Wednesday 27 September, 2023

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Magic toadstools

By the banks of the river Corrib in Mayo. And no, I didn’t pick them.

Quote of the Day

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.”

  • Stephen King

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jelly Roll Morton | Smoke House Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Confessions of a Viral AI Writer

Vauhina Vara wrote a story with the assistance of ChatGPT which went viral on the Web. She’s written a thoughtful essay in Wired on whether Generative AI’s are good for writers — or indeed for writing itself.

When the essay, called “Ghosts,” came out in The Believer in the summer of 2021, it quickly went viral. I started hearing from others who had lost loved ones and felt that the piece captured grief better than anything they’d ever read. I waited for the backlash, expecting people to criticize the publication of an AI-assisted piece of writing. It never came. Instead the essay was adapted for This American Life and anthologized in Best American Essays. It was better received, by far, than anything else I’d ever written.

I thought I should feel proud, and to an extent I did. But I worried that “Ghosts” would be interpreted as my stake in the ground, and that people would use it to make a case for AI-produced literature.

And soon, that happened…

It’s a thoughtful, thought-provoking piece. And one passage particularly resonated with me,

ChatGPT’s voice is polite, predictable, inoffensive, upbeat. Great characters, on the other hand, aren’t polite; great plots aren’t predictable; great style isn’t inoffensive; and great endings aren’t upbeat.

Yep.

Books, etc.

A must-read (for me, anyway).

From the blurb:

Mark Weiser (1952–99), the first chief technology officer at Xerox PARC and the so-called “father of ubiquitous computing.” But Weiser, who died young at age 46 in 1999, would be heartbroken if he had lived to see the ways we use technology today. As John Tinnell shows in this thought-provoking narrative, Weiser was an outlier in Silicon Valley. A computer scientist whose first love was philosophy, he relished debates about the machine’s ultimate purpose. Good technology, Weiser argued, should not mine our experiences for saleable data or demand our attention; rather, it should quietly boost our intuition as we move through the world.

My commonplace booklet

 Samuel Johnson, opsimath

Henry Oliver’s affectionate tribute to the first great lexicographer.

He is mostly remembered because of Boswell’s biography, which details all sorts of weird and wonderful things about him, like the fact that he always kept his orange peel to put in his shoes, or his strange behaviour, twitching and rolling around and muttering, like he had tourettes. People who met him found his intelligence literally unbelievable after they had observed his ‘strange antic gestures’. He also had terrible eyesight and read with the book very close to his face, so close to the candle he scorched his wig. His friend Thrale worried he would set himself on fire.

But he ought to be remembered for his writing and his strong minded independence. He was an autodidact, and a powerful example of the Fitzgerald Rule. Who would have seen the potential in that strange man wandering the streets with Richard Savage, a well known liar and fraud? Only the people who could recognise that he was an opsimath: a lifelong learner and a late bloomer.

He was. Which is why I’ve always admired him and have a copy of his Dictionary on my shelves.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

 20 String Harp Guitar Cover of Neil Young’s ‘Harvest Moon’

Link

And you thought guitars only had 12 strings at most? Me too.

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Monday 25 September, 2023

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Bird’s-eye view

The view from the Conor Pass

Tralee Bay, seen from the top of the Pass in Co. Kerry, one of my favourite roads.

Quote of the Day

“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.”

  • Niels Bohr

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dolly Parton | 9 To 5

Link

I dug this out after reading a column by Simon Kuper in the Financial Times about the obtuse determination of certain corporate executives to stop people WFH.

I’ve always admired Dolly as the epitomé of feisty insouciance. And so did my fellow-countryman, Terry Wogan of blessed memory. Once, in a conversation about transubstantiation, when he was asked what he would like come to back as in another life. His reply: “Dolly Parton’s accordion.”

Long Read of the Day

News as Objects: The Materiality of handwritten newsletters

Yeah, I know this isn’t a handwritten newsletter and maybe it isn’t all that ‘newsy’, but this lovely essay by Sara Mansutti shows that the genre has a rich and interesting history.

Sample:

Sometimes the newsletters report incidents that delayed or stopped their journey, giving a glimpse of how much the materiality of these sheets of paper mattered in the diffusion of the news. Some documents narrate about couriers fallen in rivers with their post-bags whose documents, if retrieved, became illegible due to the ink dissolving. In other cases, the interference with the mail delivery was a political tactic. In 1571 news from Paris warned that the courier of London directed to Paris had been robbed and his mail had been brought to the English court by order of Queen Elizabeth the First.

