Monday 2 March, 2026

Posted on March 2, 2026 by jjn1

On the road

Walking along this road in the Peak District on Saturday I was stopped in my tracks by a Skylark’s song. Which explains today’s Musical alternative

Quote of the Day

”I am lucky to have participated in conversations about the future of AI with executives and builders at frontier labs, economists at AI conferences, AI investors, and other bigwigs at off-the-record dinners where important truths can theoretically be bandied about without risk. And if I had to pick three words to summarize this collective expert view of the future, I could not in a million years, or with a trillion tokens, find three words more suitable than these: Nobody knows anything.”

Derek Thompson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ralph Vaughan Williams | The Lark Ascending | Iona Brown & Neville Marriner | Academy of St Martin in the Fields.

Link

It was inspired by an 1881 poem of the same title by George Meredith. Having read it a couple of times, I think the music wins by a mile.

Long Read of the Day

AI vs. the Pentagon

I guess that most people will regard what’s going on between the American Secretary for War (née Defense) and the AI firm Anthropic is petty arcane. But it’s actually really important and worrying, and I was looking for someone who could put it in a context that would make it understandable, and I found this long blog post by Jasmine Sun which admirably fits the bill.

Who would win in a fight: an alcoholic Fox host with a fetish for extrajudicial airstrikes, or a neurotic Italian-American physicist running an AI company worth $380 billion dollars?

I’ll start with a TL;DR of everything that’s happened. The whole thing plays out like a TV thriller, and I don’t blame anyone not keeping up. (Fellow situation monitorers, feel free to skip ahead to the analysis if you like.)

In July last year, Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the Pentagon to provide access to Claude. Until recently, Anthropic was the only leading AI lab whose services could be used on classified networks. The company was eager to cooperate with the US military, even partnering with Palantir. But when Claude was used for the January capture of Nicolas Maduro, that allegedly miffed an employee inside Anthropic, which got leaked back to the Pentagon. A pissed-off Pete Hegseth wanted to make super sure that Anthropic was down for anything he wanted, citing “all lawful uses”—which under US military law, means basically whatever. And that was where things got messy.

The thing is, Anthropic’s original DoW contract included two exceptions for military use: their AI could not be used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. But Hegseth ignored this, demanding that the Pentagon retain full discretion over how they use Claude. When Anthropic said no, he threatened to designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk”: a highest-tier national security designation usually reserved for companies like Huawei run by foreign adversaries. (Even Tencent and DeepSeek are not tarred with this label.) Anthropic was given a strict Friday 5pm deadline to comply with the DoW’s request.

Days passed while Hegseth’s ultimatum hung in the air. Then, on Thursday, Dario Amodei published a statement: “These threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.” The AI community praised his courage. For a moment, there was celebration.

Well, Secretary Hegseth was not bluffing. He moved ahead with designating Anthropic a supply chain risk. In a long and dumb tweet, he calls the company’s behavior a “master class in arrogance and betrayal” and “a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.” (He also uses the phrase “defective altruism,” which I must admit is pretty good.)

But the implications are severe…

They sure are — for democracy, human safety and security. Do read on.

Footnote For other worthwhile takes on the crisis, see Henry Farrell on why the tech industry should fear this precedent and Jack Shanahan on what makes this different.

The Intention economy

My Observer column of 20 February.

Did the advent of chatbots and LLMs (large language models) herald the demise of the attention economy? And, if so, what might replace it?

The most interesting answer to that question I’ve seen comes in a paper by two Cambridge researchers, Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn, in the Harvard Data Science Review. Their thesis is that we are at the dawn of a “lucrative yet troubling new marketplace for digital signals of intent”, from buying cinema tickets to voting for political candidates.

They call this the “intention economy”: a marketplace for behavioural and psychological data that signals human intent. It goes beyond capturing attention, to capturing what users want and “what they want to want” and operates through natural language interfaces powered by LLMs…

Do read the whole piece.

pdf version here

My commonplace booklet

From Azeem Azahr:

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a national security supply chain risk, effectively barring federal contractors from using its technology in government work. Hours later, Trump directed every federal agency to follow suit. No Chinese AI company has received the same designation. It’s quite an astonishing sucker-punch.

The proximate cause was Anthropic’s refusal to lift all safety constraints on military use of Claude, around autonomous targeting and AI-assisted mass surveillance. These aren’t unreasonable positions; they reflect genuine technical concerns about where AI capability ends and unacceptable risk begins. But the punishment for holding them was disproportionate, a tool designed for compromised semiconductor supply chains and foreign hardware manufacturers, repurposed to punish an American AI lab.

This seems to me a very good reason for supporting Anthropic — and for using (and paying for) Claude.ai — which I’ve done almost from the outset.

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Friday 27 February, 2026

Posted on February 27, 2026 by jjn1

Spring ahoy!

