Monster of the deep?

Sadly, no. But when viewed from a distance it looked for a moment like a sinister predator surfacing in a placid lake!

Quote of the Day

“AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do without thinking …”

• Donald Knuth

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach: Italian Concerto In F Major, BWV 971: I. Allegro | Rafał Blechacz

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project

Very nice essay by Scott Alexander as he wanders down the rabbit-hole of the strange preponderance of Hungarian geniuses in the mid 20th century.

A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, after which they decided the planet was unsuitable for their needs and disappeared. The only clue to their existence were the children they had with local women.

The joke was that this explained why the Manhattan Project was led by a group of Hungarian supergeniuses, all born in Budapest between 1890 and 1920. These included Manhattan Project founder Leo Szilard, H-bomb creator Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Eugene Wigner, and legendary polymath John von Neumann, namesake of the List Of Things Named After John Von Neumann.

The coincidences actually pile up beyond this. Von Neumann, Wigner, and possibly Teller all went to the same central Budapest high school at about the same time, leading a friend to joke about the atomic bomb being basically a Hungarian high school science fair project.

But maybe we shouldn’t be joking about this so much. Suppose we learned that Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach all had the same childhood piano tutor. It sounds less like “ha ha, what a funny coincidence” and more like “wait, who was this guy, and how quickly can we make everyone else start doing what he did?”

In this case, the guy was Laszlo Ratz, legendary Budapest high school math teacher…

With Alexander, often the journey not the arrival matters most. And so it is here. But you need to read all the way to find that out. Personally, I couldn’t put it down.

And if you’re still intrigued, there’s also ”The Martian Gene” by David Friedman to keep you from doing real work!

So many books, so little time

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia and the World’s Most Coveted microchip

My Observer review of the book in last Sunday’s edition of the paper:

This is the latest confirmation that the “great man” theory of history continues to thrive in Silicon Valley. As such, it joins a genre that includes Walter Isaacson’s twin tomes on Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, Brad Stone’s book on Jeff Bezos, Michael Becraft’s on Bill Gates, Max Chafkin’s on Peter Thiel and Michael Lewis’s on Sam Bankman-Fried. Notable characteristics of the genre include a tendency towards founder worship, discreet hagiography and a Whiggish interpretation of the life under examination.

The great man under Witt’s microscope is the co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia, a chip design company that went from being a small but plucky purveyor of graphics processing units (GPUs) for computer gaming to its current position as the third most valuable company in the world.

Two things drove this astonishing transition. One was Jensen Huang’s intuitive appreciation that Moore’s law – the observation that computing power doubles every two years – was not going to apply for ever, and that a radically different kind of computing architecture would be needed. The other was his decision to bet the future of Nvidia on that proposition and turn the company on a dime, much as Bill Gates had done with Microsoft in the 1990s when he had realised the significance of the internet…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

And just in case you are in Trumpland and thinking to doing some research on misinformation, this note from the National Science Foundation might give you pause. The regime is not going to fund research on such timely and relevant subjects. This is real authoritarianism at work, with the cooperation of hitherto independent institutions.

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Democracy?

Majority Rules, OK?

Quote of the Day

”When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism.”

• Sinclair Lewis

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Aretha Franklin | Good to Me as I Am to You

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The Next Terrorist Attack

In a sobering essay, historian Timothy Snyder does some thinking ahead which prompted me to do some thinking about the past. His argument is that the way the Trump regime is hollowing out or controlling many of the most important parts of the American national security system makes the country more vulnerable to a terrorist attack. He then goes on to explore what might happen if such an attack were to materialise, and in particular how it might be exploited by the regime in Washington.

In just three months, the Trump people have made the unthinkable much more likely. They have created the conditions for terrorism, and thus for terror management. This is true at several levels.

