Monday 9 September, 2024

Stoned

Taken on the north shore of Galway Bay, with the ‘moonscape’ of the Burren in the far distance. The cairn was built by person or persons unknown. But it was asking to be photographed!


Quote of the Day

”Anyone can make a political case so compelling that he or she can’t see the flaws in it.”

  • Henry Farrell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chet Atkins, Leo Kottke and Doc Watson | Last Steam Engine Train

Link

Really fine example of the emergent properties of three great guitarists when you put them together.


Long Read of the Day

There is no “woke mind virus”

Striking essay by Dan Williams about the pernicious idea that if people disagree with you they must be suffering from the cerebral equivalent of Covid.

In the past several years, talk of the “woke mind virus” has itself gone viral among right-wing culture warriors. In a recent interview, Elon Musk alleged that the mind virus had even killed his child. What he meant was not that it had actually killed his child—they are very much alive—but that his child is transgender and so, apparently, dead to him.

According to Musk, he was “essentially tricked into signing documents” allowing his child to take puberty blockers, which “are actually just sterilization drugs.” This experience radicalised him: “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.”

The only polite term for this delusion is horseshit. Or, as Williams puts it,

Ideas, including bad ones, are not infectious mind viruses. This metaphor rests on an inaccurate picture of human psychology and social behaviour that functions to demonise, not understand. Because of this, it poisons public debate, increases polarisation, and hinders our collective capacities to understand the world and each other.

Great essay. Worth your time if you are as irritated by culture wars as I am.


So tech titans are not above the law after all

Yesterday’s Observer column

On 24 August, a Russian tech billionaire’s private jet landed at Le Bourget airport, north-east of Paris, to find that officers of the French judicial police were waiting for him. He was duly arrested and whisked away for interrogation. Four days later he was indicted on 12 charges, including alleged complicity in the distribution of child exploitation material and drug trafficking, barred from leaving France and placed under “judicial supervision”, which requires him to check in with the gendarmes twice a week until further notice.

The mogul in question, Pavel Durov, is a tech entrepreneur who collects nationalities the way others collect air miles. In fact it turns out that one of his citizenships is French, generously provided in 2021 by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron. Durov is also, it seems, a fitness fanatic with a punishing daily regime. “After eight hours of tracked sleep,” the Financial Times reports, “he starts the day ‘without exception’ with 200 push-ups, 100 sit-ups and an ice bath. He does not drink, smoke, eat sugar or meat, and saves time for meditation.” When not engaged in these demanding activities, he has also found time to father more than 100 kids as a sperm donor and to rival Elon Musk as a free-speech extremist.

Media profiles of Durov bring to mind Churchill’s celebrated description of Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Durov left Russia because the Facebook clone he co-founded with his brother Nikolai in 2006 led to conflict with the Kremlin…

Read on

Later…

This from the New York Times:

Telegram has become a global sewer of criminal activity, disinformation, child sexual abuse material, terrorism and racist incitement, according to a four-month investigation by The New York Times that analyzed more than 3.2 million Telegram messages from over 16,000 channels. The company, which offers features that enable criminals, terrorists and grifters to organize at scale and to sidestep scrutiny from the authorities, has looked the other way as illegal and extremist activities have flourished openly on the app.

The degree to which Telegram has been inundated by such content has not been previously reported. The Times investigation found 1,500 channels operated by white supremacists who coordinate activities among almost one million people around the world. At least two dozen channels sold weapons. In at least 22 channels with more than 70,000 followers, MDMA, cocaine, heroin and other drugs were advertised for delivery to more than 20 countries.

And this fascinating account by Politico on how the French authorities closed in on Durov.


My commonplace booklet

**Intel’s problems in a nutshell:

  • Intel doesn’t have the best manufacturing
  • Intel doesn’t design the best chips
  • Intel is out of the game in AI

Devastating summary by Ben Thompson, who for a long time had been giving Intel the benefit of the doubt.


Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Churchill: the naked truth

He made quite an impression during his time as the guest of two presidents. The chief usher at the White House recalled that “In his room, Mr Churchill wore no clothes at all most of the time during the day.” Churchill’s bodyguard remarked how President Franklin Roosevelt knocked on the door of the prime minister’s suite during Churchill’s first White House visit in December 1941, only to find that “Winston Churchill was stark naked, a drink in one hand, a cigar in the other.” Roosevelt, clearly flustered, offered to leave, but Churchill demurred: “You see, Mr President, I have nothing to hide.” The two leaders then spoke for an hour.

From the Economist’s review of Mr Churchill in the White House by Robert Schmuhl.


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Friday 6 September, 2024

The Bridge

Crossing the Severn last Sunday.


Quote of the Day

I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

  • Peter Thiel, writing in an online libertarian journal in 2009

Footnote Palantir, the company founded by Thiel (with investment from the CIA) now has the contract to build a data platform for the UK’s NHS.