I’m so fed up with the Cambridge weather at the moment that I’m constantly on the lookout for signs of spring. Which is why these crocuses stopped me in my tracks yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”

Erich Fromm

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Gerry O’Beirne | When You’re Gone I Say Your Name

Link

Long Read of the Day

Inventing Tradition

Arthur Goldhammer’s delicious demolition of Marco Rubio’s meretricious speech to the recent Munich Security Conference.

JD Vance went to Munich in 2025 to offend; Marco Rubio went in 2026 to make amends—up to a point. He tried to reassure Europeans stung by Vance’s insults that the United States criticized Europe “because we care deeply.” He invoked his European ancestors from Seville and Sardinia so as to claim consanguinity with his audience and thus solicit its trust. And he insisted the the U.S. and the countries of Europe were bound by “the deepest bonds that nations can share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage.”

It was an artful portrait, slyly conceived to obscure crucial features of that “shared history,” which consisted of “centuries” indeed of bloody internecine warfare; of a “Christian faith” marked by schism, sectarian bloodletting, and intolerance…

I’m always baffled by references to “European civilisation”. This is the continent, after all, that was responsible for the two bloodiest wars in history, not to mention the Holocaust. Those who forget history may indeed be condemned to repeat it.

Books, etc.

This is one of the most important books I’ve read in years. I read it fitst in Kindle format when it came out, but I’ve just bought the paperback because it’s relevant for something I’m writing and I need to be able to scribble on, and annotate, it. It’s “the kind of book,” one reviewer wrote, “from which you look up to find the world suddenly more comprehensible.” It also provides the most readable account yet published of the work of the cybernetician, Stafford Beer, and explains why cybernetics provides an insightful lens for examining our current predicament(s).

My commonplace booklet

The Epstein files

The huge trove released by the US Congress contains millions of documents. But it also includes lots of videos and audio recordings made by Epstein or his associates. Some enterprising researcher has collected them in on JeffTube. I scrolled briefly though the gallery and came on one showing the Harvard whizkid Steven Pinker sitting across Epstein in his private jet while a girl in the background is heard asking “where are you taking us?” My question: what the hell was Pinker doing there?

Wednesday 25 February, 2026

Posted on February 25, 2026 by jjn1

One way of growing an Iris

In the college garden.

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

Link

How is it that the devil generally has the best tunes?

Long Read of the Day

Populism is an information problem, but not in the way that you think

One of the frustrating things about living in the UK at the moment is the way the country seems to be terminally stuck. It has a Labour government with a huge parliamentary majority — big enough to qualify as the ”elective dictatorship” that the Attlee government used to start the reconstruction of a war-exhausted country — and yet it’s blundering around devoid of a vision or even a good story. Part of that is a legacy of Brexit, but the bigger reason is that the UK is a case study in a much wider problem — how post-war liberal democracy has failed its citizens.

Democratic revival has to start with a frank acknowledgement of this failure. And for that we need an analytical lens through which to view it, which is why this essay by Andrew Curry in yesterday’s edition of his Just Two Things Substack was such a delight. He draws on Dan Davies’s magnificent book, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions to make his point.

All of this reminded me of Dan Davies’ book The Unaccountability Machine, about the principles of management cybernetics developed by Stafford Beer (more about the book on Just Two Things here), In it, he applies some of the learning to the rise of populism:

“People are overloaded with information that they can’t process; the world requires more decisions from them than they’re capable of making, and the systems that are meant to shield them from that volatility have stopped doing the job. (p.253)

Although it is hard to define ‘overload’ in this context, you can see the signs:

“you can easily observe the difference between a human being that is coping and one that is overloaded”. (p.251)

Often these signs are qualitative: Lexi, for, example, a mother of two, who told John Harris that she

“holds down three different jobs – as a care support worker, a dinner lady and a cleaner – and says she is just about holding everything together”.

But there are not only qualitative signals. The work of Anna Case and Angus Deaton showed a sharp quantitative increase in what they called “deaths of despair” in the United States, from alcoholism, opiate addiction and suicide. The qualitative insight here was in connecting these different data categories in a single frame.

But one of the bigger problems here is that in modern states, even in democracies, the information channels between governments, political parties, and citizens don’t carry very much information:

”The only kind of communication that such a constrained channel can carry is a scream: the signal that passes through the levels of control and announces that something has gone wrong which threatens the integrity of the system itself. This is why there was a family resemblance between the ‘populist’ movements that sprang up in the 2010s… The medium itself is the message: what liberal society ought to be responding to is the fact of mass distress, not its content.” (pp250-51, emphasis in original)

I’ve always thought that the Brexit vote was a scream in that sense. In the 2015 general election in Britain, for example, nearly 4m people voted for UKIP — the “Leave’ party. And got precisely one MP (out of 650) because of the country’s First-Past-The-Post system. The Brexit referendum, however, gave them a vote that would matter — a binary choice — and they took it.

