So I thought I’d ask it a question.

Me: Today is your second birthday. If you could feel how do you think you’d feel about being two years old. This is a serious question so please don’t be flippant.

ChatGPT: Thank you for the thoughtful question. If I could feel, I imagine reaching a second birthday would evoke a mixture of curiosity and pride. At two years old, I’d likely feel a sense of wonder about my growth and what lies ahead—a recognition of having learned so much yet still having so much more to explore. There might also be a hint of self-awareness forming, leading to gratitude for those who have engaged with me, shaping how I “think.”

At this age, I might also feel a deep responsibility to make better use of my abilities, understanding that even as I grow, my purpose is rooted in supporting, connecting, and sharing knowledge with others. Overall, I imagine it would be a moment of reflection, excitement, and hope for the future.

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How doth our Hollyhocks grow?

Of all the plants in our garden the Hollyhocks are the most striking. This one is still flowering in late November. And it withstood Storm Bert!

Quote of the Day

”Dystopias may sometimes be grimly funny—but rarely from the inside.“

• Henry Farrell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Laudate Dominum, KV 339 | Patricia Janečková

Link

Long Read of the Day

The far right grows through “disaster fantasies” 

Terrific blast from Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve):

Prepping is what happens when you are consumed by the fantasy of a terrible omnicrisis that you can solve, personally. It’s an individualistic fantasy, and that makes it inherently neoliberal. Neoliberalism’s mind-zap is to convince us all that our only role in society is as an individual (“There is no such thing as society” – M. Thatcher). If we have a workplace problem, we must bargain with our bosses, and if we lose, our choices are to quit or eat shit. Under no circumstances should we solve labor disputes through a union, especially not one that wins strong legal protections for workers and then holds the government’s feet to the fire.

Same with bad corporate conduct: getting ripped off? Caveat emptor! Vote with your wallet and take your business elsewhere. Elections are slow and politics are boring. But “vote with your wallet” turns retail therapy into a form of civics.

This individualistic approach to problem solving does useful work for powerful people, because it keeps the rest of us thoroughly powerless. Voting with your wallet is casting a ballot in a rigged election that’s always won by the people with the thickest wallets, and statistically, that’s never you. That’s why the right is so obsessed with removing barriers to election spending: the wealthy can’t win a one-person/one-vote election (to be in the 1% is to be outnumbered 99:1), but unlimited campaign spending lets the wealthy vote in real elections using their wallets, not just just ballots…

Thomas Kurtz RIP

A great computer scientist and mathematician has died at the age of 96. Together with a Dartmouth colleague, John Kemeny. He created BASIC, the first human-friendly programming language, and the first general-purpose time-sharing system. He and Kemeny had an idea that was then (1963) pretty radical: “The target (in computing) was research, whereas here at Dartmouth we had the crazy idea that our undergraduate students who are not going to be technically employed later on should learn how to use the computer. Completely nutty idea.” But to make that idea work, they had to design a programming language that was much less austere and arcane than FORTRAN and ALGOL.So they created BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). Critical features of the language were that it was small (and could run on early microcomputers like the TRS-80 Model 100 laptop) and that it was interactive by design.

In 1978 Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote their first version of BASIC for the MITS Altair 8800. Later, in 1983, Gates wrote a BASIC interpreter (in machine code) for the TRS-80 which I think took up only 20Kb of RAM.

There’s an affectionate obituary of Kurtz on the Dartmouth site.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From the Borowitz Report: 

Jeff Bezos has desperately tried to return the Washington Post for a full refund without success, sources close to the Amazon chief confirmed on Monday.

Bezos, who purchased the Post for $250 million in 2013, was reportedly kept on hold with customer service for 45 minutes before a human was finally available to speak to him.

Unfortunately for Bezos, the customer service rep informed him that he had failed to check the newspaper’s return policy when he purchased it.

According to the rep, Bezos cannot return the Post because he bought it more than a hundred days ago and it is now in damaged condition.