Most obviously, they have debilitated the services that detect terrorist threats and prevent attacks: the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA is a foreign intelligence service. The FBI is the federal police force. The NSA, which specializes in cryptography and foreign signals intelligence, is part of the Department of Defense. Homeland Security is a cabinet-level department that amalgamates a number of functions from immigration control through disaster relief and anti-terrorism.

Overall guidance over the intelligence agencies is exercised by Tulsi Gabbard, who is known as an apologist for the now-overthrown Assad regime in Syria and the Putin regime in Russia. The director of the FBI is Kash Patel, an author of children’s books that promote conspiracy theories, and a recipient of payments from sources linked to Russia. Patel plans to run the agency from Las Vegas, where he resides in the home of a Republican megadonor. The deputy director of the FBI is Dan Bongino, a right-wing entertainer who has called the FBI “irredeemable corrupt” and indulged in conspiracy theories about its special agents…

At one point he quotes a passage from his book On Tyranny:

Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book.

What this brings to mind is the Reichstag Fire of February 1933. Here’s how Wikipedia describes what happened. It was

an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on Monday, 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, was the culprit; the Nazis attributed the fire to a group of Communist agitators, used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the German government, and induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties, and pursue a “ruthless confrontation” with the Communists. This made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.

The decree nullified key civil liberties of German citizens. It was used as the legal basis for the imprisonment of anyone considered to be opponents of the Nazis, and to suppress publications not considered “friendly” to the Nazi cause. It was one of the key steps in the establishment of a one-party Nazi state in Germany.

Now of course history doesn’t repeat itself. But then the lesson we learn from history, as some wag observed, is that we never learn from history.

You are descending into populist frustration. Thank you for continuing to hold

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Question: what are the eight most annoying words in the English language? Answer: “Your call is important to us … please hold.” But when you have turned into a gibbering wreck after 10 minutes of your valuable time have ticked away – intermittently punctuated by assurances that, while your tormentor is “experiencing high call volumes at the moment”, nevertheless your call is still important to him/her/it – you can take comfort in the thought that you are not alone. In fact, you belong to the majority of sentient beings in an industrial society like ours.

Thanks to a useful piece of market research, we now have an idea of the numbers of victims of this industrial practice – at least in the UK…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Larry Summers on what’s happened to the US

From a conversation he had with Tasha Mounk

I’m feeling like I’m part of some kind of Kafkaesque economic tragedy. I think the master narrative, the big picture here, Yascha, is that the United States is turning itself into an emerging or a submerging market. There are set patterns that we associate with mature democracies. There are set patterns that we associate with developing countries, for which some people would use the term “banana republic.”

In mature democracies, it’s institutions that dominate; in banana republics, it’s personalities that dominate. In mature democracies, it’s the rule of law that governs interactions between businesses and between business and government; in emerging markets, it’s personalities, personal connection, and loyalty. In mature democracies, the central bank and finance sits with independence relative to politics; in emerging markets, that is much more in question. In mature democracies, the goal is interaction, openness, and prospering along with the world; in immature democracies, in emerging markets, it is nationalist economic policies tied to particular interests.

The United States in a stretch of a few short months is transforming from being the United States to being something much more like Juan Perón’s Argentina–and that is being recognized by markets. It’s being recognized in the economy. It’s being recognized by people…

He’s also struck — as I am — by the number of people who are now using burner phones when going to the US when leaving or returning to the US.

It’s been the case for a long time—I imagine you’ve done it too, Yascha—that when an American businessman or journalist or government figure goes to China, they don’t bring their usual cell phone. They bring a burner phone, which they’re going to discard afterwards so that they won’t be hacked. I’ve heard a half a dozen anecdotes within the last five days about people feeling a need for burner phones when they come to the United States from other countries. I’ve heard more than one anecdote of Americans taking a burner phone with them when they leave the country so that they’re not at risk of having their regular phone searched by the American government when they return. So it’s not just a market-economic thing. We are being seen the way authoritarian countries are usually seen, and that’s not something I ever expected from the United States.