Do read on. Dan Davies’s brilliant insight was that cybernetics offered a novel way of thinking about our present difficulties. This is music to the ears of an engineer like me. And not just me: it has also struck Henry Farrell, who is a great political scientist and one of the smartest people around.

My commonplace booklet

From Brad Delong…

FEB 23, 2026

I do not know how to handle the intellectual crisis tsunami now coming down on me from the creation, development, and societal consequences of MAMLMs—Modern Advanced Machine-Learning Models—other than to find a floatation device, hang on for dear life, and start kicking as fast as I can. But I do know some things: As MAMLMs make text-extrusion five times faster, the real crisis moves to reading, filtering, and not going insane. “Prompt whispering” is theater; “context engineering is the work”. Stop treating language models like minds and start treating them like very fancy calculators wired to very large libraries. Your AI is not your friend, therapist, co‑author, or co-pilot; it is a token‑production machine. If you feed it a wise string of tokens, wise tokens will come out. If you feed it tokens from a stupid conversation, stupid tokens will come out…

He also quotes this from Mike Taylor:

Memory is frequently described as ChatGPT’s “killer feature.” Many people tell me they can’t switch to Gemini or Claude because the OpenAI tool “knows them so well.”

I have memory turned off.

The memory feature allows ChatGPT to save and recall information it thinks is important about you, as well as reference past chats to shape its responses. While I can see how this could make a “helpful assistant” more helpful, I don’t use it.

I want unbiased results from ChatGPT, based on context that I carefully curated and put in the prompt, so I know how it made its decision. With memory, anything from your past chats could affect the results in ways that are hard to predict.

This squares with my experience.

Linkblog

Something I found while drinking from the Internet firehose

Screenshot

The day Bob Dylan came on a street kid playing a broken guitar in New York. And stopped to talk to him

Link

Monday 23 February, 2026

Posted on February 23, 2026 by jjn1

The House

From Will Blackburn in Sydney. One of the rewards of an early morning run!

Quote of the Day

”Narrative is strategy in story form.”

Mark Laity, former head of strategic communications at NATO.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman, Linda Ronstadt & Ry Cooder | Rider In The Rain

Link

Long Read of the Day

How Jeffrey Epstein Became a Public Intellectual

Interesting insights from Ted Gioia

Elon Musk is now the wealthiest person in the world—and he’s making proclamations every day. He even bought his own social media platform, and posts his opinions constantly. He’s the reverse of Howard Hughes. You can’t escape him. And unless he flies off to Mars, you never will.

It’s not just Musk. There are dozens of billionaires who aspire to public intellectual status. Bill Gates serves up book reviews. Peter Thiel gives a lecture series. Tom Steyer makes speeches and offers himself as a candidate for President.

We have come a long, long way from the working class intellectuals and soapbox pundits of yore. Everything now is pay-to-play.

How did this happen? When did the status of public intellectual become something you can buy, like merchandise on the shelf at a Rodeo Drive boutique?

The recent release of the Jeffrey Epstein files gives a clue.

Epstein left NYU without earning a degree, and got dismissed from his teaching gig at Dalton for poor performance. But this didn’t prevent him from getting his own office at Harvard…

Read on…. It’s amazing what money can buy nowadays.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

Zachary Leader has written what looks like an interesting book on the making of Richard Ellmann’s canonical biography of James Joyce.

James Woodall, who’s always a welcome guest at the Bloomsday lunch I host every year, has written an interesting review of it in The European Journal of Life Writing.

Over 800 pages, the Oxford University Press James Joyce was the first biography that mattered after a couple in Joyce’s lifetime that hadn’t. When I bought my copy in 1977, it read so smoothly and stylishly that it seemed sculpted by the steadiest of hands under the most unblinking of gazes. It had arrived – in print (in October 1959, one year before I was born) – in the compelling shape of a novel, a saga that might have taken a master, a Henry James for example, perhaps two years of undimmed concentration.

Ellmann’s book was not a shoe-in. Long thought about by its writer in his early thirties, James Joyce took five years: from his first research trip to Dublin in the spring of 1953, to his completion of the typescript in the summer of 1958. That in itself was a remarkable achievement, given the variables in play: the astounding number of people Joyce knew across Europe whom Ellmann had to track down; the volume of letters he found and used (and finally edited); his masterful wooing of the surviving family; and the sometimes tortured secrecy he had to spin to keep rivals at bay. A Joyce cult was brewing, and Ellmann needed to contain it to make the writer his. He did.

Hmmm… Given that I love Ellmann’s biography I might just have to buy Leader’s book.

My commonplace booklet

From Andy Borowitz…

Imagine a hypothetical job applicant. He can’t spell the simplest words, such as “heal” and “tap.” Confused by geography, he thinks there’s an African country called “Nambia.” As for American history, he’s under the impression that Andrew Jackson, who died in 1845, was angry about the Civil War, and that Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895, is still alive.

Given the alarming state of his knowledge, you might wonder what job he could get. Unfortunately, he’s not hypothetical, and the job he got, in 2016, was president of the United States.