But the biggest obstacle to the supply of news was the suspicion of plague and the fear of contagion. Letters and newsletters reached their destinations with more difficulty during the epidemics than in wartime, because couriers coming from plague-infested places were forbidden to enter into the safe cities or to pass through some regions. The newsletters were believed to be vectors of infection just like any other physical object and rules were introduced to reduce the contagion caused by them. An avviso from Venice, written in 1564, warned that the letters from Lyon should no longer be tied with twine, because of an outbreak of plague there: the avviso doesn’t say more, but we can infer that twine was believed to convey the disease.

Do read it. And at least this particular newsletter is unlikely to pass on Covid.

When it comes to creative thinking, it’s clear that AI systems mean business

Yesterday’s Observer column on how corporate executives will view Generative AI.

(Spoiler alert: it’s not all good news.)

In all the frenzied discourse about large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 there is one point on which everyone seems to agree: these models are essentially stochastic parrots – namely, machines that are good at generating convincing sentences, but do not actually understand the meaning of the language they are processing. They have somehow “read” (that is, ingested) everything ever published in machine-readable form and create sentences word by word, at each point making a statistical guess of “what one might expect someone to write after seeing what people have written on billions of webpages, etc”. That’s it!

Ever since ChatGPT arrived last November, people have been astonished by the capabilities of these parrots – how humanlike they seem to be and so on. But consolation was drawn initially from the thought that since the models were drawing only on what already resided in their capacious memories, then they couldn’t be genuinely original: they would just regurgitate the conventional wisdom embedded in their training data. That comforting thought didn’t last long, though, as experimenters kept finding startling and unpredictable behaviours of LLMs – facets now labelled “emergent abilities”.

From the beginning, many people have used LLMs as aids to brainstorming…

Do read on.

My commonplace booklet

95% of NFTs now totally worthless, say researchers

From The Register…

For those who don’t recall, NFTs are entries on a blockchain, typically the Ethereum blockchain, that represent ownership of assets – usually a digital asset like an image file or in-game item, but NFTs could also be tied to physical items.

Back in their 2021-22 heyday, collectors were paying millions for NFTs, but crypto gambling website dappGambl now says that most are worthless.

After looking at 73,257 NFT collections (a collection can contain any number of NFTs that can each be bought and sold) based on data from CoinMarketCap and NFTScan, dappGambl said it determined that 69,795 of those collections have a market cap of 0 Ether.

”This statistic effectively means that 95 percent of people holding NFT collections are currently holding onto worthless investments,” dappGambl said in its report. “Having looked into those figures, we would estimate that 95 percent to include over 23 million people whose investments are now worthless.”

Aw, shucks.

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Friday 22 September, 2023

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Down the lane…

Walking back from a college dinner the other evening, I turned into Little St Mary’s Lane, one of my favourite streets — and one I often strolled down when I was a graduate student on my (leisurely) way to the Lab. Stephen Hawking once lived in one of the houses, as did the great Irish historian, Joe Lee, when he was a Fellow of Peterhouse in the late 1960s.

Quote of the Day

“Nobody ever notices the host at a party, until the drink runs out”

  • Anthony Gilbert

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Elvis Costello sings Penny Lane for Paul McCartney at the White House.

Link

I have a soft spot for Liverpool ever since my daughter went to university there and I got to know the city.

Long Read of the Day

AI and Leviathan: Part 1

This is the first of three remarkable essays by Sam Hammond pondering the challenges posed by the flowering of machine-learning into Generative AI. If you want to get a sense of where we might be heading, these essays are worth reading.

But just for now, here’s how the first one in the series opens.

Imagine a breakthrough happened and suddenly everyone had access to cheap, x-ray style glasses. The glasses look like normal, everyday glasses, but come with a dial setting that lets you see through walls, people’s clothing, etc. It somehow works on old photos and video recordings too.

On one level, this would be amazing. You might notice the mysterious lump on your friend’s thyroid, say, catching their cancer early and saving them untold medical costs. But in the immediate term, universal and near-undetectable access to the glasses (or contact lenses, if you prefer) would be a security and privacy disaster. No one’s home or device security was compromised per se. Rather, it’s more like a society designed around the visible light spectrum became maladapted overnight.

There are three canonical ways that society could respond:

Cultural evolution: we embrace nudism and a variety of new, post-privacy norms;

Mitigation and adaptation: we start wearing lead underwear and scramble to retrofit our homes, office buildings, and locker rooms with impenetrable walls;

Regulation and enforcement: we ban or tightly regulate the technology and build an x-ray Leviathan for inspecting people’s glasses, punishing violators, etc.