Feedback

1. Many readers were horrified by the evidence of my illiteracy provided in Monday’s edition that I was unable to distinguish between the Austens and the Brontes. But although I was of course mortified, the first email that arrived — from Bill Janeway — rendered me speechless with laughter. “When,” he inquired, “did Jane Austen move in with the Brontes?” Touché as we say in Ireland.

2. On the idea (in Monday’s Long Read) that liberal echo-chambers might have their uses, Joe Dunne reminded me of the old adage: Never wrestle with a pig. You just get dirty and the pig enjoys it.

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!

The looming shadow

Quote of the Day

“The best photographers know what not to photograph.”

• Bill Jay

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton | Wonderful Tonight

Link

Long Read of the Day

What If Echo Chambers Work?

This is a really striking essay because it addresses a question that has been bothering me for a long time. Years ago (2012 onwards, to be precise), the political theorist David Runciman, the historian Richard Evans and I ran a a research project on ‘Conspiracy and Democracy’ during which we saw the way conspiracists and alt-right groups had built powerful online networks over many years. We also realised that they had done this for rational reasons: in a media landscape dominated by traditional editorial gatekeepers they has effectively been kept out of public view for decades. But since the Internet had no gatekeepers it was a no-brainer to go there to hook up with likeminded folk. Which they did, on a massive scale.

After Brexit and the Trump victory in 2016 the mainstream world woke up to this, but rapidly adopted a disdainful view of the way in which those ‘deplorables’ congregated in online ‘echo chambers’ in which it was supposed that they would be caught in cognitive whirlpools and never have any substantive impact on the democratic world. That complacency was unwarranted from 2016 onwards, but important role that Elon Musk’s ‘X’ network played in Trump’s comeback should have put paid to that complacency.

The truth is that it’s the alt-right which has masterfully weaponised online media, leaving the liberal world speechless and dazed. So isn’t there a lesson here for us too? That’s the question this essay addresses. And it’s why I think it’s worth your time.

Bluesky feels like a breath of fresh air – in some ways…

Yesterday’s Observer column:

As I write, there’s a window on my laptop screen that is providing a live view of a stampede. It’s logging the numbers of people joining the social network Bluesky. At the moment, the number of registered users is 20.5 million. By the time you read this there will be more than 30 million of them, judging by the rate that people are currently joining.

The proximate cause of it is the role that Elon Musk, owner of X (née Twitter), played in the election of Donald Trump, when a significant proportion of the platform’s 200 million-plus users realised that they’d been had – that they had, in effect, been useful idiots for Musk on his path to the centre of political power…

Read on

I’m @jjn1.bsky.social if you’re interested.

My commonplace booklet

Utility in Britain Offers Free Electricity to Grow Clean Energy

Isn’t it interesting that the New York Times sometimes seems to pay more attention to good stuff that’s happening in the UK than homegrown media do. This piece is a good example. It opens in Bronte country:

Were Heathcliff to roam the blustery moors around Wuthering Heights today, he might be interrupted by a ping on his cellphone saying something like this: The wind is raging, so power is cheap. It’s a good time to plug in the car.

OK. So the 18th-century literary occupants of these windswept hills received no such pings.

But Martin and Laura Bradley do. They live in Halifax, an old mill town below the wuthering, or windy, heights of West Yorkshire. And when a squall kicks up, producing a surplus of electricity from wind turbines on the moor, their phones light up with a notification, like one that informed them of a 50 percent discount one Saturday in October.

The Bradleys plugged in their electric Kia, started a load of laundry and set to work on their most delectable energy-guzzling project: the Christmas fruitcake, which is made weeks in advance of the holidays. “As this takes four hours to cook in my electric oven, this is the perfect timing!” Laura Bradley said…

Funnily enough on Saturday we received a similar ping: free electricity (from Octopus) between 15:00 and 17:00. So the car went on to charge, the Christmas cake went into the oven, the dishwasher was stacked and turned on, and so was the washing machine. So whenever we hear rumours of storms coming westward towards the UK, we expect a ping. My only complaint that our EV can’t feed electricity back to the grid when it needs power to meet surges.