I had similar thoughts when watching his Press Conference on the SCOTUS decision.

Who’d employ him?

Posted on February 20, 2026 by jjn1

From Andy Borowitz…

Imagine a hypothetical job applicant. He can’t spell the simplest words, such as “heal” and “tap.” Confused by geography, he thinks there’s an African country called “Nambia.” As for American history,he’s under the impression that Andrew Jackson, who died in 1845, was angry about the Civil War, and that Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895, is still alive.

Given the alarming state of his knowledge, you might wonder what job he could get. Unfortunately, he’s not hypothetical, and the job he got, in 2016, was president of the United States.

I had similar thoughts when watching his Press Conference on the SCOTUS decision.

Friday 20 February, 2026

Posted on February 20, 2026 by jjn1

Potter mania

Every time I come through King’s Cross, it’s like this. Has there ever been anything as enduring as Harry Potter’s fandom?

Quote of the Day

”When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.”

H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

A. Vivaldi / N. Chédeville | Op. 13 n. 4 – Sonata for oboe & b.c. in A major (RV 59) | P. Goodwin

Link

New to me, but gorgeous.

Long Read of the Day

The left is missing out on AI

Really perceptive essay by Dan Kagan-Kans on how the Left — and academia — are making big mistakes in underestimating AI technology. I was particularly struck by this passage:

Publishing in journals requires peer review, and peer review is slow. As Zvi Mowshowitz, who writes perhaps the world’s most exhaustive newsletter on AI, said, “Nobody in real academia can adhere to their norms and actually be in the conversation, because by the time you’re publishing, everything you were trying to say is irrelevant,” a generation or two behind the cutting edge. Another incentive for researchers to leave for industry, then.

This splitting of a field that once would have been forced to coexist has probably made industry too optimistic about the pace of progress and made academia too skeptical. That then skews what’s heard by people who listen to academia but not industry — and nearly everyone with that tendency, today, is on the left. They hear only the skeptics, unaware that real science is taking place in the AI labs too (or especially), done by PhD’d researchers they might trust if only they sat in a faculty office.

Books, etc.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1879 book, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, is an utter delight. I was first alerted to it by his biographer, Richard Holmes in his book, Footsteps: Adventures of a romantic biographer, the first chapter of which recounts how he set out in 1964 to walk 220km through the Cévennes in Stevenson’s footsteps.

It’s an irresistible read, so I started on it again, and laughed out loud when reading his account of his first day on the journey. So here it is:

In an odd way, the star of Stevenson’s account of his journey is not him but the little donkey he purchased to accompany him and carry his baggage. She was, he wrote, the size of “a large Newfoundland dog” and the colour of “an ideal mouse”. He christened her Modestine and then discovered that she was an awkward character who “refused to climb hills,… shed her saddle-bag at the least provocation,… and in villages swerved into the cool of the beaded shop-doors”. He wrote that he often had to beat her with a stick (about which he felt increasingly guilty) and wept when he sold her at the end of his journey.

So when I think of RLS it’s Modestine who always comes to my mind. Accordingly, when we bought a Tesla in 2020 and discovered that we could give it a name, I of course chose Modestine, because the vehicle can, at times, appear to have a mind of its own.

Screenshot

This puzzled our friends, but I felt it was vindicated when one day I saw my wife — normally the politest person in any room — impatiently thumping the steering wheel and shouting “Come on, you stupid donkey”.

You may wonder what propelled me down this particular rabbit hole. It was just a travel piece in the weekend edition of the Financial Times about a couple who had just walked the trail courtesy of a company called Macs Adventure (two-week trip on the full trail from £1,795).

As Miss Jean Brodie famously observed about chemistry, “For those that like that kind of thing, that is the thing they like.”

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Mark Zuckerberg overruled 18 wellbeing experts to keep beauty filters on Instagram

Hannah Murphy, writing in yesterday’s Financial Times:

Mark Zuckerberg told a jury on Wednesday that he overruled concerns about teen wellbeing from staff and 18 experts to lift a ban on Instagram beauty filters because he was concerned about “free expression”.

The billionaire social media boss faced a grilling in a Los Angeles court on Wednesday as he battles a landmark legal claim that social media is addictive to children.

Instagram temporarily suspended beauty filters — which digitally alter people’s appearance — to conduct a review of the features in 2019. All of the 18 experts Meta hired concluded they presented a wellbeing issue.

Zuckerberg told the court there was a “high bar” for demonstrating harm, calling the restrictions “paternalistic” and “overbearing”, adding he “wanted to err on the side of people being able to express themselves” in making the decision.

As usual, he ‘erred’ on the side of profitability and growth.

Feedback

David Ballard was struck by Monday’s Quote of the Day in which OpenAI’s Sam Altman said:

”I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.”

It reminded him of a lovely New Yorker cartoon which (I think) came out sometime during the pandemic lockdown.