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Edward Elgar | Salut d’amour Op. 12 | Berliner Philharmoniker

Link

Pure schmaltz, but what the hell.


Long Read of the Day

 Silicon Valley is an aristocratic culture

Background: On Sunday last, my Observer column was about the reading habits of the Silicon Valley crowd. It was prompted by reading a reading list created by Patrick Collison, and a Substack post by Tanner Greer commenting on the list and arguing that the literary ‘culture’ of Washington D.C. differs critically from the reading habits of Silicon Valley.

Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) has taken issue with this in his usual erudite way.

The actual difference, as I see it, is not one between the philistines of the Beltway and the bibliophiles of the Valley. It is between a technocratic culture in which the public display of a sound general education is irrelevant and an aristocratic one where it can be a valuable asset. Doing well in DC policy circles depends on technocratic knowledge, bureaucratic ruthlessness and connections that are mostly acquired through work or shared education. To do well in Silicon Valley, you want these things, but you also may prosper better if also you appear to have cultivated the appropriate personal dispositions. Being able to talk in the right ways about certain books may persuade others that you might have those dispositions. Hence, it makes it more likely that your start-up will be picked for Y Combinator, get early funding from the right places and so on.

Most of the elements of this explanation are already there in Tanner’s post, but they are partly obscured by his embrace of Silicon Valley’s self-generated mythology of disruption and rebellion. To the extent that Silicon Valley, unlike DC, has a ‘canon’ of books, it is not because Silicon Valley people care more about books than their Beltway equivalents. It is because book-learning does a different kind of cultural work in the Valley than inside the Beltway…

Like everything Farrell writes, it’s interesting. And his conclusion is rather different from Tanner’s. “Silicon Valley has changed remarkably in the intervening two decades,” he writes.

Its culture now centers not simply on technology but the exercise of power. Powerful founders and funders not only aspire to make lots of money, but to reshape the world along better lines. They see themselves as a political elite as well as a financial one, and they are looking to educate themselves, often in ways that reinforce their own values and understanding of their own benevolent role. They want to be formed, and accidentally or consciously form others too.

Worth your time if you are interested in this stuff.


Books, etc.

Screenshot

Unlike more sensible people I am more wired than is good for me. But I’ve also always carried a paper notebook — and still do. So I was interested to see this book — and then find “Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era”, an interesting excerpt from it, by its author.

Might even have to read it. For now, though, I’ve just scribbled a note in my notebook.


Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

  • The Geek’s Prayer

Lord, grant me the acumen to automate the tasks that do not require my personal attention,

the strength to avoid automating the tasks that do,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

From Phil Giammetti’s Mastodon, via Quentin.


Feedback

  • On Monday I mentioned an historian’s view that the prevalence of evangelical rhetoric in American public life have something to do with the skills on display at the Democratic Congress? Rex Davies is sceptical. “Having taught presentation skills internationally, I deduced that the American educational tradition of ‘show & tell’ is the cause. Children are required to address their classmates on a regular basis in the U.S. education system. Experience of public speaking in these formative years accounts for their oratorial expertise in later life. Subsequent bible-bashing may burnish these skills but simple practice – from an early age – makes perfect.

  • And on the Tesla cartoon… David Ballard added a cautionary note: “Also be careful of the autocratic transmission!”

  • The photograph of the beautifully maintained Alvis car in last Friday’s edition prompted Mark Sherman, a wizard restorer of older American vintage cars to send a photo of one of his beautifully-restored black Packards “which occasionally causes someone to comment that they look ‘gangsterish’. I point out that back in the day – gangsters drove Cadillacs, Police drove Lincolns, and the Judge that sentenced you drove a Packard…”.


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Wednesday 4 September, 2024

The wisdom of dogs

This is one of my favourite photographs. It was taken in Antibes in August 2010. We were driving along the beachfront on a blisteringly hot Sunday afternoon when I suddenly saw this scene. The owners of the little dog were lying in the sunshine, baking like sausages on a spit. And it seemed to me that their pet was reflecting on the foolishness of human animals. Smart mutt.


Quote of the Day

”Asking if a machine can think is as relevant as asking if submarines can swim.”


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sorcha Richardson | Map of Manhattan

Link


Long Read of the Day

Stone Age builders were good engineers.

That’s the conclusion of a study of a 6000-year old monument as reported in a recent paper published in Nature.

The Neolithic farmers and herders who built a massive stone chamber in southern Spain nearly 6,000 years ago possessed a good rudimentary grasp of physics, geometry, geology and architectural principles, finds a detailed study of the site.

Using data from a high-resolution laser scan, as well as unpublished photos and diagrams from earlier excavations, archaeologists pieced together a probable construction process for the monument known as the Dolmen of Menga. Their findings, published on 23 August in Science Advances1, reveal new insights into the structure and its Neolithic builders’ technical abilities.