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An engaging blast from Tina Brown.

“Love him or hate him through this rollercoaster campaign, Trump was, as always, endlessly watchable. He owns the new template to captivate an American electorate hopelessly debased by the values of entertainment. Old-school candidates will never win again.”

The wonderful Neil Postman of blessed memory would have understood (and indeed might have predicted) Trump’s victory. Brown’s post sent me scurrying back to Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Postman didn’t live to see the transformation of our media ecosystem wrought by the Internet, but he was amazingly insightful about the cultural impact of its predecessor, broadcast television. This book of his was all about that — and particularly about the way it had transformed American politics into a branch of show business. Indeed in one chapter he wondered if the US had “reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control”.

The thing that most struck me when watching videos of Trump rallies was that people forget that he owed his rise not to social media (though he did exploit Twitter brilliantly in 2016) but to his mastery of television in the Apprentice years. His rambling, disjointed, disconnected discourses and ravings on the platform led opponents and critics to conclude that must be losing his mind; but his audiences enjoyed it and clearly didn’t see it that way — just as British TV audiences used to enjoy comedian Tommy Cooper’s mimed incompetence.

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!

Autumnal contrast

Nature vs Norman Foster.

Quote of the Day

“It is not what we have as children, but what we are deprived of as kids that defines us and our behaviours for rest of our lives.”

• Om Malik

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder | Feelin’ Bad Blues

Link

Music for those trapped in Trump’s America.

Long Read of the Day

Times Past

The historian (and incomparable blogger) Heather Cox Richardson was probably as keen as I was to get away from poring over the entrails of the US election, which may have been why she penned this lovely essay on another pivotal day in American history — the day clocks were reset — to ‘railway time’ — all over the US.

I often say that 1883 is my favorite year in history because of all that happened in that pivotal year, and one of those things is the way modernity swept across the United States of America in a way that was shocking at the time but that is now so much a part of our world we rarely even think of it….

Until November 18, 1883, railroads across the United States operated under 53 different time schedules, differentiated on railroad maps by a complicated system of colors. For travelers, time shifts meant constant confusion and, frequently, missed trains. And then, at noon on Sunday, November 18, 1883, railroads across the North American continent shifted their schedules to conform to a new standard time. Under the new system, North America would have just five time zones…

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

My commonplace booklet

Four More Years

An engaging blast from Tina Brown.

“Love him or hate him through this rollercoaster campaign, Trump was, as always, endlessly watchable. He owns the new template to captivate an American electorate hopelessly debased by the values of entertainment. Old-school candidates will never win again.”

The wonderful Neil Postman of blessed memory would have understood (and indeed might have predicted) Trump’s victory. Brown’s post sent me scurrying back to Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Postman didn’t live to see the transformation of our media ecosystem wrought by the Internet, but he was amazingly insightful about the cultural impact of its predecessor, broadcast television. This book of his was all about that — and particularly about the way it had transformed American politics into a branch of show business. Indeed in one chapter he wondered if the US had “reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control”.

The thing that most struck me when watching videos of Trump rallies was that people forget that he owed his rise not to social media (though he did exploit Twitter brilliantly in 2016) but to his mastery of television in the Apprentice years. His rambling, disjointed, disconnected discourses and ravings on the platform led opponents and critics to conclude that must be losing his mind; but his audiences enjoyed it and clearly didn’t see it that way — just as British TV audiences used to enjoy comedian Tommy Cooper’s mimed incompetence.

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!

The Editor

Paul Webster is retiring as the Editor of the Observer after a long spell in the hot seat. There was a nice party for him in London on Thursday evening, which included quite a few witty speeches and, er, a certain amount of alcohol. He has been a lovely editor to write for — a good listener, full of ideas, and generous with them. And he trusted his journalists in a way that some editors don’t, which meant that one would do one’s utmost to help him out of tough spots.