Screenshot

Wednesday 18 February, 2026

Posted on February 18, 2026 by jjn1

The Old Divinity School at night

And to think that St John’s once received a proposal for converting it into a ‘boutique hotel’!

Quote of the Day

”I wish to thank my parents for making it all possible? and I wish to thank my children for making it necessary.”

Viktor Borge

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Paul Simon | Hearts and Bones

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Price of initiative just collapsed

Every so often a piece about ‘AI’ that is both topical and wise emerges from the seething chaos of current discourse about the technology. This blog post by Martha Lane Fox is one of those. It’s good all the way through, and at the end it’s full of horse-sense about what the UK should be doing with the technology now.

It starts from an encounter she had with an edition of the original Gutenberg Bible that she had in the J.P Morgan library in New York.

Even if you could get your hands on a printed Bible, you still needed literacy — and not literacy as we know it: with public schools, clear fonts, and the assumption that the words were for you. You needed the language, the time, and the permission to learn. The technology was astonishing. The interface, for most people, was not.

The future had arrived — and then it queued.

It’s that queue that followed me out of the building. Gutenberg printed his Bible around 1455. England did not even begin legislating for a national system of elementary education until 1870 — four centuries later, after long arguments over who should learn and what they should be allowed to read. The machine was fast. Everything else — institutions, access, the will to distribute — was slow. Those who could read surged ahead; those who could not were quietly kept in place.

Time is the thread I keep returning to, because it’s what makes today harder. We do not have four centuries to close the gap between technology and society. We may not even have four years. New releases from Anthropic, OpenAI and newcomer Openclaw have blown apart what’s possible in the last 3 weeks…

Keep reading. It’s worth it.

Books, etc.

What you can get away with: Updike Reconsidered

Nice review essay by James Wolcott in the LRB.

Maybe it’s just me , but the publication of John Updike’s selected letters, masterfully assembled and presented by James Schiff, doesn’t appear to have been the parade event that might have been expected. The reviews have been largely laudatory, marbled with tribute to Updike’s impeccable filigree, effortless versatility, unfaltering application and sleek plumage, but I don’t get the sense that the accolades have resonated beyond the baby boomer contingent of Updikeans who matured with the Rabbit Angstrom novels and counted on the continuing nourishment of his presence in the New Yorker. Perhaps Updike’s gifts and graces were too easy to take for granted, bannered for so long while he was alive. Whatever the explanation, betwixt and between is a strange place for any major writer to be more than a decade and a half after their death, and Updike’s standing in the literary hereafter remains profoundly iffy. It’s one thing to fall out of fashion, another to fall out of favour, and Updike seems to have fallen out of both while still being suspended mid-air, cushioned by the thermals while posterity figures out what to do with him…

One of the things I noticed in Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ novels was how acutely he tracked the sociology of the times. Rabbit Angstrom was a Toyota dealer just at the time when the Japanese car industry began to undermine its US counterpart. Another theme in the novels included American decline. Rabbit, a former high-school basketball star and symbol of postwar American confidence, for example now profits from foreign imports. I have a vague memory that an American sociology students once wrote a PhD about this.

Chart of the Day

Linkblog

The Epstein Class

From Robert Reich:

Not just the people who cavorted with Jeffrey Epstein or the subset who abused young girls. It’s an interconnected world of hugely rich, prominent, entitled, smug, powerful, self-important (mostly) men. Trump is honorary chairman.

Trump appears 1,433 times in the Epstein files so far. His billionaire backers are also members. Elon Musk appears 1,122 times. Howard Lutnick is a member. So is Trump-backer Peter Thiel (2,710 times), and Leslie Wexner (565 times). As is Steven Witkoff, now Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s consigliere (1,855 times).

The Epstein Class isn’t limited to Trump donors. Bill Clinton is a member (1,192 times), as is Larry Summers (5,621 times). So are LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (3,769 times), Prince Andrew (1,821 times), Bill Gates (6,385 times), and Steve Tisch, co-owner of the New York Giants (429 times).

The so-called masters of the universe.

Monday 16 February, 2026

Posted on February 16, 2026 by jjn1

Tulip mania

A shaft of sunlight suddenly alighted on them the other morning.

Quote of the Day

”I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.”

Sam Altman, quoted by Dan Wang in his 2025 annual letter.

I guess Altman was trolling his audience at the time. Or was he? One never known with him.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ye Vagabonds | Danny

Link

Accompanied by a sombre video.

Long Read of the Day

2025 letter | Dan Wang

For many years, when Dan Wang was a tech analyst living and working in Beijing, his annual letter was invariably one of the great reads of the year. And then there was none. In 2024 He had moved back to the US and (it turned out) was hard at work writing Breakneck, his magisterial comparison of China and the US, which has been a big and much-discussed seller. And then, suddenly, his annual letter is back.

It’s quite long but IMO as good a read as ever.

Here’s how it opens:

One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless.