He’s also good on Harvard’s resistance to Trump’s demands.

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Long gallery

Quote of the Day

”One always learns more from ‘friendly critics’ than from uncritical friends.”

• Henry Kissinger, in a letter to Zbigniew Brzeziński

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mavis Staples & Levon Helm | “The Weight”

Link

Long Read of the Day

 How Trump is dismantling democracy

Further to Noah Smith’s warning in Wednesday’s edition, this careful essay by Christina Pagel is a revealing dissection of what Trump & Co are up to.

Pagel is a formidable researcher who is Professor of Operational Research at UCL. She’s a mathematician with a PhD in space physics who applies operational research, data analysis and mathematical modelling to topics in healthcare. I first got to know about her during the Covid pandemic, when she became a member of the Independent SAGE group of experts which provided an informed commentary on decisions and analyses made by the Government’s own group of experts.

Since Trump was elected she’s been tracking every single decision, action or step the regime has taken which have implications for the survival of democratic processes and institutions. The result is a formidable spreadsheet, which itself is an amazing — and evolving — record of what’s going on.

It’s not just a list, though. She has an analytic framework which categorises 69 of the entries in the sheet and graphically represented them in this neat Venn diagram.

Screenshot

This is important because at the moment most people are so distracted by the performative circus tricks of Trump and his enablers — which are obediently reported (and therefore highlighted) by mainstream media — that they do not realise the comprehensiveness of the underlying authoritarian project. If you want an example of a useful contribution that academia could make to help citizens understand what’s really going on, then this would be hard to beat.

So many books, so little time

Screenshot

Given my interest in parallels between the 1930s and now, Kevin Cryan suggested I have a look at this.

From the reviews on Amazon:

Timothy Ryback has written an engrossing clock-ticker of a narrative about the behind-the-scenes machinations and open politicking that vaulted Hitler and the Nazi Party to power. Nothing was inevitable about their triumph, and plenty of contemporary observers were caught off guard by it, as Ryback shows to chilling effect. The relevance to authoritarianism today is urgent and unmistakable. Takeover is a vital read for anyone who cares about the future of democracy. — Margaret Talbot, staff writer, The New Yorker

If you ever thought that history is moved only by big, sweeping forces, whether of economics or creed or nature itself, think again. In this riveting, intimate account of the final months in Hitler’s rise to power, Timothy Ryback makes it plain that simple luck, bald ambition, and fallible human hearts can be drivers of earth-changing events. — Max Rodenbeck, Berlin bureau chief, The Economist

How does a flawed republic become something entirely different? We know how the Nazi regime ended, but we think too little about how it began. This admirable account shows us how fragile and avoidable were those beginnings and helps us to reflect upon our own predicament. — Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

Timothy W. Ryback tells a grippingly important tale. His meticulous detailing of the dramatic days before Hitler assumed power make for salutary reading in our times. Will the tragic failure of civil courage and political will be repeated – Germany 1933, America 2024? It’s hard not to imagine. — Philippe Sands

Note the reviewers. I’ve just bought it.

Chart of the Day

Screenshot

From The Pragmatic Engineer:

It is easy to assume that hiring solid engineers has never been simpler because fewer businesses are posting jobs and more engineers are competing for roles. But I’ve been talking with engineering managers, directors, and heads of engineering at startups and mid-sized companies, and got a surprise: they say the opposite is true!

In fact, many report that in 2025 they find it harder to hire than ever. This seems like a contradiction worth digging into, so that’s what we’re doing today, covering:

• Full-remote hiring approaches that used to work – but now don’t. Maestro.dev is hiring backend and mobile engineers and being swamped by “fake” candidates, and applications created by AI tools. It’s a struggle to find qualified engineers and raises the risk of making the wrong hire.
• Return of in-person interviews? A scaleup had to dismiss an engineer after two weeks when it emerged they’d cheated during their remote interview by using AI tools. Could episodes like this make the return of in-person interviews inevitable, even for full-remote companies?

