Alliums ahoy!

Some striking white ones in the Orchard in Grantchester on Friday afternoon.

Quote of the Day

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”

• Picasso

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Louis Armstrong | What A Wonderful World

Link

The BBC put on a wonderful — and moving — celebration of David Attenborough’s 100th birth in the Albert Hall on Friday night, which ended with a recording of him reading the lyrics of this song against a backdrop of clips from his many films.

Long Read of the Day

In the belly of the MrBeast

Remarkable analysis by Kevin Munger of MrBeast, the world’s most successful YouTuber.

One nice thing about studying social media through the lens of creators and influencers is that some of them are quite forthcoming about their experiences; that’s the nature of the gig. But others are more committed to their persona, to maintaining some distance between themselves and the content.

The most famous of these is, of course, the world-conquering MrBeast, owner of the most-subscribed YouTube channel (343 million). MrBeast rose to fame through outrageous acts of charity, and occasionally engages in stunt-giving. This is a meaty phenomenon for wordcels trying to understand MrBeast; we can bring any number of critical frames to bear on questions of whether this is altruistic, whether it actually has good effects, what the normative experience of the viewer is…what it means to fit out 2,000 amputees with new protheses, like in the most recent video.

This is a mistake. As I argued in the conclusion of The YouTube Apparatus (now free to download!), “Communication within the YouTube Apparatus has no meaning.” The rapid feedback loop between creators and audiences (as constructed by platform metrics) means that the system more and more responds to itself. Rather than trying to go somewhere (as is the case with political ideology), the creator seeks simply intensification, to draw more and more of the world into his whirlpool of content…

Read on. It’s eye-opening. And an example of media ecology done well.

Books, etc.

Many years ago I read and enjoyed Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals so when the TV adaptation, The Durrells appeared we tuned in and watched it. And then I got the book which incorporates it and two of his other books. Turns out that the TV adaptation is only loosely related to the books, so the exercise turned into a reflection on the differences between the two media. The most glaring inconsistencies were in the portrayals of the long-suffering Mrs Durrell, the mother of this extraordinary tribe, and Spiro, the Greek taxi-driver who became the family’s loyal friend and retainer. In the books, Ma Durrell is portrayed as a modest peace-maker who mostly has her nose in a cookery book, whereas in the TV adaptation she becomes a glamorous model who is lusted after by a series of unsuitable males. And Spiro is transformed from a scowling but helpful gargoyle into a handsome and desirable chat.

Like I said, different media for different folks.

My Commonplace booklet

Gilded Age 2.0

Mr and Mrs Moneybags at the Met Ball

Screenshot

Link

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Where in the world are the Nibmeisters?

This is not the kind of question that keeps 99.9999% of humanity awake at night. A nibmeister is someone who can improve or reform a nib. Nibmeisters are like the alchemists of the pen world; they can take a nib that isn’t functioning properly or isn’t to your liking and turn it into gold (not literally, unless it is gold, but you get the picture). And if you’re a fountain-pen geek like this blogger, it’s important to know where the nearest one is. Turns out there are just two of them in the UK — and you can find where they are here!

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Out of office?

Cambridge in the Summer?

Quote of the Day

”Holy Mother we do believe,
That without sin Thou didst conceive;
May we now in Thee believing,
Also sin without conceiving.”

• A.P. Herbert

My late mother, a very devout Catholic, would not have been amused.

 ## Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn | Cello Concerto No. 1 in C Major | II. Adagio | Yo-Yo Ma

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Myth of the Informed Citizen

Nicholas Carr is one of the best communicators of our age. He’s terrific at diving into academic and other research on a topic and then coming up with a readable exegesis of what he’s found. His most recent book, Superbloom is coming out in paperback around now, and this essay is taken from it.

In it, he traces the evolution of the thinking of Walter Lippmann, one of the most interesting American intellectuals of the 20th century — and also one of the early members of the ’neoliberal thought collective’ that seized the ideological initiative from the late 1960s onwards and shaped the world we now inhabit.