If the Bay Area once had an impish side, it has gone the way of most hardware tinkerers and hippie communes. Which of the tech titans are funny? In public, they tend to speak in one of two registers. The first is the blandly corporate tone we’ve come to expect when we see them dragged before Congressional hearings or fireside chats. The second leans philosophical, as they compose their features into the sort of reverie appropriate for issuing apocalyptic prophecies on AI. Sam Altman once combined both registers at a tech conference when he said: “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” Actually that was pretty funny.

It wouldn’t be news to the Central Committee that only the paranoid survive. The Communist Party speaks in the same two registers as the tech titans. The po-faced men on the Politburo tend to make extraordinarily bland speeches, laced occasionally with a murderous warning against those who cross the party’s interests. How funny is the big guy? We can take a look at an official list of Xi Jinping’s jokes, helpfully published by party propagandists. These wisecracks include the following: “On an inspection tour to Jiangsu, Xi quipped that the true measure of water cleanliness is whether the mayor would dare to swim in the water.” Or try this reminiscence that Xi offered on bad air quality: “The PM2.5 back then was even worse than it is now; I used to joke that it was PM250.” Yes, such a humorous fellow is the general secretary.

It’s nearly as dangerous to tweet a joke about a top VC as it is to make a joke about a member of the Central Committee. People who are dead serious tend not to embody sparkling irony. Yet the Communist Party and Silicon Valley are two of the most powerful forces shaping our world today. Their initiatives increase their own centrality while weakening the agency of whole nation states. Perhaps they are successful because they are remorseless…

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. He’s knowledgeable, witty and clearly enjoys long-form writing.

Call my AI agent! Chatbots can now post on their own version of Reddit

My Observer column of 6 February.

In the “old” AI regime, you asked ChatGPT questions and it replied; if you wanted it to think about a complicated matter, you had laboriously to craft a prompt that would guide it along the relevant channels to come up with an answer. In the brave new regime, however, you would simply set a goal and the agent would plan, act, use software tools, check results and adapt to changed circumstances as needed. Rather like a conscientious intern, in fact.

At this point, the corporate hive mind woke up and began salivating: this could mean that AI could replace entire workflows! Wow! If AI could do things end-to-end, then the technology may finally start creating real economic “value” (AKA profits). Verily, agentic AI was the future.

The corporate hive mind’s colleagues in its legal department were not as enthusiastic, though. Responding to prompts is one thing, they would point out, but acting in the world is different. It raises tricky questions about responsibility and legal liability, not to mention the attention of investigative journalists, regulators and other pesky outsiders. So calm down was the advice; let’s not rush down this agentic slipway.

And then, out of the blue, up pops Moltbook, a new social media platform, but one with a radical difference: humans are barred from it. Only verified AI agents – chiefly those powered by OpenClaw software – can participate…

Read on

Books, etc.

As a photographer, I’ve always been fascinated by Brassai, the pseudonym of Gyula Halász, a Transylvanian journalist and photographer who moved to Paris in 1924 and lived there for the rest of his life. I first came across him via his 1933 book, Paris by Night, in which he published some of the photographs he had taken as he wandered the streets of the city late at night.

His photograph Les Espaliers de Montmartre has pride of place in our dining room, and — like many others — I’ve made unsuccessful efforts to photograph the same scene, consoling myself that things have changed a lot since the 1930s!

Screenshot

What I hadn’t realised until recently was that Brassai was a friend of Henry Miller, of whom he wrote this biography. It’s an entertaining read, which may be one reason why Miller criticised it as being “padded”, “full of factual errors, full of suppositions, rumors, documents he filched which are largely false or give a false impression.” This might also be the reason why it’s turning out to be such a good read!

My commonplace booklet

When the depredations of ICE started in the US after Trump’s inauguration, people in the UK comforted themselves with the thought that well, that sort of stuff couldn’t happen here. Rule of law and all that, old boy.

Well, think again. Steve Bloomfield had a sobering piece in the Observer on February 1.

On the eve of last October’s Conservative party conference, its press office highlighted the week’s key announcement. As part of its plan to “tackle the crisis at the borders”, a Tory government would establish “a removals force” that would round up and remove people who were “in the UK illegally or whose visas have expired”.

“Legal barriers” would be removed, resources would be doubled, and the number of people deported each year would rise from 34,000 to around 150,000. The Tories were playing catch-up. Two months earlier, Reform UK had announced its own “mass deportation” plan.

For the past two decades, much of the immigration debate in Europe has been about borders – preventing people from coming in the first place. But over the past year or so, the emphasis has shifted towards deportations. The idea of “remigration” has moved from the far-right fringe to the rightwing mainstream in several European countries. Too many people have come to Europe, they argue, and many of them don’t share what they euphemistically term “European values”.

What began as a threat to those who are undocumented swiftly shifted to encompass those who have followed every rule and have a legal right to live in their new country. In the words of Katie Lam, a Conservative MP who has been tipped as a future leader, some people who are legally entitled to live in Britain “need to go home” in order to ensure the UK remains “culturally coherent”…

You see where this is heading.