A truly astonishing read. “These people had no blueprints to work with, nor, as far as we know, any previous experience at building something like this,” says study co-author Leonardo García Sanjuán, an archaeologist at the University of Seville in Spain. “And yet, they understood how to fit together huge blocks of stone” with “a precision that would keep the monument intact for nearly 6,000 years”.


My commonplace booklet

The public discourse about ‘AI’ (aka machine-learning) is messy and incoherent with everyone on a spectrum that ranges from doom/existential risk at one extreme to cynical shrugging it off as just another tech fad (like crypto, say) at the other. From the beginning I’ve been pragmatic about the technology: the thing it first reminded me of was the spreadsheet — and it looked to me to be really just a new tool for human ‘augmentation’ as dear old Doug Engelbart would have put it.

I still see it that way, but am sometimes berated by sceptics with talk of ‘hallucinations’, the alleged absence of real use-cases for the technology and so on.

All of which is by way of explaining why I welcomed something posted this week by Andrew Jassy, the CEO of Amazon and someone who really does know about use-cases. Here’s his post:

One of the most tedious (but critical tasks) for software development teams is updating foundational software. It’s not new feature work, and it doesn’t feel like you’re moving the experience forward. As a result, this work is either dreaded or put off for more exciting work—or both.

Amazon Q, our GenAI assistant for software development, is trying to bring some light to this heaviness. We have a new code transformation capability, and here’s what we found when we integrated it into our internal systems and applied it to our needed Java upgrades:

  • The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real).

  • In under six months, we’ve been able to upgrade more than 50% of our production Java systems to modernized Java versions at a fraction of the usual time and effort. And, our developers shipped 79% of the auto-generated code reviews without any additional changes.

  • The benefits go beyond how much effort we’ve saved developers. The upgrades have enhanced security and reduced infrastructure costs, providing an estimated $260M in annualized efficiency gains.

This is a great example of how large-scale enterprises can gain significant efficiencies in foundational software hygiene work by leveraging Amazon Q. It’s been a game changer for us, and not only do our Amazon teams plan to use this transformation capability more, but our Q team plans to add more transformations for developers to leverage.

Of course that particular use of the technology is very specific. But the numbers are impressive, and I think credible.


Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

  •  My First Trip to Norway, With A.I. as a Guide. A NYT journalist asked three ‘AI’ travel planners for advice, and then wrote it up. As someone who doesn’t do package holidays, cruises (or guided tours), this wouldn’t appeal to me. But maybe it works for some people.

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Monday 2 September, 2024

Trompe-l’œil

Arles, 2022. Caused me to do a double-take.


Quote of the Day

“If reading is one of the pleasures – and necessities – of youth, rereading is one of the pleasures – and necessities – of age. You know more, you understand both life and literature better, and you have the additional interest of checking your younger self against your older self.”

  • Julian Barnes

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Field | Nocturne No. 1 in E Flat Major, H.24 | Elizabeth Joy Roe

Link

I love all Field’s Nocturnes, but most of all this one.


Long Read of the Day

How Ireland became the world’s literary powerhouse

Slightly hyperbolic headline but still an interesting journalistic investigation by Kate McCusker into why my country seems to breed good writers.

“The Irish just chat about everything. We love telling tales and yarning. There’s no other country where you could talk for an hour about the weather,” says Aisling Cunningham, 57, the owner of Ulysses Rare Books on Duke Street in Dublin.

Sure enough, I have been here for 50 minutes and we have talked at length about everything from the biblical rains of Donegal to why more people who stop into her antiquarian bookshop end up leaving with a copy of James Joyce’s Dubliners than Ulysses itself. (Cunningham reckons it’s because the former is more accessible – although there is also the small matter of the Shakespeare and Company first edition of the latter costing just short of €30,000, about £25,500.)

I am in Dublin to find out why Ireland, a country that you can drive the length of in a few hours, punches so far above its weight when it comes to literature. It has contributed four Nobel literature laureates and six Booker prize winners; its capital was the fourth Unesco City of Literature in 2010; and it’s home to a booming network of magazines, publishers, bookshops, festivals and (whisper it) decently funded libraries…

One of those libraries played a key role in the education of this blogger.


My commonplace booklet

I spent more time than I should have watching the main speakers at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week. What struck me was the level of oratory on display, particularly in speeches by Kamala Harris, Michelle and Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Tim Walz. Even Joe Biden seemed energised and eloquent. And I was left struggling (and failing) to think of any British (or European) politician who could deliver a speech as good or as eloquent as any of these.

A knowledgeable historian friend to whom I said this afterwards observed that the prevalence of evangelical rhetoric in American public life might have something to do with it. I wonder.


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Can you judge the tech bros by their bookshelves?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

In August, a thoughtful blogger, Tanner Greer, posed an interesting question to the Silicon Valley crowd: “What are the contents of the ‘vague tech canon’? If we say it is 40 books, what are they?” He was using the term “canon” in the sense of “the collection of works considered representative of a period or genre”, but astutely qualifying it to stop Harold Bloom – the great literary critic who spent his life campaigning for a canon consisting of the great works of the past (Shakespeare, Proust, Dante, Montaigne et al) – spinning in his grave.