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Harvard to Award Trump Honorary Doctorate for Making its Approval Rating Soar

From Andy Borowitz:

CAMBRIDGE, MA (The Borowitz Report)—To show thanks for making its approval rating soar, Harvard University announced on Thursday that it would award Donald J. Trump an honorary doctorate.

The Ivy League institution, deeply despised by Americans since its founding in 1636, released a statement thanking Trump for his “game-changing service to Harvard.”

In the statement, Harvard said that it had received Trump’s biggest public relations boost since the one he bestowed on Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office.

“Donald J. Trump may not have built a wall with Mexico or annexed Canada,” the statement read. “But he has done something far more monumental: made Americans like Harvard.”

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Blossoming

Our crab-apple tree has exploded into colour. Local bee-keepers are delighted.

Quote of the Day

”A lot of people look at the movies and are amazed that so many bad movies get made. But when you work in Hollywood, you are amazed that any good movies are made.”

• Seth Rogen, on Morning Joe

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Smetana | Má Vlast, JB1:112 – 2. Vltava

Link

I still remember being swept away by this when I first heard it in a Dutch friend’s house in 1977.

Long Read of the Day

The authoritarian takeover attempt is here

There’s an eerie, resigned passivity in the air in the US. Is it because Trump’s continuing circus act (tariffs, etc) is monopolising people’s attention and preventing them from seeing the way the groundwork for authoritarian rule is being steadily laid? How much evidence do US citizens need before they realise that what they’re witnessing is a coup d’etat?

It’s not as though the evidence isn’t available if you’re paying attention. Latest piece I’ve seen is Noah Smith’s grim analysis.

First, there’s the obvious: Trump is going around arresting innocent people, and sending them to foreign torture-dungeons, apparently for the rest of their lives. Bloomberg reports that about 90% of these deportees had no criminal records in the U.S., and most have not been charged with any crime:

Some were arrested simply because they had (non-gang) tattoos. Others didn’t even have any tattoos, and were arrested for no apparent reason.

It’s not clear why the Trump administration is doing this. Perhaps it’s to scare immigrants into leaving the country by making an example of a few. Perhaps it’s to simply assert power, or to test the boundaries of what they can get away with. Maybe they’ve really convinced themselves that all of the people they arrested are gang members. Who knows. But what’s clear is that this is brutal and lawless behavior — the kind of arbitrary arrest and punishment that’s common in authoritarian regimes.

The second thing that should scare you is the lawlessness. The Trump administration insists it didn’t defy the Supreme Court, arguing that simply removing any barriers to Abrego Garcia’s return means that they’re complying with the court order to “facilitate” that return. Trump’s people have also argued that the courts have no right to interfere in the executive branch’s conduct of foreign policy. And on top of that, they’ve declared that their deal with Bukele is classified.

In practice, the administration is arguing that as soon as they arrest someone and ship them overseas, U.S. courts have no right to order their return — ever. That means that Trump could grab you, or me, or anyone else off the street and put us on a plane to El Salvador, and then argue that no U.S. court has the right to order us back, because once we’re on foreign soil it’s the domain of foreign policy. If so, it means that due process and the rule of law in America are effectively dead; the President can simply do anything to anyone, for any reason…

Smith is no hysteric, but a pretty cool observer. If people are not alarmed by what’s going on, then they’re not paying attention.

So many books, so little time

Screenshot

Struck by the parallels between the way in which tech companies started cosying up to Trump before his election, and how German industrialists began to warm to Hitler in 1932-3, I started looking for research into that period, and came on David De Jong’s book. I’ve just ordered it.

My commonplace booklet

Not much work was done on Sunday in Chateau Naughton (aka Chaos Manor). The reason? It was the final of the US Masters and Rory McIlroy started out with a comfortable lead which he then spent the round losing and regaining until he finally — in a sudden death playoff against his friend Justin Rose — won, to become one of the elite few who have ever achieved a grand slam of the four major golf tournaments — the US and British Opens, the PGA championship and the Masters.