Sample:

In 1919, Lippmann wrote a despairing essay in the Atlantic Monthly titled “The Basic Problem of Democracy.” Democracy’s founding ideal—that of a well-informed citizenry capable of making reasoned judgments about national problems and plans—had come into being in a much simpler time, he argued, when most concerns were local and people had direct experience of them. The assumptions of America’s founders, a small, insular, largely agrarian elite, held little relevance to the bustling modern world, with its urban and industrial energies and lightning-quick communications. Society was much more complex now, and people’s sense of it came not from their own first-hand observations but through information received “at second, third, or fourth hand.”

The public’s understanding of social and political issues was fated to be incomplete, distorted, and easily manipulated. “The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding,” Lippmann wrote…

Worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

Ever wonder why Warren Buffett, arguably the most successful investors of the 20th century, said this?

“The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.”

For an answer, try David Oks’s splendid article, “Why airlines are always going bankrupt”!

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Iris surveillance

These crept up on us in our front garden. We went to the Lake District for a week and when we arrived what should we find but these show-offs.

Quote of the Day

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

• Isaac Asimov

  The problem seems to have got worse over the years since he made the observation!

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Joan Armatrading | Love And Affection

Link

Long Read of the Day

A Rash Conclusion

By Paolo Valdemarin. Not such a Long Read, but to the point, and perceptive.

Everyone worries about AI replacing doctors. After 24 hours in the hands of the NHS, I think they’re looking in the wrong direction.

GP, A&E, then other parts of the hospital. Every shift, a new doctor. Every new doctor, the same questions. The same story, retold from the top. Every single one of them then took a picture of my rash with their phone.

The first GP I saw actually had an AI assistant. It recorded our conversation and drafted a letter, which he printed on that grey recyclable paper the NHS uses for everything and which absolutely no one in the chain that followed ever read…

The NHS is like many other large organisations, unable to join the administrative dots. Sometimes, it’s maddening to have to watch it especially since no rocket science required to fix it. I guess the problem is that nobody ‘owns’ the co-ordination problem.

My commonplace booklet

I really liked this New Yorker cover (captioned “War-a-Lago”), which was clearly referencing General George Patton’s practice of standing upright in a Jeep during WW2 while reviewing troops. After the Normandy invasion he was given command of the US Third Army which went deep into Nazi Germany.

During the Allied occupation of Germany, Patton was named military governor of Bavaria, but was relieved for making aggressive statements towards the Soviet Union and questioning denazification. He also held antisemitic views and made derogatory statements about Jewish people.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Why the voice note craze is yet to truly explode in Britain

From BBC News…

On an August day in 2013, WhatsApp, the messaging app now owned by Meta, made an announcement. With relatively little fanfare, they revealed the voice note, the messaging feature that lets you send a clip of your own voice to friends and family.

”We know there’s no substitute for hearing the sound of a friend or family member’s voice,” the company enthused in a press release.

Thirteen years on, receiving a 10-minute clip from a friend, telling you about a complex family feud or workplace drama, is an experience that is loved by some and loathed by others.

In places like India, Mexico, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates, voice notes are almost matching the popularity of written texts as the preferred form of electronic communication.

But curiously, the truth is that compared to many places, Britain never seems to have quite caught the voice note bug.

I don’t think I’ve ever sent one. But my sisters love the medium and use it quite a bit.

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Refractive Jellyfish

One of the most enigmatic photographs I’ve ever taken. It looks as though someone’s monocle has fallen on the sand. But it’s just a jellyfish. Taken on a beach in March 2012.

Quote of the Day

”Familiarity breeds contempt, but without a little familiarity it’s impossible to breed anything.”

• Noël Coward

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vivaldi | Nulla in mundo pax sincera | RV r630 | Marie Lys, soprano

Link

Music for a May morning.

Long Read of the Day

 How Charles III Quietly Filleted Donald Trump in His Own House

You will remember from Friday’s edition that I liked the King’s speech to both houses of Congress. As it happens, I didn’t know the half of it. This elegant piece by Dean Blundell masterfully fills in the picture.