Greer’s challenge was immediately taken up by Patrick Collison, co-founder with his brother, John, of the fintech giant Stripe (market value $65bn) and thus among the richest Irishmen in history. Unusually among tech titans, Collison is a passionate advocate of reading, and so it was perhaps predictable that he would produce a list of 43 books – adding a caveat that it wasn’t “the list of books that I think one ought to read – it’s just the list that I think roughly covers the major ideas that are influential here”. (“Here” being Silicon Valley.)

The list included some predictable choices…

Read on

Friday 30 August, 2024

Petrolhead nostalgia

As long-suffering readers of this blog know, I am a recovering petrolhead — and the only member of my extended family who can recognise vintage cars at sight. I spotted this beautifully-preserved 1960s Alvis TD21 in a car park the other day. When I was a kid I thought of an Alvis as the kind of car a gent with private means and handmade tweed suits might own, rather than a Jaguar MkII which would seem — to him — a bit raffish. (I can say this because I once had a blue MkII, and I was definitely a bit raffish then. Fortunately, the Yom Kippur war and the quadrupling of oil prices cured me of that particular addiction.)


Quote of the Day

“Just as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”

  • Paul Valery, Pieces sur l’Art, 1934.

Amazingly prescient. Just like David Bowie about ‘music like water’ (in 2002) and E.M. Forster about the Web (in 1909.

Thanks to Philip Steadman for pointing me to it.


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Long Time Traveller | Wailing Jennys

Link


Long Read of the Day

Real estate shopping for the apocalypse

Wonderful New Yorker essay by Patricia Marx on the market for domestic nuclear bunkers in the US.

What if they’re right? What if a nuke drops, or climate change turns the world into a foaming puddle, or the next pandemic is spread through selfies? Billionaires have recently been spending millions building themselves customized bunkers, in the hope that they can ride out the apocalypse in splendor. In January, a video surfaced of the rapper Rick Ross bragging that his bunker will be better than Elon Musk’s bunker. (Musk is not known to have a bunker, but that’s a detail.) Ross’s bunker will have multiple “wings” and a “water maker.” Also, plenty of canned goods. Ross’s bunker might even have its own bunker. But what about me—and, if I’m being generous, you? Are there affordable underground shelters available for us to hole up in?

A few months back, I started to scan real-estate Web sites. Hmm, I wondered. Might throw pillows brighten up the underground scheelite mine in Beaver County, Utah, that was converted into a community fallout shelter during the Cold War (a steal at nine hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars, when you consider how many light-bulb filaments you could make from the leftover tungsten you could knock loose)? Or how about the concrete-and-steel stronghold in Hilliard, Ohio, built by A.T. & T. and the Army in 1971 to protect the nation’s communications system in case of nuclear attack? It comes with a “1970’s-era smoking room.” (Note to self: Take up smoking a few months before world ends.) Would house guests get the hint if I mentioned that my new home had three-thousand-pound blast-proof doors? ($1.25 million for nine acres.)

Keep reading. It’s a scream.


Books, etc.

I’ve just discovered this — a book by Dan Mulhall about my native land as the 19th century morphed into the 20th. The blurb says that

“it describesthe political and cultural ferment that gripped Ireland the last time a century turned. Based on contemporary books and newspaper sources, and copiously illustrated with photographs from the period, this book offers a stark insight into the conditions that prevailed in the Ireland of 1900. There is an account of the crimes that captured public attention at a time when urban and rural poverty were rife, the emigrant ship remained a common experience and the workhouse often provided a last refuge for the poor and the old.”

I know Dan slightly. He was the Irish Ambassador to the UK when I first met him (and was later Irish Ambassador to the US, after which he retired). He’s also a keen and knowledgeable Joycean (he wrote a chatty, readable guide to Ulysses, for example), and he was the only diplomat I knew of who tweeted regularly about Joyce, the poetry of W.B. Yeats and related matters. So I’d better catch up with A New Day Dawning before I run into him again.


My commonplace booklet

From Tortoise media’s newsletter yesterday:

Time capsules rarely attract more fanfare at their unveiling than their installation, but an unexpected one at London’s National Gallery certainly has. Constructors uncovered a letter entombed within one of two false concrete columns in the foyer of the Sainsbury Wing. The letter was written in 1990 by donor John Sainsbury (Sainsbury and his two brothers Simon and Timothy originally donated £40 million to the National Gallery for its extension) and snuck into the column during its installation. It details Sainsbury’s great disdain for the column, which he described as “a mistake of the architect” that the National Gallery would “live to regret”. Regret indeed, as more than 30 years on, the letter was discovered in the pillar’s demolition during the wing’s redevelopment, due to reopen in May next year. John Sainsbury died in 2022, but the 1990 letter makes clear how he would have felt. It reads: “Let it be known that one of the donors of this building is absolutely delighted that your generation has decided to dispense with the unnecessary column.” A gloriously petulant “I told you so” from beyond the grave.


Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From the current issue of Private Eye (Which God Preserve)


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Wednesday 28 August, 2024

The millennial spire

A church that is over 900 years old, framed by autumnal leaves.


Quote of the Day

”When confronted with magical thinking by dictators, historians feel out of place, like a bridge player invited to judge prestidigitation, say, or a surgeon hired to care for wax figures.”

  • Timothy Snyder

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Peter Maxwell Davies | Lullaby for Lucy (1981)

Link

Words by the Scottish poet George Mackay Brown for the birth of Lucy Randall, the first child born in Rackwick, Hoy, in 32years.


Long Read of the Day

Stranded Astronauts and the Biggest Disruption In (modern) Business History

An interesting and instructive essay by Andrew McAfee whose book The Geek Way on how corporations have changed and evolved over a century or more. There’s a whiff of techno-worship and whiggery in his writing, but he’s invariably interesting and knowledgeable. I found this particular essay informative, and it contains some charts that make one sit up, especially the ones that compare the West and East coasts of the US. He begins with the irony of how Boeing (an old-style industrial corporation) took an unconscionable time to build a spacecraft that could take astronauts to the International Space Station, but is unable to take them back to earth. So they will have to be rescued by — guess what? — by a SpaceX rocket built by Elon Musk’s geeks! And it turns out that they only brought underwear for a short stay.


My commonplace booklet

Barry Blitt’s front cover of the current issue of the New Yorker.


Linkblog

Stolen iPhone. I Survived.

David Birch’s iPhone was stolen. He’s written a really helpful account of how he mitigated the potential damage. He sums up the lessons thus:

If your iPhone is snatched:

First, use your laptop (or a friend’s laptop) log in to your Apple account immediately, wipe the iPhone and change your iCloud password. Do this before you call the police or anyone else.

Second, use your spare phone (or a friend’s phone) and call the phone company get the number blocked.

Third, call the police and get the crime number you will need for your insurance. The police are not going to do anything about getting your phone back (it would take every police officer in Britain to do something about this).

To which I would add — if you’re in London (and especially in Westminster — where almost a third of the thefts occur — do not walk around with your iPhone in your hand or in an accessible pocket.

The latest figures (from the Office of National Statistics) show that over the last decade mobile phones have overtaken cash and payment cards as the items most often stolen from individuals in the UK.


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!


Monday 26 August, 2024

Before the Fall

Seen on a woodland walk yesterday.


Quote of the Day

”Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”

  • David Bowie, speaking to the New York Timesin 2002!.

Amazingly perceptive. Apple’s iPod was just a year old and we were all carrying our music around with us, rather as Victorian tourists in India carried bottles of boiled water. And now we just turn on the tap marked ‘Spotify’.


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Piano Sonata No. 12 in F Major, K. 332: II. Adagio | Seong-Jin Cho

Link


Long Read of the Day

You may think that; I couldn’t possibly comment

Lovely blog post by Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve) on the vexed topic of the comments that appear under many articles published online.

When you arrive at the bottom of a story on a news site, you will—especially if the story appears in the “Opinion” section—often find yourself effectively being invited to comment on what you’ve just read. Come on, you’re not just a reader now: you’re also one of the people with the power to make your voice heard! At last you can stick it to The Man!

So what’s your reaction when you find that 1,500 people have already commented on the article?

So when you see that number, do you think: wa-hey! This must have some fun going on, it’s time that people heard my view on this too.

Or do you think: there cannot possibly be any value in being the 1,501st comment below this story.

My guess is that you fall into the latter category. And yet there are plenty of people out there who do not. They see an article with 200 comments—arguably more than even a quite devoted reader who reaches that point is going to bother with—and think to themselves what this really needs is my opinion, because that’s what people have been missing in all this.

Read on.

Speaking personally…. I’ve always been opposed to comment streams that are not moderated — and many (most?) are not because moderation costs money. What unmoderated commenting reveals is that most people haven’t the faintest idea of how to formulate an argument.

Years ago I had an interesting conversation with a well-known journalist who had recently taken up photography and was delightedly posting his work on Flickr — and also following other photographers on the platform. He particularly liked the pictures of one of his followees and one day wrote to him complimenting him on an image but suggesting that it might have been even more effective if it had been cropped in a certain way.

And the response? “Go f**k yourself.”

Constructive criticism is an art not widely understood..


Books, etc.

David Spiegelhalter (Boris Johnson’s least favourite statistician) has a new book coming in September. Hooray!


AI cheating, the education system and common sense

Yesterday’s Observer column:

LLMs are a burning issue for the humanities in particular because the essay is such a key pedagogical tool for teaching students how to research, think and write. More importantly, perhaps, the essay also plays a central role in how they are graded and assessed. The bad news is that LLMs threaten to make that venerable pedagogy untenable. And that there’s no technical fix in sight.