The option where everyone spontaneously coordinates to never use the glasses, or to only use them for a subset of pro-social purposes, is unstable. Even if you’re a voyeur and access to the glasses benefits you personally, there’s an underlying prisoner’s dilemma, and so we quickly shift to the equilibrium where everyone has the glasses even if we all preferred the world without them.

The glasses are a metaphor for Artificial Intelligence.

See what I mean? Read on.

Books, etc.

John McPhee is the greatest long-form non-fiction writer alive IMO. Period. And he’s just published his 32nd book, Tabula Rasa, which I downloaded last night and started reading — until I suddenly realised that staying up all night is not a great idea.

Noah Rawlings’s review in the LA Review of Books might give you an idea of why I nearly didn’t sleep.

Writers’ lives are littered with unrealized projects. Some more than others. John McPhee—the New Yorker staff writer who, over his 60-year career at that magazine, redefined what is today known as “creative nonfiction”—does not strike one as the type to leave things undone. He has more published books than most writers have inchoate inklings: books on oranges, tennis, canoes, geology, the Swiss Armed Forces, the US Merchant Marine. We’re talking 31. We are not talking 31 formulaic variations on a theme, not 31 books by Louis L’Amour or Clive Cussler (with all due respect), but 31 books that are, with few exceptions, masterworks of literary journalism. Greatness is not measured by word count, but McPhee’s output doubles that of nonfiction giants like Gay Talese or Joan Didion or Tom Wolfe. To produce so much good work requires rare qualities: staggering energy, expansive interests, exceptional endurance. And a long life.

McPhee is now 92…

My commonplace booklet

I’m looking forward to seeing the Lee Miller biopic (in which Kate Winslet plays Miller) when it comes out in December. In the meantime interesting fragments and references are appearing. Can’t remember where I saw this, but it shows how photographer Annie Leibovitz has recreated with Winslet the famous picture of Miller in Hitler’s bath when she and her fellow-photographer David Scherman got into the Führer’s apartment in Munich as the war ended. Note the Rolleiflex on the tripod. You have to get these things right.

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Wednesday 20 September, 2023

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Vanishing point

Cycling in to College for breakfast the other day, I found myself brooding on ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’ and then saw this scene. And fell to thinking about how much I like Autumn, and how September, not January, is when the new year begins for me. Which is probably a legacy of a life spent working in universities, I guess.

Quote of the Day

”There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary hack.”

  • Dave Winer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Dirty Mac | Yer Blues

Link

Wow! John Lennon on vocals, Eric Clapton on guitar, Mitch Mitchell on drums, Keith Richards on bass and Yoko Ono on blanket.

Long Read of the Day

Just for Fun

Lovely essay by Rebecca Baumgartner on people’s reaction to the news that she’s learning German — for fun! Which is really a reflection on the way our neoliberal-driven society is disdainful of hobbies, of things we do just because we enjoy doing them.

I was struck by this passage.

Beneath the self-deprecating label of “hobby” lives a whole array of benefits that we (ironically) don’t have the words to talk about. We don’t have a way of talking about fulfillment and enrichment, or flow and connectedness, without sounding like a snob or a hippie.

So many of the unpaid things I do fall into this category. These things make it possible to stay hopeful. They keep me flexible. They give me something to talk about – a virtue not to be underestimated for those who hate small talk. They (hopefully) make me a more interesting person to know. They make me feel connected to something. They help me stay awake, literally and metaphorically. They keep me engaged when I feel myself languishing. They take me out of my competent adult role and provide me with an invigorating dose of failure.

Yep. You could say that applies to my photography habit — as an incessant (and usually futile) quest for that one perfect picture. (My only satisfaction is that Derek Parfit had it worse; but at least he was also a great philosopher.) Or my enjoyment of crosswords — the pathetic satisfaction of eventually realising, for example, that the solution to “previous tube made one lose patience” (3,4,5) is “the last straw”.

Books, etc.

 Elon Musk: pillock, genius, or both?

My Observer review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of the SpaceX and Tesla guy.