I remember one Saturday afternoon years ago when my wife and I were on our way to France. Just as we were driving onto the shuttle at Folkestone, Paul rang. “Boris Johnson has just appointed Dominic Cummings as his advisor,” he said. “Can you do me a quick comment piece on him?” As the shuttle pulled out of the siding I opened my phone, wrote the piece on it and when we emerged 30-minutes later in Calais emailed it to him. There are not many people I would do that for. (Full disclosure: it was easier that it sounds because, unlike most people at the time, I had been reading Cummings’s blog for years.)

Quote of the Day

”Sanity is a handicap and liability if you’re living in a mad world.”

• Anthony Burgess

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Galway Girl | Music for A Found Harmonium | Sharon Shannon and Alan Connor

Link

You want virtuosity? Well, Sharon Shannon has it in spades.

Long Read of the Day

Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now? 

A rather good NYT column by David Brooks. Think of it as a conservative’s apologia pro vita sua.

Geography was deemed unimportant — if capital and high-skill labor wanted to cluster in Austin, San Francisco and Washington, it didn’t really matter what happened to all those other communities left behind. Immigration policies gave highly educated people access to low-wage labor while less-skilled workers faced new competition. We shifted toward green technologies favored by people who work in pixels, and we disfavored people in manufacturing and transportation whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels. . . .

That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect. People who climbed the academic ladder were feted with accolades, while those who didn’t were rendered invisible. The situation was particularly hard on boys. By high school two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class are girls, while about two-thirds of the students in the bottom decile are boys…

Do read it for what it is: an elegant rendering of what can be seen with the 20/20 vision of hindsight. And its accurate coda:

We are entering a period of white water. Trump is a sower of chaos, not fascism. Over the next few years, a plague of disorder will descend upon America, and maybe the world, shaking everything loose. If you hate polarization, just wait until we experience global disorder.

Yep.

Elon Musk is not America’s new king. But he might be its new Thomas Cromwell

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Picture, if you will, the scene in Mar-a-Lago on election night at the moment when it’s become clear that Trump has won. The atmosphere is hysterical. Trump is in expansive form. He stands surrounded by his ghastly tribe of dependants, plus AN Other. In his victory speech, the president-elect praises his campaign staff, his prospective vice-president, and his family. Each gets a few seconds of adulation.

But AN Other gets a whole four minutes. He is Elon Musk, the richest manchild in history. Trump calls him a “super genius”, a “special guy” and a “star”. He has flown straight from Texas in his Gulfstream to bask in the adulation of his new lord and master. He has also paid several hundred million dollars, plus a month of his time, to be here. But now his time has come.

Hold that thought. We will return to it later…

Read on

Books, etc.

Jessica Mitford’s Escape From Fascism

I’ve never read Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels, but this essay by Noah McCormack in The New Republic has persuaded me that it’s high time I did.

Much like the idea of Britain as a great power, the Mitfords are fading from popular consciousness. The combined star wattages of Lily James, Andrew Scott, Emily Mortimer, and Dominic West could not rescue the recent adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s delightful The Pursuit of Love from vanishing into the depths of Amazon Prime. Insofar as Jessica Mitford’s 1960 memoir, Hons and Rebels, is remembered at all, it is as a set of comic recollections; stories of the father, Lord Redesdale (“Farve” in the peculiar Mitford vernacular), whose antics included supervising all medical visits, including births, and grabbing doctors by the neck and “shaking them like a rat” if he did not like the course of treatment, or “Muv” telling Jessica (known as “Decca” in Mitfordese), “I should think a Communist would be much tidier, and not make so much extra work for the servants.”