There is an old British art form that Americans, despite our many gifts, have never quite mastered. It is the art of saying terrible things about a man while he smiles and nods, convinced you are paying him a compliment. King Charles III flew across the Atlantic on April 28, 2026, walked into the United States Capitol, and gave a master class channelling his inner Mark Carney.

By the time he sat down to dinner at the White House that evening, he had — without raising his voice, without breaking decorum, without uttering Donald Trump’s name a single time in anger — done something no Democrat, no journalist, and no foreign leader has managed in a decade. He made the President of the United States look small in his own ballroom.

And he did it with jokes.

It’s a lovely essay. Here are some gems from it:

A President who insists he is not a king, in a country whose entire founding mythology is built on the violent rejection of monarchy, was about to throw open the doors of the White House for an actual hereditary king — the head of the same throne the colonies revolted against in 1776 — and the White House communications team was, at that very moment, posting a photograph of the two men captioned “TWO KINGS.”

Or this:

Charles took the rostrum at 3:09 p.m. He spoke for roughly 25 minutes. He received multiple standing ovations, including from Democrats who have spent the past year searching for someone, anyone, capable of saying out loud what they have been thinking.

Or this:

The single most electric moment of the speech came when Charles invoked the post-9/11 alliance — when NATO triggered Article Five for the first time in its history to defend the United States — and then pivoted, with the unhurried grace of a surgeon, into the present.

Today, he told the chamber, that same unyielding resolve is needed for the defence of Ukraine and her most courageous people, in order to secure a truly just and lasting peace.

Members of Congress rose to their feet. Both parties. Together. In a Congress that cannot agree on a lunch order, Republicans and Democrats stood shoulder to shoulder to applaud a foreign monarch publicly contradicting the foreign policy of the man who had hosted him for breakfast.

The biggest surprises of all, though, come later in the piece, when Blundell turns to the speech Charles delivered at the White House dinner that evening.

Charles then pivoted to Trump’s most cherished domestic vanity project: the demolition of the East Wing of the White House to make way for a $400 million ballroom Trump has been building, financed in significant part by private donors and corporate interests, against the howling objections of historians and preservationists.

He could not help noticing, the king observed dryly, the “readjustments” to the East Wing.

He was, he said, sorry to report that the British had made their own attempt at real estate redevelopment of the White House in 1814.

This was the moment of the night. In 1814, during the War of 1812, British soldiers marched into Washington and burned the White House to the ground. Charles — heir to that throne, head of that state — stood in the rebuilt building, looked at the demolition crew’s work outside, and gently equated Donald Trump’s signature architectural legacy with an act of foreign arson.

The line was so good it hurt. The room — Fox hosts, cabinet secretaries, billionaires — laughed because there was nothing else to do…

This is writing of a very high order. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

My commonplace booklet

In his current FT column, Tim Harford asks if his intuition that politics is more emotionally fraught than it used to be is accurate. He points to a recent working paper by a group of Harvard Researchers which appears to confirm that hunch. I dug it out and started to read, but by the time I got to page 52 (of 138) I’d lost the will to live, and so will just give you Hartford’s summary.

1. Of all the emotions expressed in tweets on X (née Twitter) by far the most common is anger. Other emotions (positive and negative) don’t get a look-in.
2. Anger is on the rise. It started to rise in 2106 and by 2020 40%-50% of tweets were angry.
3. The angriest tweeters are: people at the political extremes of both the right and the left; people who follow a lot of politicians and ‘influencers’; and people over the age of 65.

The funny thing about these findings is how obvious they are. Nobody who’s been paying attention to what happens on ‘X’ will be surprised by them. It may indeed by the case that people are getting angrier in general, but anyone who thinks that the obsessive users of social media are representative of society as a whole is making a serious mistake. So what this research seems to confirm is simply that social media algorithms reward anger — something we’ve known almost from the year dot. Bah!

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Conkers

Hitherto, it had never occurred to me that Chestnut trees might be interesting at this time of year. Until yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”This damp little shambles of a democracy on the edge of the Western world”.

