provide. Women breaking down on video — “I’m so screwed, y’all” — after losing jobs and running out of money. Young women crying at the gas pump because the number on the screen doesn’t leave enough for food.

The establishment has a category for this. It is called “economic anxiety.” It is a term that converts the specific, felt, real experience of not being able to make the arithmetic work into a demographic variable suitable for polling analysis.

That is not what this is. This is people, in public, telling the truth about their lives because the pressure has built past the point where keeping up appearances is possible. This is the sound a society makes when the gap between the declared reality and the actual reality becomes too large to maintain in private.

And it’s what our much-vaunted liberal democracy has produced.

Books, etc.

After Trump’s inauguration last January, when I was trying to figure out if we were witnessing a revolution or a coup, I suddenly remembered this lovely, wise, book, and dug it out. It’s written as an extended letter to an (unnamed) friend who had bombarded him with questions about “the riddles of Poland and Europe after the revolution of 1989 until I was too dazed to answer any of them properly”. So he retreated to the peace and quiet of his study in St Antony’s College, Oxford, and started to write. The continuing conundrum, he concluded, which will plague peoples everywhere in Europe, will be how to balance the need for economic growth with the desire for social justice while building authentic and enduring democratic institutions.

As the liberal democracy celebrated by Francis Fukuyama in 1989 has been steadily eroding, I’m finding that Dahrendorf’s reflections improve with our newly-acquired hindsight.

My commonplace booklet

Rory McIlroy Does It the Hard Way (Again) 

I was once a very keen golfer (I played for my university as an undergraduate) and although I more or less gave it up when I came to Cambridge in 1968, it’s still the only game I pay attention to. Which explains why I so enjoyed this   lovely account by Elizabeth Nelson of Rory McIlroy’s second victory in the Masters last weekend.

Sample:

You know when the hard-boiled detective grabs the prime suspect by the scruff of the neck in the interrogation room and says: “We can do this the hard way, or we can do this the easy way”?

Rory Fuckin’ McIlroy never does it the easy way.

On Sunday, when he became just the fourth golfer in history to win back-to-back green jackets at the Masters, he kept us in suspense until the very end. Standing on the 18th tee, following a week of wild fluctuations in his game that had nevertheless vouchsafed him a two-shot lead over Scottie Scheffler’s posted 11-under, he only needed to find fairway to functionally call game on the tournament.

But that is not Rory’s MO. Instead, he pulled his drive so far right that my editors and I briefly had to reconsider whether we’d still be writing a Rory-repeat story. Not until he hit his tough third bunker shot to 12 feet could we be absolutely certain that we wouldn’t have a Van de Veldeian ending…

Magical!

Also explains why following McIlroy is bad for one’s blood pressure. He’s the most entertaining and exasperating golfer since the late — and much lamented — Seve Ballesteros (who also won the Masters twice).

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The enduring fascination of Harry Potter

Every time I pass through King’s Cross I am reminded of it. Must be wonderful to be an author who made such an impact on people.

 ## Quote of the Day

”The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alfred Brendel | Schubert Impromptu Op 90 No 3 D 899 G flat major

Link

Long Read of the Day

Hegseth the Crusader

I am temperamentally suspicious of anyone who talks about a ‘crusade’ in an approving light. Yet the US Secretary for Defense, er War, has clearly never read the history of said Crusades, which, among other things took about 200 years and ended with Saladdin’s liberation of Jerusalem in 1187. What I hadn’t fully realised, though, was the extent to which he is a religious fanatic. Accordingly, I’m grateful to Frank Bruni for putting me right.

Hegseth volubly likened the rescue of an American airman shot down over Iran to the Resurrection of Jesus. “A pilot reborn, all home and accounted for, a nation rejoicing,” Hegseth said at a news conference. “God is good.”.

Hegseth has a tattoo on his right biceps that says “Deus vult,” Latin for “God wills it.” He has described that phrase as a battle cry during the Crusades, which, of course, pitted Christians against Muslims. He titled his 2020 book “American Crusade” — notice any fixation? — and wrote in it that Americans must fight “like our fellow Christians 1,000 years ago.”

He belongs to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which exalts patriarchy and descends from a movement that argues that the Bible’s edicts should prevail over secular law.

He tugs church into state. As Michelle Boorstein wrote recently in The Washington Post: “Every month at the Pentagon, Hegseth hosts evangelical worship services that legal experts say are unprecedented. His social media profile and public comments routinely espouse his understanding of Christianity, which is one that would dominate American life and cast those who disagree with him as God’s enemies. He has brought clergy from his small Christian denomination to preach at the Pentagon, including a prominent pastor who says women shouldn’t have the right to vote.”