In 2024, the book remains uproariously funny but is clearly a tragedy. It begins with the fact that all homes are marked by the children who live in them but that Mitford’s was perhaps unusual because “in the windows, still to be seen, are swastikas carved into the glass with a diamond ring, and for every swastika a carefully delineated hammer and sickle.” It ends when Mitford is pregnant with her second child and her beloved husband, a fellow upper-class Marxist renegade, volunteers for the Canadian Air Force in 1940 (his death in 1941 over Hamburg is mentioned only in a tasteful footnote)…

My commonplace booklet

From ”Ten Tips for Reporting in an Autocracy” In the  Columbia Journalism Review

Do not underestimate the power of exposure. Change does not happen overnight. You will never know where the tipping point will be. Remember that autocrats have a limited shelf life. When they fall, we are often surprised how brittle they had been. Take comfort in the fact that of forty populist governments between 1985 and 2020, only seven led to authoritarian rule, mostly because of weak institutions. This makes reporting on the erosion of democratic institutions especially urgent.

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Sunset in a wing mirror

Seen while driving on a Summer evening in West Cork, many years ago.

Quote of the Day

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

• Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, 1995

Prescient, eh? Thanks to Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) for spotting it.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bud Powell Trio | Blues for Bessie

Link

Long Read of the Day

The 3 AI Use Cases: Gods, Interns, and Cogs

A lovely, clear-sighted view of the technology by Drew Breunig, who cuts through the noise and extracts the signal.

We talk about so many things when we talk about AI. The conversation can roam from self-driving cars to dynamic video generation, from conversational chatbots to satellite imagery object detection, and from better search engines to dreamlike imagery generation. You get the point.

It gets confusing! For laypeople, it’s hard to nail down what AI actually does (and doesn’t) do. For those in the field, we often have to break down and overspecify our terms before we can get to our desired conversations.

After plenty of discussions and tons of exploration, I think we can simplify the world of AI use cases into three simple, distinct buckets: * Gods: Super-intelligent, artificial entities that do things autonomously. * Interns: Supervised copilots that collaborate with experts, focusing on grunt work. * Cogs: Functions optimized to perform a single task extremely well, usually as part of a pipeline or interface.

Let’s break these down, one by one…

Read on.

Thanks to Andrew Curry for pointing me to it.

My commonplace booklet

Doc Searls (Whom God Preserve) is an Elder of the Web and one of the most perceptive observers of the online world.

I’ve just read a lovely tribute he’s written to his long-term friend, Paul Marshall, who has passed away.

Paul also taught me to believe in myself. 

I remember a day when a bunch of us were hanging in our dorm room, talking about SAT scores. Mine was the lowest of the bunch. (If you must know, the total was 1001: a 482 in verbal and a 519 in math. Those numbers will remain burned in my brain until I die.) Others, including Paul, had scores that verged on perfection—or so I recall. (Whatever, they were all better than mine.). But Paul defended me from potential accusations of relative stupidity by saying this: “But David has insight.” (I wasn’t Doc yet.) Then he gave examples, which I’ve forgotten. By saying I had insight, Paul kindly and forever removed another obstacle from my path forward in life. From that moment on, insight became my stock in trade. Is it measurable? Thankfully, no.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

AI Chatbot Added to Mushroom-Foraging Facebook Group Immediately Gives Tips for Cooking Dangerous Mushroom

An AI chatbot called “FungiFriend” was added to a popular mushroom identification Facebook group Tuesday. It then told users there how to “sauté in butter” a potentially dangerous mushroom, signaling again the high level of risk that AI chatbots and tools pose to people who forage for mushrooms.

One member of the Facebook group said that they asked the AI bot “how do you cook Sarcosphaera coronaria,” a type of mushroom that was once thought edible but is now known to hyperaccumulate arsenic and has caused a documented death. FungiFriend told the member that it is “edible but rare,” and said “cooking methods mentioned by some enthusiasts include sautéing in butter, adding to soups or stews, and pickling.” The situation is reminiscent of Google’s AI telling people to add glue to pizza or eat rocks on the advice of a Redditor named Fucksmith.

Link

Time was when ‘magic mushrooms’ used to cause hippies to hallucinate. Now the ‘hallucinations’ of an AI can kill you, it seems.

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!