• Nuala Ó’Faolain on her (and my) native land, which is currently a bit of shambles.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Giunse alfin il momento…Deh vieni non tardar |Marriage of Figaro | Regula Mühlemann

Link

Long Read of the Day

The King, the Queen, and the Ballroom Blitz

Tina Brown on song about King Charles’s visit to the Augean stable that is the current White House.

God, it was nice for British embassy guests to see King Charles and Queen Camilla in person yesterday afternoon! As the royal pair emerged with elderly, familiar grace onto the portico steps of the residence and stood side by side, rooted in history, the volatile Washington circus finally came to a stop. Two teary national anthems were played. There was the sweet smell of freshly mown grass, small sandwiches were passed, and the better-dressed-than-usual DC crowd waited respectfully in assembled “pods” for Their Majesties to unfreeze their pose and descend to emit magical civility.

Given that the last time many in this crowd had seen each other was underneath a table in the Washington Hilton ballroom as a would-be presidential assassin at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner stormed a checkpoint and was wrestled to the ground, the embassy garden party was mint tea for the nerves. Everyone was comparing their Saturday night vignettes of Secret Service heroes vaulting over scattering silverware or the sight of a disorientated RFK Jr. being armpit-lifted out of danger with his actress wife scurrying behind. Right before the king and queen deplaned at Joint Base Andrews, Trump’s creamy-faced flak Karoline Leavitt turned her valedictory, pre-maternity leave speech from the podium into a gargantuan gaslight session of the traumatized press, blaming Saturday night’s violence on hate-filled discourse purveyed by Democrats and the media. Wait, wasn’t it her boss, Donald J. Trump, who godfathered the Jan. 6 mayhem, excoriated the murdered Rob and Michele Reiner last December for having “Trump derangement syndrome,” and commemorated the death of former FBI director Robert Mueller in March with the Truth Social post “Good”? Trump himself in his post-dinner press conference took his propensity to attract assassins as proof he is a president of consequence, like Lincoln (but not, apparently, like Gerald Ford, who nearly took a bullet from Manson mini-maniac Squeaky Fromme).

On the embassy lawn in the spring sunshine, the king glided through the parting crowd as if he were on casters. He first greeted a bipartisan cluster of ingratiating pols that included gangly Scott Bessent, stocky Mike Johnson, Steve Miller with his shiny cue ball head, and Nancy Pelosi, her four-inch heels defiantly sinking in the grass.

Do read on. There are interesting stings in the tail.

Books, etc.

This is a remarkably ambitious book by an Oxford scholar I’ve been following since her first book came out in 2020 (when she gave a presentation about it to our — then new — research centre).

Here’s how she describes it in the Prelude:

This is a technology book, because artificial intelligence is the new Oracle of Delphi and executives the new prophets. It’s a business book, and personal development one, because it explores prophecy as an industry, with a focus on how to avoid falling for false prophets in a “data-driven” world. It explores the history of prediction – from ancient oracles to the development of measurements and probability – to argue that prophecies are more often than not power plays in disguise. It’s a political treatise on how prediction serves social control.

Like I said, ambitious.

My commonplace booklet

Thank God for Private Eye!

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

 King Charles’s speech to Congress

Quite classy, IMHO, especially in current circumstances. Worth watching. Link

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Sheepishly

Our nearest neighbour in the Lake District, photographed shortly before we left for home. Herdwicks (which are native to the Lakes) are such beautiful animals.

Quote of the Day

”It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”

Noël Coward

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Lord Inchquin

Link

One of my favourite Irish airs.

Long Read of the Day

When Decentralization Fails

This essay  by Alex Chalmers is a long, long read, but in a way that’s appropriate because it addresses one of the biggest problems that societies will have to face (assuming we survive climate catastrophe), namely how to govern two kinds of technologies that we have recently invented — AI and (although Chalmers doesn’t address it directly) synthetic biology.

In a way the only comparable problem the world has had to address — at least in my lifetime — was the challenge of controlling nuclear weapons, and to date we have just-about managed that (though there have been a few close calls).