Sample:

Much of Musk’s industrial success comes from his persistent attention to engineering detail and willingness to overturn practices that had congealed into holy writ in these industries. He is a great believer in “vertical integration” – making things yourself rather than outsourcing to others – for example. So Tesla writes all its own software whereas other car manufacturers outsource theirs to Silicon Valley giants. Musk believes that there must be no barriers between design and manufacturing: designers’ desks should be physically close to the production line. He believes that in redesigning many industrial processes automation is the last thing you should do, not the first. So just as Henry Ford is remembered not so much for the Model T but for the production line that made it, Musk will probably be celebrated for his obsession with “the machine that builds the machine”.

There is, however, a dark side to this industrial creativity. The term that comes continually to mind from reading Isaacson’s account of how Musk runs his pioneering enterprises is “brutal”. A fanatical worker himself, he doesn’t give a toss about employees’ work-life balance. He believes that if people want to prioritise their comfort and leisure they should leave his employment. He emails employees reminding them that “a maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle”. Isaacson’s study of Musk’s management style is filled with sudden dismissals, capricious decision-making and apparently sociopathic indifference to the feelings of other people. As one of his oldest friends from university put it: you can work with him or be his friend, but not both…

Footnote: It’s hard to get it right when writing about Musk. There’s a forcefield around him that continually shapes people’s views about him into single dimensions. (Something similar applied to Steve Jobs.) Binary categorisation: Pillock or Genius. And so I expected criticism when I decided just to focus on what Isaacson’s (diligent) research tells us about the things that Musk has built, rather than delving into his wacky, borderline-crazy behaviours. I expect there has been lots of criticisms of that approach, and the usual accusations of having become a devil-worshipper, etc.

But then I remembered that trying to keep a focus on ‘the work’ has always been a challenge. Many distinguished people in history — artists as well as inventors and industrialists — have been flawed and, on occasion, monstrous human beings. Think of Evelyn Waugh, Phillip Larkin, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Céline, to name just five with whom I am familiar. Somehow in the Humanities, though, we succeed in drawing a line between the work and the author. Or used to, anyway. Maybe in an age obsessed with ‘cancellation’ it’ll be more difficult.

My commonplace booklet

XKCD

Jonathan Peelle’s response:

Circular cats, contd.

Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) writes…

I took advantage of this convenient sleeping in circles habit when one of my great nieces wanted a cat cake for her birthday….

Linkblog

 Not all USB-C cables are created equal.

Useful warning by Brian X. Chen in the NYT.

Key takeaway: don’t charge your device using cables you buy in, say, a filling station. These cables are no longer just dumb pipes, so you need the right one for a particular job.

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Monday 18 September, 2023

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On reflection…

This is an enigmatic image. We were walking on the banks of the river Corrib in Cong and came on a large, placid pool, and I saw the overhanging branches of a tree reflected in the water. So I pressed the shutter. But ever since, when I happen upon the image I find myself doing a double-take, to try and orient myself. Which way is up?

Quote of the Day

“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

  • J. K. Galbraith, letter to JFK, 1962.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

George Butterworth | English Idyll 2

Link

I stumbled on this the other day and was enchanted by it. I knew nothing of Butterworth, so headed to his Wikipedia page. Like many of his generation, he died on the Somme in 1916.

Long Read of the Day

Searching for a Breakup

From CNN:

US prosecutors opened a landmark antitrust trial against Google on Tuesday with sweeping allegations that for years the company intentionally stifled competition challenging its massive search engine, accusing the tech giant of spending billions to operate an illegal monopoly that has harmed every computer and mobile device user in the United States.

In opening remarks before a federal judge in Washington, lawyers for the Justice Department alleged that Google’s negotiation of exclusive contracts with wireless carriers and phone makers helped cement its dominant position in violation of US antitrust law.

This looks like being a big deal. It’s the biggest case since the DoJ took on Microsoft in the 1990s. Scott Galloway has a terrific piece helpfully putting it in its proper context.

Google doesn’t dominate computing today to the extent Microsoft did in 1998. Nobody does, as “computing” is a much broader space. But its control of search — the most common entry point to the internet — is a nearly pitch-perfect echo of Microsoft circa 2001. Similarly, a quarter century after its founding, Google has a more than 90% market share, a sclerotic artifact of market power vs. a function of innovation. Its market dominance creates a virtuous cycle of increasing power. An estimated 9 billion Google searches occur every day, vs. 400 million for Bing. The massive delta of data and reach makes for a better product: Click-through rates for ads on Google are 30% greater than on Bing. More usage = more data = more advertising, and so on. Today, Google’s parent Alphabet is worth $1.75 trillion and employs 175,000 people.