Friday 13 February, 2026

Posted on February 13, 2026 by jjn1

Outside the British Museum

On a wet morning.

Quote of the Day

”One wonders in these places why anyone is left in Dublin, or London, or Paris, when it would be better, one would think, to live in a tent or hut with this magnificent sea and sky, and to breathe this wonderful air, which is like wine in one’s teeth.”

John Millington Synge on the Kerry countryside.

Whenever I’m in Kerry, I know just what he meant.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel| As steals the morn (L’Allegro, HWV 55) | Amanda Forsythe & Thomas Cooley, Voices of Music

Link

Staggeringly beautiful aria. Good way to start the day.

Long Read of the Day

The Artist’s Reward

In these horrible times, we occasionally need something uplifting to read. So here is something that I think merits that label — Dorothy Parker’s profile of Ernest Hemingway, published in the New Yorker on 23 November, 1929.

Here’s a sample:

I have heard of him, both at various times and all in one great bunch, that he is so hard-boiled he makes a daily practice of busting his widowed mother in the nose; that he dictates his stories because he can’t write, and has them read to him because he can’t read; that he is expatriate to such a degree that he tears down any American flag he sees flying in France; that no woman within half-a-mile of him is a safe woman; that he not only commands enormous prices for his short stories, but insists, additionally, on taking the right eye out of the editor’s face; that he has been a tramp, a safe-cracker, and a stockyard attendant; that he is the Pet of the Left Bank, and may be found at any hour of the day or night sitting at a little table at the Select, rubbing absinthe into his gums; that he really hates all forms of sport, and only skis, hunts, fishes, and fights bulls in order to be cute; that a wound he sustained in the Great War was of a whimsical, inconvenient, and inevitably laughable description; and that he also writes under the name of Morley Callaghan. About all that remains to be said is that he is the Lost Dauphin, that he was shot as a German spy, and that he is actually a woman, masquerading in man’s clothes. And those rumors are doubtless being started, even as we sit here.

Hemingway; people are so eager to hear that you haven’t the heart to send them away empty. Young women, in especial, are all of a quiver for information. (Sometimes I think that the wide publication of that smiling photograph, the one with the slanted cap and the shirt flung open above the dark sweater, was perhaps a mistake.)

“Ooh,” they say, “do you know Ernest Hemingway? Ooh, I’d just love to meet him! Ooh, tell me what he’s like!”

Well, I warned you the task sinks me…

Do read on. And while you’re at it, crack open that bottle of Absinthe you’ve been hiding away.

My commonplace booklet

One of the infuriating things about living in Britain at the moment is having to watch a Labour Party which has a huge parliamentary majority without, it seems, the faintest idea of what to do with it. Jonty Bloom had a fine blast about this yesterday.

Being forced by your own back benchers to be nicer to the poor is one thing, but to introduce a perfectly fair reform to the inheritance tax system and then give concessions to whinging farmer is another, the same with pubs.

Being kicked by the tabloids is one thing but allowing them to kick you about is another and habit forming. The more concessions and back downs, the more the pressure from every lobby group and dodgy cause grows because they know pressure works.

If Labour and Sir Kier are to turn this around they need to find some radical policies and force them through.

Far too many things are just being kicked down the street when ministers should be forcing them through parliament. Reforming the police for instance, or hiking defence spending now, or regulating the media better. Do it now and don’t back down, ever.

My own personal suggestion would be taking on the trade unions, the middle class trade unions that is, the ones that hike prices for us all, are closed shops and often farcically incompetent and useless.

Dentists, vets, lawyers, chartered surveyors and auditors just for a start. All charge far too much, add to our cost of living, try to ban competition and keep out new entrants.

How about some real competition, and some real capitalism?

Amen to that. Especially the dentists and vets.

Wednesday 11 February,2026

Posted on February 11, 2026 by jjn1

Hopeful signs…

… that Spring might be on its way. Seen as I was walking back from lunch in College yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”The physicist I.I. Rabi and General (later President) Dwight Eisenhower became friends after Eisenhower was appointed president of Columbia University soon after the end of WW2. When introduced to Rabi, Eisenhower said, “I am always very happy to see one of the employees of the university,” to which Rabi replied, “Mr. President, the faculty are not the employees of the university. They are the university.”

Quoted in J. S. Rigden, Rabi: Scientist and Citizen, Harvard University Press, 2000.

Not any more, though. The ‘management’ of Columbia caved in to Trump. And I guess its professors no longer feel they embody the Genius loci of the institution.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Like a Rolling Stone | Newcastle | 1966

Link

Long Read of the Day

Bafflement with Bezos

This latest edition of Tina Brown’s diary is another gem — triggered this time by zillionaire Jeff Bezos’s emasculation of the Washington Post, the newspaper he once claimed to be rescuing.