How exactly did he become secretary of defense, to use the traditional title for the job?

How indeed? Especially given that a New Yorker investigation reported that he had been forced out of previous leadership positions for financial mismanagement, sexist behaviour, and being repeatedly intoxicated on the job.

Chart of the Day

What’s happened to the platform previously known as Twitter?

In other words, it’s become a freak-show.

“Without really wanting to comment on individual accounts,” writes Nate Silver,

the liberal-leaning accounts that remain prominent on Twitter aren’t much better. They’re partisan and combative, sometimes peddling misinformation. They’re almost like a dark-mirror-world, Waluigi version of the conservative “influencers”, crafted in Elon’s jaded image of what liberals are like. It’s no coincidence that one of the most successful ones is the Gavin Newsom Press Office account, which literally mimics President Trump’s style in a sometimes funny, sometimes cringeworthy way.

Source

My commonplace booklet

Henry Oliver has a thoughtful post about Harold Bloom (accurately titled “The Man Who Had Read Everything”) which contains this endearing quote from a letter to the A.R Ammons in 1969.

An odd note, this—I came home just now from an exhausting Grad. Seminar in Poetic Influence—exhausting because a waste of spirit somehow—and I sat down—with cigar and scotch and soda—in my deep armchair in the living room—Daniel playing outside—David in the kitchen fingerpainting, Jeanne there too cooking chicken pilaf—and I turned to my downstairs copy of Ammons’ Selected Poems (I’ve got an upstairs copy for reading in my study—every house should have 2 Ammonses) and I read “Bridge”—because the book fell open to it—a poem I hadn’t been open to before—and Arch, it opened to me and found me—immensely beautiful, healing, Archie, as only Wordsworth and Stevens and Ammons can heal. I am very moved, very, very moved. It is a great poem, Archie, and if I had written it—rather than wasting my spirit (such as it is) in tiring seminars and exegeses we don’t need—I would feel blessed, Archie, as you must sometimes feel in spite of yourself.

Ammons was a poet an professor of English at Cornell. “Bridge” is the poem Triphammer Bridge:

I wonder what to mean by sanctuary, if a real or apprehended place, as of a bell rung in a gold surround, or as of silver roads along the beaches

of clouds seas don’t break or black mountains overspill; jail: ice here’s shapelier than anything, on the eaves massive, jawed along gorge ledges, solid

in the plastic blue boat fall left water in: if I think the bitterest thing I can think of that seems like reality, slickened back, hard, shocked by rip-high wind:

sanctuary, sanctuary, I say it over and over and the word’s sound is the one place to dwell: that’s it, just the sound, and the imagination of the sound—a place.

Feedback

Sheila Hayman’s documentary on Fanny Mendelssohn can be ordered here.

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No such thing as a free lunch

Seen on a street in Brighton in March 2012.

Quote of the Day

”Reality has no sense of plot, timing or strategy. It just goes on.”

• Jack Watling in Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Charles Brown | Driftin’ Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Mythos and the mispricing of everything

The AI firm Anthropic has developed a new model called Mythos, but they haven’t released it to the public. Why? Because Mythos is alarmingly good at hacking. Anthropic claims that its cyber-security research abilities are strong enough that they need to give the software industry as a whole time to prepare.

Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely.

This perceptive commentary by Azeem Azhar and Greg Williams ponders some of the implications of a new AI tool that Anthropic has created.One of these implications is that the insurance firms that provide cover against hacking will urgently have to conduct an urgent review of the way they estimate the risk of a successful and damaging attack.

The most significant and immediate implication of Mythos is on how we price risk. Critical infrastructure is the asset class that is most exposed and is systemically mispriced. The US utilities sector alone has a $1.5 trillion market capitalization, priced at roughly 22x PE – with cyber risk treated as an incremental operational cost rather than a structural exposure. That frame no longer works in a world where an AI agent can autonomously construct working exploits overnight.

My first thought when the story broke is that Anthropic might be hyping up the significance of their new model by implying that it was too dangerous to release. (We’ve seen that stunt before with early versions of OpenAI’s models.) But Simon Willison, my go-to guru in these matters, doesn’t think it’s a stunt. “There’s enough smoke here,” he writes, “that I believe there’s a fire.”

It’s not surprising to find vulnerabilities in decades-old software, especially given that they’re mostly written in C, but what’s new is that coding agents run by the latest frontier LLMs are proving tirelessly capable at digging up these issues.