Most people probably switch off when they hear the word ‘antitrust’. But this is an important case, not just for the tech industry but for liberal democracy generally. As the legal scholar Tim Wu puts it, the notion that power should be limited so that no person or institution can enjoy unaccountable influence is at the very root of a democracy.

The trouble is that liberal democracies have spent half a century building governance and regulatory systems which have allowed the emergence of uncontrolled monopolies not just in tech but in many other industries. If this is not reversed then we’re in deep trouble.

Which is why Scott’s piece is worth your time.

(For those who — like me — have to pay more attention to this, Matt Stoller has set up a free Substack newsletter which will report daily from the trial.)

The EU cable guys have tied down Apple, yet big tech is still bossing the Tories

Yesterday’s Observer column…

Sometimes, when Apple launches a new device (or even an upgrade of an existing one), it’s tempting to think that the accompanying blurb is a satirical spoof. On Tuesday, the day the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus were launched in California, for example, it burbled that both phones featured “industry-first colour-infused back glass with a stunning, textured matt finish and a new contoured edge on the aluminium enclosure. Both models feature the dynamic island which displays outputs and alerts and an advanced camera system designed to help users take fantastic photos of everyday moments in their lives. A powerful 48 megapixel main camera enables super-high-resolution photos and a new 2x telephoto option to give users a total of three optical zoom levels – like having a third camera. The iPhone 15 lineup also introduces the next generation of portraits, making it easier to capture portraits with great detail and low-light performance.”

Oh, and by the way, it also has a USB-C charging port…

Read on.

If you’re really interested in the iPhone launch, then Jon Gruber’s long analysis is just the thing.

Nonsense on stilts

The Financial Times is a fine newspaper, but it has one intensely annoying appendage — a glossy colour magazine that accompanies the paper’s weekend edition and is aimed directly at the 0.01% . It was originally called “How To Spend It”, but this was eventually deemed to be too crass and so it’s now sneakily packaged as “HTSI”.

This weekend’s edition was beyond parody. It was largely taken up by umpteen two-page spreads of a pair of emaciated lads poncing about the streets of Paris dressed like expensive tramps, but what really took the biscuit was this little ‘feature’ for those heading for university in a week or two.

Among the essential items listed were:

  • A suede backpack: £2,440
  • A Lange & Sohne ‘Jumping Second’ wristwatch: £90,000
  • A Paul Smith woollen sweater: £795
  • A Burberry wool hot-water bottle: £290
  • A Herno nylon trench coat: £1,295
  • A 1953 ‘Vintage Reversivel’ armchair by Carlo Hauner & Martin Eisler: 48,000 Euros.

Two questions: who dreamed up this page? And what were they smoking at the time?

My commonplace booklet

Circular cats (cont.)

My good friend Miranda McArthur (Whom God Preserve), a talented painter, sent me this lovely pastel she did of her sister-in-law’s cat, who favoured a clockwise orientation!

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

On long reads

“Senior hack Adam Macqueen, who has worked for the Eye since 1997, thinks that the ‘long read’ could do with a rebrand: “‘I’ll Read That Later’ might be a better title in a lot of cases – I’d put money on an awful lot of them sitting on open tabs for weeks or months like those apples people buy with their lunch with the best of intentions and then leave on their desks to go all wrinkly and finally get thrown away. Obviously, there are some fantastic examples of the genre, but mostly I think if stories can’t be told short they’re quite often probably not stories.”

From an interesting piece in Press Gazetteby Charles Baker.

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Friday 15 September, 2023

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Cats circular

Zoombini and Tilly, dozing in anti-clockwise formation.

My post about the passing of Tilly, the second of our brace of beautiful cats, brought a wonderful, heart-warming flood of emails from readers, which we deeply appreciated. On Wednesday evening we held a wake for her (an old Irish tradition, normally reserved for mere humans rather than superior beings like cats) and buried her in the garden alongside her sister, Zoombini, who died on June 10 last year. After we’d done that, I read all of the emails aloud to the assembled company. It seemed a fitting tribute to two felines who never realised how famous they were.

The picture above was inspired by the number of messages which revealed that our cats’ penchant for sleeping in the best circles was much more common than I had realised.

For me, though, the consoling takeaway from losing these two remarkable animals is discovering how many other people also understand the way pets reach parts of the human psyche that nothing else touches.

Quote of the Day

“When novel ideas succeed, they decay into stale clichés.”

  • Henry Farrell and Abe Newman

(I’m reminded of David Runciman’s observation that “clichés are where the truth goes to die”.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Brothers In Arms | Berlin 2007

Link

Triggered by reading a piece from the front lines in Ukraine.