The good news is that the problem isn’t insoluble – if educators in these disciplines are willing to rethink and adapt their teaching to the new reality. Other pedagogies are available. But they require, if not a change of heart, two changes of mindset.

The first is an acceptance that LLMs – as the distinguished Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik puts it – are “cultural technologies”, like writing, print, libraries and internet search. In other words, they are tools for human augmentation, not replacement.

Second, and more importantly perhaps, is a need to reinforce in students’ minds the importance of writing as a process…

Read on


My commonplace booklet

On the language of LLMs

Rob Nelson has a marvellous essay on his Substack

At its core, the debate over how to treat LLMs is about the relationship between computation and cognition. Enthusiasts don’t see a problem with using the concepts of human cognition to describe the behavior of LLMs. For skeptics, human thought is vastly more complex than the computational processes happening in even the largest models, and because LLMs do not understand context, they do not know anything. Using words like think, write, or speak to describe what LLMs do is a category error. As Edsger Dijkstra analogized, asking if a machine can think is as relevant as asking if submarines can swim.

The essay is particularly good on the confusions that arise when machine-learning researchers use terms like ‘attention’ in a very specialised way — as a word to describe the information processing that occurs in a transformer-based LLM, but which is totally unlike how we use the term in ordinary human-to-human discourse. Just to underline the problem, the seminal 2017 research paper in which Google researchers announced the conceptual breakthrough represented by the ‘transformer’ model had the provocative title “Attention Is All You Need”.


Feedback

My comments on how the Breugel painting in last Wednesday’s edition highlighted the ways agriculture has changed over the centuries reminded Joe Dunne of another painting — John Constable’s ‘The Cornfield’.

(For a zoomable version click here)

Joe thinks that in the painting Constable was criticising the impact of the Industrial Revolution on farming. Young people were moving to the cities to work in factories where they could get better and stable wages. And he lists evidence in the painting supporting this conjecture. For example:

  • There are only three workers in the field compared to 20 in Breugel’s 1565 ‘The Harvesters’.
  • The gate is hanging off its hinges – nobody to fix it (the donkeys & sheep have access to the wheat field so it’s vulnerable to damage).
  • The farmer inside the gate of the wheat field is quite old (stooped) indicating the youth have left for the city.
  • The plough is still out in the open and therefore rusting even though it’s now August (corn is ripe) and the ploughing was done in March. No staff to look after it properly.
  • The tree on the left of the painting is dead – no staff to render the lane safe by cutting it down.
  • The young boy in the foreground is looking after the sheep – no mature adult available to do this job.

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Friday 23 August, 2024

I Love Nice

Actually, I don’t. Taken at 11pm outside the bus station in Nice during an interminable wait for my grandson to arrive from Florence.


Quote of the Day

“Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising. Those whom the public criticizes most, usually end up as full-blown mediocrities. A writer who has produced a respectable body of work and still writes on may be past his prime. He may go into a decline of intellectual menopause, producing more and more of what he does best with less and less feeling until the mechanical becomes habitual and the habit becomes invincible.”

  • Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise.

Hmmm……see below.


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Andy Irvine, Donal Lunny & Paul Brady at The Embankment in 1976

Link

I think the two tunes are ‘Munster Buttermilk’ and ’Tripping up the Stairs’. The incorporation of the Greek bouzouki into Irish folk music in the mid-1960s was a major event, and the instrument was subsequently retuned by Andy Irvine who, according to Wikipedia “replaced the octave strings on the two lower G and D courses with unison strings, thus reinforcing their lower frequencies” making it an Irish bouzouki!


Long Read of the Day

Steve Bannon’s Dangerous “Dharma” Boston Review

This is a transcript of an interesting interview that Deborah Chasman had with the documentary-maker Errol Morris marking the release of his new documentary on Donald Trump’s former advisor, Steve Bannon, “who is loathed on the left at least as much as the president himself”.

Morris is a great director who made The Fog of War, a memorable series of interviews with Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense who oversaw the US’s war in Vietnam. In more recent times, he made a film on Donald Rumsfeld, who was George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense. So the obvious first question put to him by Ms Chasman is: what draws him to obnoxious characters?

Errol Morris: In the case of the two secretaries of defense and now Bannon, they’re people who have wielded enormous power. It’s the power and the destructiveness combined that is fascinating. The psychology of these people is hard to parse. With Rumsfeld, I felt I put my finger on it: at the heart of it was this almost impossible vanity and self-satisfaction. I call him the least Jewish person I’ve ever met because of his lack of self-knowledge, lack of self-loathing, guilt, remorse. All that was left when you sieved everything out was this enormous pleasure at himself and his own sense of righteousness—“I am right, and you are wrong.” McNamara was never trying to convince you that he was smart; he just was smart, and tortured.