To say that it was a rollercoaster ride is the understatement of the century, and most of us who followed it — not to mention the normally urbane, detached media commentators — felt that we had been put through a wringer by a sadist.

My friend and schoolmate Ivan Morris, who became a much better golfer than I ever was (and a perceptive observer of the sport), wrote to me on Monday morning when it was all over.

How does a simple stick and ball game subject such intensive adversity on a golf player that every known raw emotion in the human repertoire is tested to the point where he either succumbs or rises up to slay the monster?

I’m resigned to never in my lifetime seeing anything like it again.

Me too.

Linkblog

“For Trump, everything is a shakedown, the way it was for Vito Genovese, who is Trump’s model of governance. Every crisis, foreign or domestic, is assessed for its financial opportunity, and crises are manufactured for this purpose. He doesn’t have a worldview but a cognitive handicap, the incurable myopia of infinite self-interest. Money is his country; and more money is his diplomacy, a kind of one-man imperialism. (America will withdraw from the world, but not from the world’s money.) The sole objective that comes even close to money is revenge, which is the only thing that Trump will pursue even without the prospect of remuneration.”

• Leon Wieseltier via Tina Brown’s splendid blog.

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The ‘Origins’ man

Listening to a terrific podcast conversation between David Runciman and Adam Rutherford about Darwin’s The Origin of Species sent me searching through my photo archive for this — a window of an antiquarian bookseller in Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

• William Faulkner

Something that nobody in Silicon Valley gets.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Cathal Hayden and Eamonn McElholm | Farewell to Ireland

Link

Make America make again? Yeah, by manufacturing pipe dreams

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Trump’s obsession with tariffs goes back a long way. In his book Fear, about the first Trump administration, the journalist Bob Woodward told of how Gary Cohn, the president’s then chief economic adviser, repeatedly tried to explain to Trump that his “antiquated vision of roaring industrial chimneys and clanking steelworks busy with grateful blue-collar workers was no longer applicable, or indeed desirable, to an America reinventing itself in service industries and hi-tech products”. And when, exasperated, he asked the president why he held these views, Trump replied: “I just do. I’ve had these views for 30 years.”

So here we are. But instead of steel mills, Trump and his crew have now begun thinking that the Apple iPhone not only should, but could, be manufactured in the US. The other day, when the White House press secretary was asked whether Trump thought that iPhone manufacturing is the kind of technology that could move to the US, she replied: “Absolutely. He believes we have the labour, we have the workforce, we have the resources to do it.”

This is, to put it politely, baloney…

Read on

Long Read of the Day

 Living in interesting times

Charlie Stross wondering if the US is moving into a “pre-revolutionary crisis”.

Of the anti-Trump demonstrations at the weekend, I have to say that despite estimates of 3-5 million marchers, my Sunday thoughts were, “it’s going to suck to be them.” The same face recognition and IMSI tracking tech that allowed the Biden administration’s Department of Justice to track down a few thousand January 6 rioters is now better-developed, and when the generative AI bubble collapses (as seems to be already happening) there is going to be a lot of surplus data center capacity that the emergent dictatorship can deploy for crunching on that data set to identify protesters. There won’t be many trials (except possibly a handful of show trials and executions as red meat for the base if they run true to form for a dictatorship): the rule of law in the United States is already being undermined as rapidly as happened in the Third Reich, and rather than overloading the prison system they’ll just dig mass graves. (If you’re really lucky the response will be more restrained—but those marchers won’t be getting any social security checks or medicare, will be blacklisted by employers with government contracts, harassed by the police,and so on.)

But all that has changed because Trump has completely shat the economic bed. I’m not going to re-hash the reasons why everyone stopped using tariffs as an instrument of trade policy, let alone taxation, nearly a century ago. But the epic stupidity of asking ChatGPT how to use tariffs to balance a trade deficit and then accepting its incorrect answer and using them to set policy is jaw-dropping even by Trumpian standards. But what happens next?