I actually thought to myself on Friday that this sounded like an industry-wide reckoning in the making, and that it might warrant a huge investment of time and money to get ahead of the inevitable barrage of vulnerabilities.

For “might” read “will”. This is a big deal.

In polarised times, AI may be the centrist the world needs

Given the existence of what Henry Farrell calls “the AI Fight Club”, I expect that yesterday’s Observer column will get me into trouble with everyone, and especially with those who are critical of AI in its present form. But what the hell: columnists are paid to have opinions.

Technology is not the only reason for the increasing polarisation of democracies. The deeper problem is that these societies have for several decades failed to deliver the shared prosperity on which social cohesion depends. As programmers say: inequality is a feature, not a bug of the neoliberal state. The system has been good for some, but countless others have been “left behind”.

Social media gives them a voice that is then amplified by tabloid media. So the pool of people producing and broadcasting information has dramatically expanded – as have the range of views and narratives to which people are exposed. The result is a perfect storm of misinformation.

In 2025, John Burn-Murdoch, the Financial Times’s data wizard, did an analysis that showed extreme political views and narratives are overrepresented on social media compared with traditional media and cable TV. “Whereas traditional media catered to a range of views,” he reported, “with moderate positions well represented, extreme views – of both left and right – are heavily overrepresented on social media.”

Last month, he did a fascinating experiment that built on the earlier study…

Do read on.

My commonplace booklet

Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) was moved to email after reading Margaret Heffernan’s essay (“Use it or Lose it”) on not outsourcing important cognitive tasks to AI.

Sheet music downloads, as you probably know, are usually delivered as PDFs. When I opened the second fiddle part of the Bruch violin concerto, Adobe’s bot popped up and asked brightly: ’This appears to be a long document. Would you like me to summarise it for you?’ Curious, I agreed and waited, intrigued to know whether it would indeed be able to reduce one of the glories of the repertoire to a few notes.

After a few minutes of furious exertion, it confessed: ‘I’m sorry, this appears to be in a language I don’t recognise.’ A relief on one level, but then I thought, actually, a lot of music – Beethoven’s in particular, as that’s what I’m working on at the moment – is, in effect, an embroidery on a few notes (I attach the first appearance of the famous First Four Notes of the 5th Symphony which happen to have been sent to me this morning and out of which, I’m told by cleverer people, the entire symphony is spun.)

So that seemed to me a very concise summary of these LLMs: they can’t necessarily do all that we can, but because they don’t know their limits – like children, in a way – they may accidentally come up with ideas that I might not have had on my own…

Sheila’s documentary on Fanny Mendelssohn is terrific. Great to learn that she’s now got Beethoven in her sights.

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Stairway to…

… who knows…

Quote of the Day

”No solution to the problem of poverty is so effective as providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion.”

• John Kenneth Galbraith

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Albinoni | Adagio in G Minor for solo cello and cello quartet

Link

See below for why I chose this for today.

Long Read of the Day

Use it or lose it

Margaret Heffernan takes on the challenge of AI.

I used to carry about 100 phone numbers in my head: family, friends, my office. Now I carry just one: my husband’s. I can do this because I have effectively outsourced my memory to my phone. I’m comfortable doing so because I backup my phone and if, in a real emergency, I don’t have it, I can call my husband.

Other kinds of outsourcing I am not happy with. No matter how well AI agents might get to ‘know’ me, I wouldn’t want it to email my friends or fix a time I can have lunch with my daughter; I’d regard it as crass and impersonal—because it would be crass and impersonal. In the same way, podcasters who invite me onto their show, and then invite me to schedule myself don’t get a reply: I have zero appetite for so transactional an exchange.

The smarmy automated invitations to save me time by letting AI summarize long documents (wow at least 10 pages!) just make me mad at the addiction-peddling of Microsoft, a company that, if it truly respected my time, would devote real resources to improving their messy software…

I’m with her on Microsoft software.

The new Ofcom chair’s first task is to tame Elon Musk

My OpEd in last Sunday’s Observer

The former television mogul Michael Grade comes to the end of his four-year term as chairman of Ofcom, the UK’s media regulator, later this month. In classic British fashion, the government compiled a shortlist of possible successors drawn straight from central casting: a doughty baroness and a brace of knights. The baroness, Margaret Hodge, was thought by some to be too ancient (though she is of the same vintage as Lord Grade). One of the knights, Jeremy Wright, a Tory MP with a real track record of caring deeply about online harms, was thought to be deemed too dangerous for a timid government. So the position appears to have gone to a City grandee, Ian Cheshire, who has spent his life running big retailers and sitting on the boards of Barclays, Debenhams and BT.