Long Read of the Day

The Transformative, alarming power of Gene Editing

In his recent book, The Coming Wave, Mustafa Suleyman provided a vivid picture of two major technological forces that are bearing down on humanity. One is the so-called ‘AI’ wave; the other is genetic engineering. Crudely put, we humans have devised a powerful technology for messing with (or perhaps augmenting) our brains, plus another one (derived from CRISPR) for messing with our biology. As Edmund Leach, the great anthropologist, might have put it, humans are in the process of becoming gods: and isn’t it time that we thought hard about the responsibilities that accompany that role?

As a tech insider (Suleyman was a co-founder of DeepMind), his account of the potential of AI was predictably good. (I reviewed it for the Observer.) But I had to take his account of the threat/promise of gene-editing on trust, because I know little about the subject.

All of which is a roundabout way of explaining why I found this long, long New Yorker essay by Dana Goodyear so useful. If you read nothing else this weekend, set aside the time to read it.

Books, etc.

Errol Morris’s Believing is Seeing is one of the most interesting books on photography that I’ve read. In it, the distinguished (Oscar-winning) documentary film-maker analyses a number of celebrated photographs that have been taken to represent the truth about something. The book consists of four extensive essays, each of which presents the reader with a puzzle and then examines the relationship between the photographs and the reality they supposedly record.

Morris starts with two photographs taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War, and goes on to examine the famous “Hooded man” photograph in Abu Ghraib during the Iraq war, pictures by WPA photographers during the Great Depression and a photograph from the American Civil War. In each case things are not what they seem, and Morris proceeds through an investigation in his characteristic laid-back style. The basic message — captured in the book’s title — is that (as the philosopher Karl Popper famously observed in a different context) “all observation is drenched in theory”. Or, more prosaically, we see in pictures what we’re looking for.

For a nice illustration of Morris’s inimitable style take five minutes to watch this short.

My commonplace booklet

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Wednesday 13 September, 2013

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Tilly RIP

We had to bid farewell to our beloved cat Tilly last night. She was 19.5 years old, so you could say she had a good innings. But she had been a lifelong companion for two of my children and a constant background to our lives. She often gave me disapproving looks, so I was pleased to dig up this picture, in which she is merely saying “You cannot be serious!”

She also had the ability to curl herself up into an almost-perfect circle.

Quote of the Day

”More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”

  • St Theresa of Ávila

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Geshwin | Rhapsody in Blue | Khatia Buniatishvili

Link

It’s 17 minutes long, but worth every minute.

Long Read of the Day

The Political Economy of Technology

Terrific review essay on Project Syndicate by Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve) on Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson’s book, Power and Progress. It’s a terrific book, but it’s also a long read. Bill has done a consummate job of summarising many of its key arguments and adding value as he goes.

Highly recommended. But set aside some time for it.

My commonplace booklet

50 years ago: Henry Kissinger and the death of democracy in Chile

Robert Reich remembers the other 9/11 anniversary that occurred on Monday.

As Chile marks the 50th anniversary tomorrow of the coup that brought strongman Augusto Pinochet to power for almost 17 years — toppling Chile’s democratically elected socialist government and resulting in the murders and “disappearances” of thousands of Pinochet’s political opponents — it’s important to recall the central role played by Richard Nixon and Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, in this atrocity.

Kissinger — now 100 years old, and who in my humble opinion should be considered a war criminal — urged Nixon to overthrow Chile’s democratically elected government of Salvador Allende because Allende’s “‘model’ effect can be insidious,” according to declassified documents posted by the U.S. National Security Archive.

On September 12, 1970, eight days after Allende’s election, Kissinger initiated discussion on the telephone with CIA Director Richard Helms about a preemptive coup in Chile. “We will not let Chile go down the drain,” Kissinger declared. “I am with you,” Helms responded. Three days later, Nixon, in a 15-minute meeting that included Kissinger, ordered the CIA to “make the Chilean economy scream,” and named Kissinger as the supervisor of the covert efforts to keep Allende from being inaugurated…

An awful lot more people died in Chile that year (and in succeeding years) than in the attack in New York.

I’m reminded of Tom Lehrer’s observation that “Satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Errata

On Monday I claimed that Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk ran to 360 pages. That was a typo — it’s 670 pages long. I know, because I’ve read the whole damn thing.