Bannon has this odd career because you would assume, having been tossed out of the Trump administration, that that would be more or less the end of him; he might appear as a pundit on Fox News and otherwise we wouldn’t hear from him again. But of course that’s not what has happened. And that in itself is really interesting, this life after life. It bears out a lot of his claims, one of which was that he saw himself as bigger than just a political advisor to Trump. Evidently, bigger means he wants to take his message—his crusade—global; he’s in love with the Crusades and he himself has started yet another. He wants to destabilize Europe and he’s having some success. He wants to put an end to the European Union. He wants to put an end to the euro. He wants to undermine the May government, the Merkel government, and the Macron government and install right-wing administrations in their place. And he’s already been successful to the extent that he played a major role in the political coalition that now governs Italy…

‘dharma’, btw, is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “The principle or law that orders the universe.” (No, I didn’t know either, but it’s an interesting interview despite that.)

Footnote: For an intriguing little film by Morris that conveys what he’s like, see this New York Times video on “the umbrella man”. He’s also written a rather good book on documentary photography, Believing is Seeing.


My commonplace booklet

Venkatesh Rao’s definition of ‘intellectual menopause’ from his essay on the subject.

Intellectual menopause is an individual disease that men of particular temperaments and a particular age range (40-50) are particularly vulnerable to. It is especially liable to be triggered if they’re part of a paradigm that’s beginning to exhaust itself when they begin their careers, and is likely to infect entire cohorts. It is likely to manifest through behaviors like a focus on abstract values, manifestos, bestowing advice upon younger people, “attitudinizing” one’s own past, or retreating from frontline creative endeavors to supervisory and managerial ones. It is is a symptom of a phase in the lifecycle of complex social systems.


Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

  • Is the Gartner ‘hype cycle’ generalisable?

The Economist decided to do some empirical work.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to test whether a hype cycle is an empirical regularity. “Since it is vibe-based data, it is hard to say much about it definitively,” notes Ethan Mollick of the University of Pennsylvania. But we have had a go at saying something definitive, extending work by Michael Mullany, an investor, that he conducted in 2016. The Economist collected data from Gartner, which for decades has placed dozens of hot technologies where it believes they belong on the hype cycle. We then supplemented it with our own number-crunching.

We find, in short, that the cycle is a rarity. Tracing breakthrough technologies over time, only a small share—perhaps a fifth—move from innovation to excitement to despondency to widespread adoption. Lots of tech becomes widely used without such a rollercoaster ride. Others go from boom to bust, but do not come back. We estimate that of all the forms of tech which fall into the trough of disillusionment, six in ten do not rise again. Our conclusions are similar to those of Mr Mullany: “An alarming number of technology trends are flashes in the pan.”

Interesting. I have found the Hype Cycle to be a good way of opening a conversation about tech, but maybe it doesn’t capture the overall reality of tech evolution. As the Economist notes, cloud computing went “from zero to hero” in a straight line. And the same may be happening with solar power. But how will the ‘AI’ bubble play out?


Feedback

Thanks to a reader, Melwyn Godinho, I discovered that the BBC World Service’s Moving Pictures documentary strand had a lovely episode about the picture which had led Wednesday’s edition of this blog. From it I learned how much more there is to the painting than I had imagined. As a result I’ve been brooding on it all week.

Great works of art do that — they have a way of burrowing into one’s consciousness, so that you can’t stop thinking about them. I was the Observer’s television critic for many years, and when I decided to move on to other things I was asked to name the best TV productions I’d seen during that time. And I used that criterion — of whether a work had taken up a space in my head — to decide. Top of the list was Edgar Reitz’s Heimat trilogy, which chronicled life in Germany from 1918 to 2000 through the eyes of a family from the Hunsrück area of the Rhineland-Palatinate. The family’s personal and domestic life is set against the backdrop of wider social and political events in Germany, and when I was watching it, week by week, I simply could not get its characters — and their stories — out of my head. Other works that had the same effect included Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, Alan Plater’s The Barchester Chronicles (and especially Alan Rickman as Mr Slope) and Alan Bleasdale’s The Boys from the Blackstuff.


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Wednesday 21 August, 2024

Harvesting then and now

This remarkable 1565 painting by Pieter Breugel the Elder stopped me in my tracks the other day. It’s fascinating in its detail (for a much bigger version click on the image here) — right down to the people who may be skinny-dipping in a small lake in the far distance, the man bringing a pitcher of water to the others sitting under the tree, and the exhausted man asleep. But it’s also an interesting illustration of how agricultural practices have changed over the centuries.

Consider the number of people involved in harvesting that crop, and then look at this:

This field, which is farmed by a neighbour of ours, is truly vast — stretching almost as far as the eye can see. Yet its cereal crop was harvested in three days by two men (albeit with a couple of enormous machines). And then it was ploughed by a single man in a huge tractor in (I think) two days.