As far as I can see, his only obvious qualification for running a media regulator was that he had once been chairman of Channel 4. Presumably, he at least possesses those accessories so prized by the British establishment: a “safe pair of hands”. Which is good, because he’ll need them.

He inherits a powerful agency that has, since its foundation in 2003, been attracting commitments the way a trawler attracts barnacles…

Do read on

Books, etc.

Screenshot

Just downloaded this on the recommendation of a colleague because it touches on things I’m trying to think about at the moment.

My commonplace booklet

RIP a fine journalist

Yesterday, I went to the funeral of a fine journalist in our local church. Burns won two Pulitzer Prizes and a host of other awards during his 40-year career at the New York Times. One of the Pulitzers was for his reporting of the destruction of Sarajevo and the barbaric killings in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992.

The music at the service was comforting in the Anglican tradition, with Abide with Me, Guide me, O thou great redeemer and Jerusalem (an echo of the last night of the Proms), but the really heart-stopping moment was when a young cellist, Santi Lowe, played Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor, as a tribute to Vedran Smailovic, a musician whom John had immortalised in his reportage. Here’s what he wrote:

A Cellist Honors Sarajevo’s Dead

As the 155-millimeter howitzer shells whistled down on this crumbling city today, exploding thunderously into buildings all around, a disheveled, stubble-bearded man in formal evening attire unfolded a plastic chair in the middle of Vase Miskina Street. He lifted his cello from its case and began playing Albinoni’s Adagio.

There were only two people to hear him, and both fled, dodging from doorway to doorway, before the performance ended.

Each day at 4 p.m., the cellist, Vedran Smailovic, walks to the same spot on the pedestrian mall for a concert in honor of Sarajevo’s dead.

The spot he has chosen is outside the bakery where several high-explosive rounds struck a bread line 12 days ago, killing 22 people and wounding more than 100. If he holds to his plan, there will be 22 performances before his gesture has run its course.

I really love the cello. And the resonances it triggers when played in a small country church are breathtaking. Reminds one of those recordings of Pablo Casals playing the Bach Cello suites in the crypt of Sant Miquel de Cuixà, France, in 1950.

The New York Times obit of John Burns is here.

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On reflection…

Quote of the Day

”Courage is a banal consequence of a lack of imagination”.

• André Malraux

Vintage example of French cynicism.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Paul Desmond and the Dave Brubeck Quartet | Take Five

Link

I’ve often listened to this but knew little about it. So I turned to Wikipedia:

The track emerged after Quartet drummer Joe Morello challenged Desmond to compose a piece in 5/4. Brubeck arranged Desmond’s melodies around Morello’s rhythmic ideas, creating a work in ABA ternary form. Its title refers both to the quintuple meter and the colloquial expression “take five,” meaning to take a short break.

Long Read of the Day

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying

Good Guardian essay by Kevin T. Baker on how “LLMs gone rogue” stories often mislead the public about AI. Same things happen when self-driving cars kill or injure people. It’s always the tech that gets blamed, not the corporations that develop and operate them.

On the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, 28 February 2026, American forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in southern Iran, hitting the building at least two times during the morning session. American forces killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12.

Within days, the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target. Congress wrote to the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, about the extent of AI use in the strikes. The New Yorker magazine asked whether Claude could be trusted to obey orders in combat, whether it might resort to blackmail as a self-preservation strategy, and whether the Pentagon’s chief concern should be that the chatbot had a personality. Almost none of this had any relationship to reality. The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody was arguing about Maven.

Eight years ago, Maven was the most contested project in Silicon Valley. In 2018, more than 4,000 Google employees signed a letter opposing the company’s contract to build artificial intelligence for the Pentagon’s targeting systems. Workers organised a walk out. Engineers quit. And Google ultimately abandoned the contract. Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company and defence contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, took it over and spent the next six years building Maven into a targeting infrastructure that pulls together satellite imagery, signals intelligence and sensor data to identify targets and carry them through every step from first detection to the order to strike.

The bombing, in which U.S. forces hit the school with Tomahawk missiles while targeting an adjacent military base, killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them young female students. … The building in Minab had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that, according to CNN, had not been updated to reflect that the building had been separated from the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound and converted into a school, a change that satellite imagery shows had occurred by 2016 at the latest. A chatbot did not kill those children. People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal. By the start of the Iran war, Maven – the system that had enabled that speed – had sunk into the plumbing, it had become part of the military’s infrastructure, and the argument was all about Claude. This obsession with Claude is a kind of AI psychosis, though not of the kind we normally talk about, and it afflicts critics and opponents of the technology as fiercely as it does its boosters. You do not have to use a language model to let it organise your attention or distort your thinking.