Well, maybe what happens next is already becoming visible to a sharp-eyed observer like Charlie:

One final note: on April 20th (entirely coincidentally, the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth) a point Department of Defense and Homeland Security report is due to recommend whether the 1807 Insurrection Act can be invoked, allowing the use of the Army and National Guard to crack down on “insurrectionists”, whoever they may be—effectively a declaration of martial law. (This was part of the Project 2025 plan, incidentally.) SecDef Hegseth has already purged the top legal counsel for the Army, Air Force, and Navy to prevent them from blocking “orders that are given by a commander in chief.” Go figure where all this is going.

I love Charlie’s blog. And his intuitive understanding of what’s going on — typical of a fine sci-fi writer. He was the one who, ages ago, correctly characterised big corporations as “Slow AIs”, a metaphor I have ruthlessly borrowed for many talks since.

Apropos the title of his Substack post… *Heffers, the venerable Cambridge bookshop now owned by (I think) Waterstones, is selling some lovely offbeat greetings cards, of which this one is irresistible.

Needless to say, I’ve bought a few.

My commonplace booklet

Trump’s abrupt (possibly temporary) ‘retreat’ from his tariff impositions after the bond market reined him in, made me think of the DownFall Meme. I’m sure some jokers are already working on it in this particular context.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Cass Sunstein has a Substack. And it looks interesting (which is not surprising, given how smart he is). For a scholar of his his eminence he doesn’t sound pompous. I first thought that when I heard an anecdote he told about himself and his wife, Samantha Power. She was Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations in 2008 and whenever the UN was in session she and Cass stayed in a suite in a posh New York Hotel, where he discovered that he was known to the hotel staff as “Mr Power”. One morning, when she was at the UN, he went down to the Lobby and asked the concierge to call for a taxi for him. “Sure thing, Mr Power,” said the chap. “No, no”, said Cass, my name is Sunstein.” “Well now”, said the concierge, “that’s weird: you look just like Mr Power”.

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Jesus on the Mainline

Reminds me of Ry Cooder’s song.

Quote of the Day

”The threat of autocracy advances each day under Donald Trump, and it is a process that hides in plain sight. Some will choose to deny it, to domesticate it, to treat the abnormal as mere politics, to wish it all away in the spirit of ‘this too shall pass.’ But the threat is real and for all to see. No encryption can conceal it.”

• David Remnick, writing in The New Yorker on 7 April.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Martyn | May You Never

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Colors Of Her Coat

Absolutely fabulous essay by Scott Alexander on “semantic apocalypses”. Yeah, I know it sounds pretentious and/or incomprehensible, but trust me it isn’t. It explores how we experience wonder, meaning, and beauty in a world where technology constantly makes extraordinary things ordinary.` He starts with an extraordinary disquisition on the colour Ultramarine Blue.

I thought of ultramarine blue. But also, I thought of the first phonographic records. In 1890, hearing Enrico Caruso sing Pagliacci might be the highlight of your life, the crowning glory of a months-long trip to Italy and back. By 1910, you could hear Enrico Caruso without leaving your house. You could hear him twenty times a day if you wanted. The real thing in Naples would just be more Caruso.

And I thought of computer monitors. If you wanted to see Lippi’s Madonna and Child when it was first painted in 1490, you would have to go to Florence and convince Lorenzo de Medici to let you in his house. Now you can see a dozen Lippi paintings in a sitting by typing their names into Wikipedia – something you never do. Why would you? They’re just more Lippi.