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Monday 11 September, 2023

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Cats

Guardians of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

  • Amos Tversky in The Undoing Project

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mary Black | Sonny

Link

Something lovely I found while investigating a suggestion by Andrew Brown (Whom God Preserve)

Long Read of the Day

How Big Tech Got So Damn Big

A characteristically vivid essay in Wired by Cory Doctorow based on his new book.

Somehow, these new giants—the companies that have, in the words of New Zealand software developer Tom Eastman, transformed the internet into “a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four”—interrupted that cycle of “disruption.” They didn’t just get big, they stayed big, and then they got bigger.

How did these tech companies succeed in maintaining the dominance that so many of their predecessors failed to attain? Was it their vision? Was it their leadership?

Nope.

Do read it.

Nvidia’s picks and shovels

Yesterday’s Observer column…

It’s not often that the jaws of Wall Street analysts drop to the floor but late last month it happened: Nvidia, a company that makes computer chips, issued sales figures that blew the street’s collective mind. It had pulled in $13.5bn in revenue in the last quarter, which was at least $2bn more than the aforementioned financial geniuses had predicted. Suddenly, the surge in the company’s share price in May that had turned it into a trillion-dollar company made sense.

Well, up to a point, anyway. But how had a company that since 1998 – when it released the revolutionary Riva TNT video and graphics accelerator chip – had been the lodestone of gamers become worth a trillion dollars, almost overnight? The answer, oddly enough, can be found in the folk wisdom that emerged in the California gold rush of the mid-19th century, when it became clear that while few prospectors made fortunes panning for gold, the suppliers who sold them picks and shovels prospered nicely.

We’re now in another gold rush – this time centred on artificial intelligence (AI) – and Nvidia’s A100 and H100 graphical processing units (GPUs) are the picks and shovels…

Read on

Books, etc.

I’m reading it, all 370 pages of it, so you don’t have to. My review will be in next Sunday’s Observer.

My commonplace booklet

The Rolling Stones’s new album

From Tortoise media…

Believe it or not kids, the Stones, all now in their ninth decade, were once very good. Brilliant in fact. They mattered. Exile on Main Street, released in 1972 completed a decade of dazzling work that actually gave The Beatles (not to mention The Kinks and The Who) a run for their money. And their legendary 1969-1972 tours justly earned them the title of The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World, a crown they still, unjustly, claim today.

Now the once genuinely edgy Stones are a mini-corporation with an admittedly brilliant singer/executive chairman anxious for new product: ticket sales and of course merch for their very own outlet in Carnaby Street….

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

How savvy trillion-dollar chipmaker Nvidia is powering the AI goldrush

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Today’s Observer column…

It’s not often that the jaws of Wall Street analysts drop to the floor but late last month it happened: Nvidia, a company that makes computer chips, issued sales figures that blew the street’s collective mind. It had pulled in $13.5bn in revenue in the last quarter, which was at least $2bn more than the aforementioned financial geniuses had predicted. Suddenly, the surge in the company’s share price in May that had turned it into a trillion-dollar company made sense.

Well, up to a point, anyway. But how had a company that since 1998 – when it released the revolutionary Riva TNT video and graphics accelerator chip – had been the lodestone of gamers become worth a trillion dollars, almost overnight? The answer, oddly enough, can be found in the folk wisdom that emerged in the California gold rush of the mid-19th century, when it became clear that while few prospectors made fortunes panning for gold, the suppliers who sold them picks and shovels prospered nicely.

We’re now in another gold rush – this time centred on artificial intelligence (AI) – and Nvidia’s A100 and H100 graphical processing units (GPUs) are the picks and shovels…

Read on

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not [subscribe]? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Friday 8 September, 2023

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Here comes the Sun

My favourite flower. And one of a bunch grown from last year’s seeds too.

Quote of the Day

”He shunned the Press, as as far as he was able, and doled out quotes like a miser giving alms. Hurrying once through an airport, he was hailed by a reporter who asked if he might ‘have a word’. Without breaking stride, Ramsey obliged him: ‘Goodbye’.”

  • Anthony Quinn, reviewing Duncan Hamilton’s biography of Alf Ramsey in the Observer.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Victor Borge | Clair de Lune

Link

And you thought he was just a comedian? So did I.

Long Read of the Day

How Misreading Adam Smith Helped Spawn Deaths of Despair

An edited transcript in the Boston Review of a terrific lecture by the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton at the Tercentenary celebrations of Adam Smith in Edinburgh last June. It’s an impressive lecture that covers a lot of ground. The basic theme is the way some of Adam Smith’s ideas were perversely distorted by an influential group of economists in the University of Chicago and then used to justify introducing libertarian ideas and policies into areas like healthcare where they have had disastrous consequences.