These newer technologies are different in one important respect, though. Whereas nukes were the sole prerogative of nation states, AI and synthetic biology are the property of giant corporations. And the bi-polar world in which the nuclear threat evolved (and was to some extent resolved) is fragmenting into a potentially chaotic, multipolar one.

Chalmers ends on an interesting note. Most governance questions are deployment problems where domain-specific knowledge is generated through practice — oncologists, not central regulators, hold the relevant knowledge for AI in cancer medicine, say. Existing institutions (professional bodies, universities, malpractice insurers, procurement officers, open-source communities) can govern within their domains, with state or interstate coordination reserved for the genuinely cross-cutting issues like frontier model weights.

This won’t fix production-side concentration of corporate power, but it can build countervailing power on the deployment side — so that AI giants have to satisfy many authorities rather than capturing one regulator. What happens at the deployment level of these technologies is where humans — and democracies — still have critical leverage and power, if they choose to exercise it.

I hope you can find time for it.

My commonplace booklet

Stockholm syndrome in Mar-a-Lago: The belief that “something must be done” and the sanewashing of economic policy in the age of Trump

Historian Adam Tooze, after reprising arguments that were largely incomprehensible to me, provides this helpful summary at the end:

None of us really knows where this clown car is headed and what drives it on its crazy course. It seems like a mystery even to many on board. Quite reasonably we look for elements of rationality. We ask: who inside MAGA 2.0 is thinking and what are their thoughts? We then relate that to our own efforts to diagnose America’s history and the history of the world economy. At the very least we need to explain how Trump 2.0 happened. Sometimes we will find a match between a strand of policy from inside MAGA and our own analysis and it is tempting to label that as “MAGA for thinking people” and to look for continuities with the Biden team etc. That mode of analysis is reasonable. To historically minded people it is appealing for obvious reasons. But it puts us at risk of is underestimating the radicalism of the break marked by the Trump administration. In search of historical context we miss what is most historically significant. We avoid facing the conclusion that the vision of a Mar-a-Lago Accord may have more in common with grift, a protection racket or a facelift pandering to the ignorant vanity of an old man than with economic policy as we have hitherto known it. Faced with Trump, the risk is that conventional realism is a form of escapism.

Which, oddly enough, is what I’ve felt since Trump took office.

Linkblog

To see or not to see? Every single Shakespeare play – ranked!

This is truly wonderful: the great theatre critic Benedict Nightingale’s analysis of all Shakespeare’s plays, in order of his preferences.

Many thanks to Christine Happel for alerting me to it.

Feedback

Lots of interesting emails arrived about the problems of being famous. Reading them made me remember Nuala Ó’Faolain, who was a great — and very well-known — Irish feminist when I was a student. A publisher asked her to write an autobiographical introduction to a collection of her newspaper columns, and she was stuck for a title. Then one day, when queueing at a supermarket checkout, a lady came up to her, looked at her closely, and asked “Are you somebody?” And Bingo, she had her title! And a world bestseller.

  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 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

No mist without fire?

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

Quote of the Day

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

• Bill Murray

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

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Rufus & Martha Wainwright | Sweet Thames, flow softly

Link

Long Read of the Day

How Brexit Created Britain’s New Political Tribes

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

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

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

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

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

My most recent Observer column:

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

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

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

Read on

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

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Making a typeface with potatoes

A group of typeface designers decided to have a go.

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

Screenshot

Link

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The Doll’s House

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

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

Screenshot

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

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Day

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

• Bernard Baruch

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Byrds | Ballad Of Easy Rider

Link

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

Long Read of the Day

What if we just stopped hyperscaling?

Fabulous essay by John Quiggin, the economist.

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

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

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

Books, etc.

Screenshot

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

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

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Zoombini

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

Quote of the Day

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

• Noel Coward

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Cello Suite 1 | Pablo Casals

Link

Long Read of the Day

You Are Not a Function

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yesterday’s Observer column

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

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

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

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

Read on

(Pdf version here).

My commonplace booklet

Two caveats on Orban’s defeat.

The first from John Quiggan:

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

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

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

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

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

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

Screenshot

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

Feedback

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

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

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

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

Tut,tut.

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