And what about cameras? A whole industry of portraits, landscapes, cityscapes – totally destroyed. If you wanted to know what Paris looked like, no need to choose between Manet’s interpretation or Beraud’s interpretation or anyone else’s – just glance at a photo. A Frenchman with a camera could generate a hundred pictures of Paris a day, each as cold and perspectiveless as mathematical truth. The artists, defeated, retreated into Impressionism, or Cubism, or painting a canvas entirely blue and saying it represented Paris in some deeper sense. You could still draw the city true-to-life if you wanted. But it would just be more Paris.

Scott’s essay triggered all kinds of personal memories. Of the way Raymond Williams described his father as the kind of person who was always surprised when he turned a switch and the kitchen light came on. My grandfather was a peasant farmer in Connemara and he would have felt that too because electricity only reached his house late in his life. Or what I felt when I first read Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Or Max Frisch’”s observation that “Technology is the art of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.”

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

My commonplace booklet

Alex Tabarrok had a nice blog post about the suspicions that Trump’s initial tariff levels were actually generated by ChatGPT or an equivalent LLM.

Alex thought that the White House staff should have asked the AI a different question:

Suppose the US imposed tariffs on other countries in an effort to reduce bilateral trade deficits to zero using the formula for the tariff of (exports-imports)/imports. What do you estimate would be the consequences of such a policy?

So he put it to OpenAI’s o1Pro, which came up with a pretty sensible analysis and a good conclusion:

In summary, a bilateral “deficit-equalizing” tariff policy would create severe distortions, invite retaliation, and do little to fix the structural causes of US trade deficits. Empirical evidence and standard trade theory both suggest it would reduce economic efficiency and likely harm US producers and consumers alike.

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The physicist in lyrical mode

Bernardo Huberman, speaking at a conference in Cambridge in 2012.

Quote of the Day

”In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”

*  H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dick Gaughan | Wild Mountain Thyme | Transatlantic Sessions | TG4

Link

Long Read of the Day

Donald Trump is seeking to erase the United States as we know it

After Trump had been first elected in 2016 I asked American friends whether they were alarmed about it. Most of them were phlegmatic, citing examples of earlier duff presidents. Some talked about historic pendulum swings. And one asked if I was forgetting that the US was “a republic of laws”.

This led me to dig out the famous story about Ben Franklin leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and being asked by a woman “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic,” Franklin replied sharply, “if you can keep it.”

Which is what ran through my mind when I came across this essay in the Guardian by Laurence Tribe, the distinguished scholar of American constitutional law.

The seeds of our ongoing disintegration long precede Trump’s rise to power. They were planted decades ago by strategic politicians who dressed rightwing ideologies in conservative garments, permitting the darkest angels of our nature to take hold and to reach a climax in fake claims of a stolen election that led to an insurrection in our country’s capital, followed first by the Senate’s abdication of its duty in Trump’s second impeachment trial (on the bogus ground that the trial had begun too late to give the Senate jurisdiction) and next by the US supreme court’s gifting of Trump – and every future president – with a nearly absolute immunity transforming the office from one restrained by law to a source of virtually limitless power.

Rarely noted is how this frightening power to ignore federal criminal law has been conferred not only on the president but on his legions of loyal lieutenants, from public officials to private militias. Because the constitution itself gives presidents an unbridled power to pardon others – a power Trump reveled in employing to free from prison the violent insurrectionists that he had himself helped unleash – we now live under a system in which any president can license his trusted followers to commit crimes to consolidate his power and wealth, making clear that a pardon awaits them should they face federal prosecution. The upshot is that privateers in league with the president can safely ignore federal laws criminalizing corrupt evasion of rules designed to protect public health and safety while they casually usurp powers the constitution gave to Congress, moving so fast and breaking so much that not even genuinely independent federal courts can keep pace with the mayhem…

Worth a read. When the extent of Trump’s ambitions started to become this year, I began to wonder if we were looking at a revolution or a coup. The answer, I suspect, is some strange mixture of the two. Smart lad, that Ben Franklin.

Books, etc.

This arrived yesterday. Looks interesting. I’m reviewing it for the Observer later in the month.