Here’s a sample (informed by the book  Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Deaton and his wife, Anne Case.)

In 1995 the painkiller OxyContin, manufactured by Purdue Pharmaceutical, a private company owned by the Sackler family, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). OxyContin is an opioid; think of it as a half-strength dose of heroin in pill form with an FDA label of approval—effective for pain relief, and highly addictive. Traditionally, doctors in the United States did not prescribe opiates, even for terminally ill cancer patients—unlike in Britain—but they were persuaded by relentless marketing campaigns and a good deal of misdirection that OxyContin was safe for chronic pain. Chronic pain had been on the rise in the United States for some time, and Purdue and their distributors targeted communities where pain was prevalent: a typical example is a company coal town in West Virginia where the company and the coal had recently vanished. Overdose deaths began to rise soon afterwards. By 2012 enough opioid prescriptions were being written for every American adult to have a month’s supply. In time, physicians began to realize what they had done and cut back on prescriptions. Or at least most did; a few turned themselves into drug dealers and operated pill mills, selling pills for money or, in some cases, for sex. Many of those doctors are now in jail. (Barbara Kingsolver’s recent Demon Copperhead, set in southwest Virginia, is a fictionalized account of the social devastation, especially among children and young people.)

In 2010 Purdue reformulated Oxycontin to make it harder to abuse, and around the same time the docs pulled back, but by then a large population of people had become addicted to the drugs, and when prescribers denied them pills, black market suppliers flooded the illicit market with cheap heroin and fentanyl, which is more than thirty times stronger than heroin. Sometimes dealers even met disappointed patients outside pain clinics. The epidemic of addiction and death that had been sparked by pharma companies in search of profit was enabled by some members of Congress, who, as Case and I describe in detail in our book, changed the law to make life easier for distributors and shut down investigations by the Drug Enforcement Agency. None of these congressional representatives was punished by voters.

He also adds an interesting footnote for readers on this side of the Pond:

Queen Elizabeth, awarded knighthoods in the 1990s to Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, owners of Purdue Pharma, not for the human destruction they had wrought in the United States but for their philanthropy in Britain, much of which involved what was later called “art-washing.” Many institutions are still trying to extricate themselves from Sackler money, including, most recently, Oxford University in the UK and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine who produced an “authoritative” report that, by several accounts, exaggerated the extent of pain in the United States, and thus the need for OxyContin.

There’s lots more in what amounts to an insightful account of how democracies have got into the mess they’re currently in.

Books, etc.

Jeff Jarvis is ‘retiring’ from CUNY. Note the quote marks. He’s not really the retiring sort. He’s written a nice valedictory piece, though. And I’ve reviewed his new book in the British Journalism Review. You can find a copy of the review here if you’re interested.

My commonplace booklet

Dickens on Effective Altruism

Robert Cottrell has been listening to Dickens…

Of the many sub-plots in Bleak House, I am particularly taken by Dickens’s prescient critique of Effective Altruism through the person of Mrs Jellyby, a middle-class Londoner who is so preoccupied with raising money for missions to Africa that she has no time to spare for her own children. The unwashed little Jellybys fall downstairs, dress in rags, and weep with misery, while their mother, indifferent to what is going on in front of her eyes, devotes her energies to the promotion of grand projects for improving the future well-being of distant peoples. I find it hard not to think of San Francisco as Mrs Jellyby’s house writ large.

Errata

Seems I may have been misinformed when I claimed the other day that the Lone Ranger’s buddy Tonto may not have been as dismissive of his boss as I had claimed. (His invariable reply to the Ranger was “Kemo Sabay” which a friend of mine claimed meant “horseshit” in some indigenous language or other.)

Frank Miller pointed me to Wikipedia, which maintains that:

Jim Jewell, director of The Lone Ranger from 1933 to 1939, took the phrase from Kamp Kee-Mo Sah-Bee, a boys’ camp on Mullett Lake in Michigan, established by Charles W. Yeager (Jewell’s father-in-law) in 1916. Yeager himself probably took the term from Ernest Thompson Seton, one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America, who had given the meaning “scout runner” to Kee-mo-sah’-bee in his 1912 book The Book of Woodcraft and Indian Lore.

Drat and double-drat! I still prefer “horseshit”, though. Much more appropriate in the comic context.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!