Great piece. And AI psychosis is spreading.

Ten metaphors for AI

My piece from last Sunday’s Observer with nice illustrations by Chris Riddell.

ChatGPT was the first instantiation of AI that most people encountered, and it’s still what most of us regard as “AI”, much as they once learned to refer to internet search as “googling”. It’s a chatbot, a large language model (LLM) equipped with a conversational interface. And it came as a shock to its early users. As Terrence Sejnowski, an AI pioneer, put it: “A threshold was reached, as if a space alien suddenly appeared that could communicate with us in an eerily human way.” Some aspects of their behaviour appear to be intelligent, “but if it’s not human intelligence, what is the nature of their intelligence?”

In order to answer this question, users have inevitably fastened on to metaphors as the way to tether the abstractions of artificial intelligence to more tangible things. I’ve lost count of the number of metaphors for AI that have appeared since 2022 but I guess they now run into the hundreds. Here are 10 of the most interesting…

Do read the whole thing

My commonplace booklet

How to Live Beyond 80

Robert Reich has been thinking ahead:

Let me be very candid with you. I’ll be 80 in June.

Eighty!

When I was a boy, my grandmother had a friend named Jack who was 80. He was the oldest person I’d ever met. I was amazed he was still standing. And still able to walk and talk. I thought he was Methuselah. I regarded him as a fossil from a different time.

Now I’m about to become a fossil from a different time.

Trump will reach 80 ten days before me, but that’s small comfort. He’s not just a fossil. He’s a neanderthal with a reptilian brain. I’m embarrassed he and I are of the same generation.

But there are a lot of us, all hitting 80 this year. More babies were born in 1946 than in any other year in American history up until that time: 3.4 million of us little darlings, 20 percent more than the year before…

Verily, fossilhood beckons for us all.

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Tulip Mania

These amazing multi-coloured tulips which suddenly appeared in our garden a couple of years ago, give one a hint of why the Dutch went mad about the bulbs in the mid-1600s.

Quote of the Day

”The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

• John Kenneth Galbraith

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S.Bach | Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (Sleepers Awake) | Munich University choir.

Link

In the cantata (of which this is just a spectacular part), performed by the Netherlands Bach Society, everything revolves around the parable of the wise and foolish virgins. They wait throughout the night with burning lamps for the arrival of the bridegroom. Five of them have brought along extra oil to keep their lamps burning. The others run out of oil and go off to buy some more. The bridegroom arrives while they are away. Nice to wake up to it on Easter Day!

Long Read of the Day

It’s astonishing to watch from afar how Trump & Co are getting away with what they’re doing. A lot of it has to do with the extraordinary way that Congress has been cowed. But it also has something to do with the fact that cowardice is contagious (as people discovered in 1930s Germany).

This essay by historian Timothy Snyder outlines some of the grim possibilities that faces the American public over the months between now and November.

We are seven months away from the most consequential midterm election in the history of the United States. Meanwhile, we are fighting a war. These are the structural conditions for a coup attempt in which a president tries to nullify elections and take permanent power as a dictator. If we see this, we can stop it, overcome the movement that brought us to this point, and make a turn towards something better.

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Pete Hegseth are stuck in the logic of escalation, according to which the feeling of defeat today can be reversed by doing the first thing that comes to mind tomorrow. Trump is surrounded by people who are making money from the war; each day of war strengthens a warmongering lobby with personal access to the president. As the war lengthens, the chance that it will be exploited for a coup attempt increases.

Trump tells us that he is chiefly concerned with the permanence of his own comfort and power (think about ballroom and bunker), much of which he will lose when his party is defeated decisively in the midterms. He regularly declares his intention to meddle in the elections. His party backed a bill which would have turned elections into a sham. Trump wants to increase the defense budget by nearly 50% without any review of what the money is for; this is strategic nonsense, and has to be understood as a payoff for the men who, as he imagines, will help him install a dictatorship. Hegseth is meanwhile purging the highest officer ranks of people of principle.

It is up to us to put two and two together: Trump will seek to exploit the war (or the next one) to alter the elections. We bear responsibility for what comes next.

Chart of the Day

Screenshot

Which explains why it is important that the UK government continues to support the BBC as negotiations about the renewal of its Charter continue.

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