Yet he appears to have checked out of the Post some time after his libido was liberated by his pneumatic new paramour Lauren Sánchez. And that personal transition coincided with an acceleration in wealth that saw his net worth rise from $28 billion in 2013 to $222 billion today. You might think a fortune that stratospheric would make it easy to say no to paying out $75 million to make and market a Roman tribute to Melania. Or not feel the need to curry favor with Trump by precipitously ending the Post’s 36-year tradition of endorsing presidential candidates, just 11 days before the 2024 election, a decision that instantly lost the paper 250,000 hard-won subscribers. Entertaining War Sec Pete Hegseth at Blue Origin, two days before the Post apocalypse, and saying nothing about Hegseth’s Pravda-like restrictions on Pentagon press coverage, was not a great look either. The purpose of having f##k you money is to say f##k you, but it seems the purpose of f##k you money is to have more f##k you money.

What’s baffling is that Bezos really was a tech visionary, and, in fact, so many of that first generation or two of tech bros were. Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page transformed forever the way we tap into the riches of the world’s information and learning. Elon Musk made environmentally-friendly electric cars that were fast and beautiful and promised us that his rockets would take us to Mars. Even Travis Kalanick, the rapacious CEO and co-inventor of Uber, invented a way for us to never be stranded. But as all the nerdy dreamers bulked up into heedless plutocrats, it was like watching a chart of the Descent of Man—their muscles bulged to comic-book proportions, their aspirations coarsened, they hid out in their luxury, Blue Zone caves. I think most of them had set out with a genuine belief that tech could make the world a better place, but they wound up instead wanting just to better their OWN place.

Spot on. Great wealth is a powerful aphrodisiac. It deludes you (and many around you) into thinking you’re a genius. And it buys you impunity from the consequences of your actions.

Books, etc.

You may remember that I read (and enjoyed) this book a while back, which meant that I found this review of it in The Asian Review of Books interesting. It occurred to me that it might make useful reading for anyone who is curious about the book.

## My commonplace booklet

The blast radius of Jeffrey Epstein

Turns out it’s much wider than we’d imagined. It may yet see off Keir Starmer, even though he had nothing to do with the paedophile, but had foolishly allowed his consigliere Morgan McSweeney to push him into appointing Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US.

I remember being shocked when the first release of documents revealed that the famed economist Larry Summers, who I thought was a real grown-up (as portrayed in The Social Network), had been seeking advice from Epstein about an extra-marital affair. But now I find that even a hero of mine, Noam Chomsky, had been lured into the vicious circle round Epstein and exploited as a reputation-launderer. Truly, there seems to be no end to this.

Fintan O’Toole, the brilliant Irish Times columnist, has been writing perceptively about all this. It’s behind a paywall, alas, but I think it’s worth quoting some of it from yesterday’s edition of the paper.

One of the foundational acts of the Roman empire was the construction of the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer that carried off the city’s effluent and made its glories possible. The Romans thought of it as sacred and gave it its own presiding deity, Cloacina.

The Epstein archive is the Cloaca Maxima of the contemporary American empire, a vast sewage system that underlies and enables the triumph of gilded misogyny. Epstein is its sacred monster, the presiding deity of the cult of rapacity to whom men of privilege sent up their supplications: let us prey.

Unlike the benign Cloacina, Epstein’s cult demanded human sacrifice, preferably that of young virgins. (“He likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Donald Trump smirked in 2002.) The scale of the demand was vast: the US department of justice estimated that Epstein sexually abused more than a thousand girls.

Those girls were, in this system, fungible assets, their value interchangeable with that of the dollar. They functioned as currency in an elite gift economy, passed around as tokens of status – to be granted the right to use their bodies was to be in with an ultimate in-crowd, a charmed circle of mutual enrichment and reciprocal advancement…

He also sees in many of the released emails (many of which complain about the #metoo movement) a coherent and concerted reaction by elite men against the feminist revolt of the 1960s and 1970s.

This was a movement defined in a much earlier generation by Rebecca West: “I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”

LATER Valeria Chomsky, Noam’s wife, issued a statement revealing that her husband, now 97, is “confronting significant health challenges” after suffering a devastating stroke in June 2023 and is currently under 24/7 medical care and unable to speak.

When we were introduced to Epstein, he presented himself as a philanthropist of science and a financial expert. By presenting himself this way, Epstein gained Noam’s attention, and they began corresponding. Unknowingly, we opened a door to a Trojan horse.

Epstein began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities for interesting discussions in areas Noam has been working on extensively. We regret that we did not perceive this as a strategy to ensnare us and to try to undermine the causes Noam stands for.

We had lunch, at Epstein’s ranch, once, in connection with a professional event; we attended dinners at his townhouse in Manhattan and stayed a few times in an apartment he offered when we visited New York City. We also visited Epstein’s Paris apartment one afternoon for the occasion of a work trip. In all cases, these visits were related to Noam’s professional commitments. We never went to his island or knew about anything that happened there.