My commonplace booklet

”People complained for years that OpenAI isn’t open, and Altman has spent almost as long loudly declaring that open source LLMs are massively dangerous and a threat to whatever the listener thinks is most important. Altman, meanwhile, spends a lot of his time manoeuvring and positioning so, as Metternich said when Talleyrand died, “What did he mean by that?”

• Benedict Evans

Reminds me of a story about the day Elvis Presley died and a Hollywood PR guy was asked for his reaction to the news. “Good career move” was his immortal reply.

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’A crowd, a host of…

“…Golden daffodils”. And I wasn’t even wandering, lonely as a cloud, just walking through a college garden.

Quote of the Day

”Some drink deeply from the river of knowledge. Others only gargle.

• Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

JJ Cale | Call Me Breeze

Link

Wow! I didn’t want it to end.

Long Read of the Day

Snookered

Rabbithole warning. I’ve just read this lovely essay by Kieran Setiya. Trouble is, it’s a meditation on a New York Review of Books essay by the Irish writer Sally Rooney. So if you embark on the first, you’re going to wind up reading the second. But here’s the thing: the journey is worth it.

Rooney is writing about the great snooker player Ronnie “The Rocket” O’Sullivan. Setiya starts with an admission — that he doesn’t have “Rooney’s verbal gifts, and a video is worth a million words, so if you want to know what he can do and you have five minutes to spare, watch this”.

It’s a video of O’Sullivan clearing a snooker table with a display of skill that is simply mind-blowing.

And of course you watch it, and you’re hooked.

Setiya concludes that

Rooney’s questions — “Why do we call O’Sullivan a savant?” and “How is what he does even possible?” — are, I think, related to one another. A picture holds us captive. We have an idea of how one would have to do what he does — by mathematical physics and physical translation — and that can’t be how he does it. So it can’t be done.

We’ve been snookered and our task is to escape the trap, a task that involves more than mere description: we have to uproot the sources of our puzzlement in misconceptions of mind and body, as Rooney indicates.

But my question at the end of all this was: ‘How on earth does Rooney do it?’ She’s a phenomenon in her own right.

Genetic data: another asset to be monetised – beware who has yours

Yesterday’s Observer column

Ever thought of having your genome sequenced? Me neither. But it seems that at least 15 million souls have gone in for it and are delighted to know that they have Viking ancestry, or discombobulated to find that they have siblings of whom they were hitherto unaware. The corporate vehicle that enabled these revelations is called 23andMe, which describes itself as a “genetics-led consumer healthcare and biotechnology company empowering a healthier future”.

Back in the day, 23andMe was one of those vaunted “unicorns” (privately held startups valued at more than $1bn), but is now facing harder times. Its share price had fallen precipitately following a data breach in October 2023 that harvested the profile and ethnicity data of 6.9 million users – including name, profile photo, birth year, location, family surnames, grandparents’ birthplaces, ethnicity estimates and mitochondrial DNA – and there have been internal disagreements between its board and the CEO and co-founder, Anne Wojcicki. So on 24 March it filed for so-called Chapter 11 proceedings in a US bankruptcy court in Missouri.

At which point the proverbial ordure hit the fan because the bankruptcy proceedings involve 23andMe seeking authorisation from the court to commence “a process to sell substantially all of its assets…

Read on

So many books, so little time

Long-term readers will remember how, during the pandemic lockdown, I was blown away by Zachary Carter’s biography of John Maynard Keynes. It’s really two biographies — one of the man himself, the other of his thinking and its impact on the world, and it’s enthralling. So imagine my delight in discovering a video of a long conversation between Paul Krugman and Carter about the book (and lots of other interesting stuff).

It’s long but (about an hour), if you’re interested in the history of ideas, unfailingly interesting.

Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve) wrote a fine review of the Carter book, alongside Cheryl Misak’s biography of Frank Ramsey, one of the few humans Keynes regarded as a genius.

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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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