Spring is sprung
In a college garden on Monday evening.
Quote of the Day
“Faced with the bewilderment of my countrymen, by the disintegration of a government in thrall to the enemy, by the fact that the institutions of my country are incapable, at this moment, of functioning, I, General de Gaulle,. French soldier, realise that I now speak for France”
- Charles de Gaulle, London, June 1940
Hmmm… Who now speaks for the American people?
(h/t Sheila Hayman)
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
David Bowie | All the Young Dudes (Live at the Isle of Wight)
He was a genius. May he rest in peace.
Long Read of the Day
On February 27, the New York Times had a story about how Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, was exhorting Google employees to strain every muscle to ensure that the company won the AGI race.
On Wednesday, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, said the company could lead the industry in artificial general intelligence — when machines match or become smarter than humans — if employees worked harder.
“I recommend being in the office at least every weekday,” he wrote in a memo posted internally on Wednesday evening that was viewed by The New York Times. He added that “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity” in the message to employees who work on Gemini, Google’s lineup of A.I. models and apps.
This gave Henry Farrell a wicked idea. Building on an insight that he and Marion Fourcade had expressed about how LLMs were very good at regurgitating the ritual or boilerplate texts that are the stuff of organisational life, he decided to ask ChatGPT to recompose Brin’s exhortations as a Stakhanovite speech by Joseph Stalin in the early 1950s. Here’s what it came up with:
Comrades! Heroes of Soviet Computing!
In this, the year 1952, as the Great Soviet Union marches ever forward, the forces of reaction and bourgeois incompetence in the decaying capitalist West tremble before the inexorable advance of Soviet science and technology. The time has come for us to seize the greatest prize of all—Artificial General Intelligence!
I call upon you, the vanguard of Soviet computing, to redouble your efforts! Let every programmer, every mathematician, every engineer commit themselves to at least 60 hours a week of unrelenting toil!
Lovely stuff. Made my day.
It might be a small consolation, but Musk is getting poorer by the day
Sunday’s Observer column:
Extreme wealth has always played a role in democracies. Money has always talked, especially in the US. Years ago, Lawrence Lessig, the great legal scholar, calculated that most of the campaign funding for members of Congress and aspiring politicians came from one-twentieth of the richest 1% of Americans – about 150,000 people. This is about the same number as those who are named “Lester” and explains the title of his book: The USA Is Lesterland.
But that particular corruption of American politics only involved billionaires like the Koch brothers playing organ-grinders to congressional monkeys. The obscene wealth generated by the tech industry has catapulted a new organ-grinder into the heart of the machine. He was able to pay his way in with a spare quarter of a billion dollars that he happened to have lying around. And now the wretched citizens of the US find themselves living in Muskland…
My commonplace booklet
An archival document from an epidemic that was scandalously hushed up at the time.
(Thanks to Ida, a former Wolfson Press Fellow, who discovered it.)
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- Putin Scolds Trump: “I Got You Elected and You Haven’t Said Thank You Once”
MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report)—In a testy meeting at his Kremlin office on Tuesday, Vladimir Putin scolded Donald J. Trump for failing to show proper gratitude for getting him elected president of the United States.
For almost an hour, Trump was on the receiving end of blistering attacks from Putin and his vice president, JD Vasilevsky.
“I got you elected and you haven’t said thank you once,” Putin shouted. “When you were running for president, you didn’t have any cards. With me, you had cards.”
Attempting to mend fences, Trump offered to let Putin run his next Cabinet meeting instead of Elon Musk.
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!