Quote of the Day

“If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking”

  • Benjamin Franklin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Ruth Moody | Wherever I Go

Link


Long Read of the Day

Fixed Narratives, Fixing Narratives

Fabulous essay by Timothy Burke which starts with a scorching critique of the New York Times’s delusional (and dangerous) pursuit of editorial ‘balance’ at a time when that requires ‘balancing’ rational thinking and analysis with the ravings of a deluded ex-President and his supporting cast of right-wing nutters.

The NYT is really at its worst in this year’s campaign cycle, to the point that I’m a bit at a loss to imagine what’s going on in the newsroom. Their behavior is so programmatic that I have to think they’re consciously pursuing an obsessive, almost lunatic version of “balance” in their coverage of both presidential campaigns. It’s so over the top and calculated that it ends up feeling less like news coverage and more like an attempt to be a third side—not even being a referee but an advocate set against both campaigns on behalf of some imagined and very Rube Goldberg jerry-rigged “centrism”. Nate Cohn’s weird freak-out about how Harris was far to the left on economic policy right after she moved into the lead spot was a foretaste of what we’ve had ever since.

Today’s piece on why Harris is wrong that inflation has anything to do with price gouging is a good example of what this drive is doing to the clarity and structure of NYT news analysis. It’s not a patient laying out of the concept of inflation, nor an exploration of the history of inflation in post-Bretton Woods global economies. It’s not a methodical sector-by-sector look back at price increases during the pandemic and its immediate aftermath. It’s not a detailed analysis of whether there have been supply chain issues and which commodities have been affected most, or even what “supply chains” mean in the contemporary globalized situation, which is something quite different than what they meant in 1974, 1980, or 1990. The whole piece reads as if the conclusion was reached first and then the authors tried to find ways to make the conclusion hold. Which, I know, is not an unfamiliar habit in journalism or academia, but it’s a bad look when it is this obvious and this motivated.

Two junctures where I really found myself frustrated with the article was first that in fact some economists do say that “price gouging” and profit-seeking were one reason inflation remained high into 2022 and 2023. The article acknowledges that fact, but way down near the bottom of the inverted pyramid, whereas the lede frames the story as “politicians who have a message vs. the strong consensus of experts.” “Gouging” of some kind, fueled in part by the stimulus provided to consumers and nominal increases in wages in response to workers quitting their jobs, was so visible in 2022 and 2023 that some companies touted their continuing strategy of increasing prices to pad profits a part of their annual reports and have developed a marketing narrative to go along with it—that they want consumers to normalize a preference for “premium” brands where the main thing that’s premium about them is the price.

What really drove me nuts is a paragraph early on that sets out to rubbish the idea that companies are keeping supplies artificially low in order to pump demand and keep prices high. It drove me nuts first because there have been demonstrated cases of price manipulation of that kind in the last seventy-five years of global economic history. This is not folklore or conspiracy theory. Sometimes it’s not the companies, it’s speculative buyers that keep supplies low, but it absolutely can happen. More importantly, what the article offers as disproof that this was happening between 2021 and 2023 the following: “At least in theory, such a situation should be only temporary. New competitors should enter the market and provide products at a price people can afford.”

Among other things, the essay supports the view that if the US does finally sink into unshackled authoritarianism in November, then the country’s mainstream media will have — wittingly or unwittingly — been an accessory after the fact.


Books, etc.

Corporate BS

This looks interesting. Blurb reads:

From praising the health benefits of cigarettes to moralizing on the character-building qualities of child labor, rich corporate overlords have gone to astonishing, often morally indefensible lengths to defend their profits. Since the dawn of capitalism, they’ve told the same lies over and over to explain why their bottom line is always more important than the greater good: You say you want to raise the federal minimum wage? Why, you’ll only make things worse for the very people you want to help! Should we hold polluters accountable for the toxins they’re dumping in our air and water? No, the free market will save us! Can we raise taxes on the rich to pay for universal healthcare? Of course not—that will kill jobs! Affordable childcare? Socialism! It’s always the same tired threats and finger-pointing, in a concentrated campaign to keep wealth and power in the hands of the wealthy and powerful.

If in doubt, see Cory’s review!


My commonplace booklet

’Decisive moment’ 2.0

Many thanks to the readers who wrote to me after this pic headed Monday’s edition. Writing back to one of them (a fellow-photographer) I explained that it was the result of a conjunction of a few things: a lovely afternoon; me happening to be in the churchyard; I had a Leica with me (as usual); over to the left, out of view, was an almost extinct bonfire, smoke from which was gently drifting rightwards. The conjunction of all those things made for the ‘decisive moment’ that Henri Cartier-Bresson famously wrote about in his book of that title.

But when I raised the camera to my eye, the scene didn’t look right in colour. So I took out my iPhone, switched on its monochrome filter and took the picture.

“Ah”, wrote my friend, “the decisive moment! That time when you had a Leica and an iPhone and chose to use the iPhone…”. Touché.

But actually, that particular decisive moment happened a long time ago. See this chart.

Most of those ‘digital cameras’ (blue colour) are in smartphones.


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