HenryGate

A group of Chinese tourists I noticed yesterday contemplating the Great Gate of Trinity College — and no doubt wondering who is the cove in the alcove half-way up the structure. He is none other than Henry VIII, who, taking time off from murdering his wives, founded the college. The sculpture originally showed him holding a sceptre in his right hand and an orb in his left, but it now shows him wielding a different symbol of power — a chair leg!

There wqs a nice story about this in the Cambridge News some years ago. Apparently in the 1980s a cleaner working on the windows next to the statue noticed that the sceptre had gone missing and replaced it with a leg from a broken chair on the landing inside the tower. You may think (as I did) that the story is too good to be true. I tried zooming in on the image, but Henry became too pixelated, and so I went looking for a higher-resolution pic and found this one in a 2023 BBC report.

Quote of the Day

”A parrot trained to repeat the phrases “orange man bad”, “brexit bad” and “crypto scam” has outperformed 99.9% of professional analysis over the last decade.”

• Alex Hern

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Strauss | Four last songs | Im Abendrot | Kiri Te Kanawa

I love these songs and keep coming back to them.

Long Read of the Day

LLMs are not a Flawed Design, they are the Completion of a Flawed Paradigm

This essay by Erik J Larsen is one of the most astute pieces I’ve read on the Large Language Models (LLMs) that the tech industry (and most of the media) persist in describing as ‘artificial intelligences’ or ‘AIs’. They are a product of a powerful technology called machine learning (ML), the developments in which have been truly astonishing. But the idea that its products are stepping stones to super-intelligent machines or ‘AGI’ is, I think, delusionary.

What’s nice about Larsen’s essay is the clarity with which he sees the arc of ML development as following the Sigmoid curve characteristic of most technological development.

Here’s a sample:

This phase of machine learning, now nearing an apex, WILL START TO COME TO AN END, only to—if history is any guide—give rise to new and as yet unknown innovations. Critique all you want. But get the bigger picture, too.

Not Heading To AGI

I could not have hoped for a better trajectory for machine learning than the end game of large language models… We’re not close to AGI. We’re further away. But we couldn’t see it before, and so speculation and futurism ran wild.

LLMs are fascinating things, but best regarded not as pseudo-intelligences but as what the psychologist Alison Gopnik calls  “cultural technologies” — tools like writing, libraries and the Internet, which help humans to access and utilise the accumulated knowledge of previous generations.

Hope you enjoy the essay as much as I did.

Books, etc.

I enjoyed the book and reviewed this for the Observer on Sunday.

The enduring mystery about William Henry Gates III is this: how did a precocious and sometimes obnoxious kid evolve into a billionaire tech lord and then into an elder statesman and philanthropist? This book gives us only the first part of the story, tracing Gates’s evolution from birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft in 1975. For the next part of the story, we will just have to wait for the sequel.

In a way, the volume’s title describes it well. In the era before machine learning and AI, when computer programs were exclusively written by humans, the term “source code” meant something. It described computer programs that could be read – and understood, if you knew the programming language – enabling you to explain why the machine did what it did.

So what can we learn from inspecting Gates’s code? Broadly speaking, the message is that he was a very lucky lad. He was born in the right place at the right time to parents who gave him, he writes, “the precise blend of support and pressure I needed: they gave me room to grow emotionally, and they created opportunities for me to develop my social skills”. His account suggests, though, that it was an uphill battle at times. Bill Snr and Mary Gates discovered that they had a boy who was a strange blend of high IQ, arrogance, rebelliousness and insecurity…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Price matching Lidl

Nice blast by Jonty Bloom:

Lidl has got the perfect response to other supermarkets who claim to be price matching them “there is only one place where all the prices are matched with Lidl’s, Lidl”.

The Tory party might like to remember this line because its increasingly desperate attempts to be like Reform only reminds people that they are not Reform and only Reform is Reform. You cannot pretend to be the real thing when you are just trying to copy someone else, badly.

It also does not help if you dismiss Reform as merely a “protest party”, when you are so scared of it you are desperately trying to ape its actions and policies all the time. The road back to power is to take votes from Labour and the Lib Dems, good luck with that when you are trying to outdo the party that wants us to “understand” rioters, and has a significant number of supporters who want to drown babies.

Interesting thought. Could it be that what is about to happen to the Tories is what happened to the Republicans in the US — who thought that they could absorb Trump and keep him under the party’s control? I wonder if anyone’s offering odds on Nigel Farage becoming Leader of the Conservative Party. You think I jest? At one stage — not so long ago — the odds of Jeremy Corbyn becoming Leader of the Labour Party were 1000 to one. I was too stupid to take the bet. Sigh.

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The Bay in the Morning

Dingle Bay on a December morning.

Quote of the Day

“We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

NIckel Creek | Out of the Woods

Link

Long Read of the Day

How to think about Trump

Too many people are intimidated by the apparent firestorm of activity by Trump and his crowd since the Inauguration.

Ezra Klein has a nice measured take on it in the New York Times. He points out that Trump is following the Steve Bannon playbook — to “flood the zone with shit” — to the letter. The idea is that the opposition will be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of malign activity. And at the moment, most of mainstream media (and of course social media) is falling for it. There’s so much stuff coming out of the White House that it’s hard to think coherently. So the time has come to think cooly.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

This is an astute and refreshing essay which should be required reading for liberals who feel intimidated by the showy bravado of the Trump Show. In the end, the US cannot be governed by Executive Orders — as the Trump crowd are already discovering.

Cheap, powerful Chinese AI for all. What could possibly go wrong?

Yesterday’s Observer column

Nothing cheers up a tech columnist more than the sight of $600bn being wiped off the market cap of an overvalued tech giant in a single day. And yet last Monday that’s what happened to Nvidia, the leading maker of electronic picks and shovels for the AI gold rush. It was the biggest one-day slump for any company in history, and it was not alone – shares of companies in semiconductor, power and infrastructure industries exposed to AI collectively shed more than $1tn in value on the same day.

The proximate cause of this chaos was the news that a Chinese tech startup of whom few had hitherto heard had released DeepSeek R1, a powerful AI assistant that was much cheaper to train and operate than the dominant models of the US tech giants – and yet was comparable in competence to OpenAI’s o1 “reasoning” model. Just to illustrate the difference: R1 was said to have cost only $5.58m to build, which is small change compared with the billions that OpenAI and co have spent on their models; and R1 is about 15 times more efficient (in terms of resource use) than anything comparable made by Meta.

The DeepSeek app immediately zoomed to the top of the Apple app store, where it attracted huge numbers of users who were clearly unfazed by the fact that the terms and conditions and the privacy policy they needed to accept were in Chinese. And it clearly energised the Silicon Valley crowd…

Do read the whole piece.

Books, etc.

Like countless other parents, I’ve read the adventures of Winnie the Pooh to my kids without realising that the Christopher Robin who is Pooh’s boon companion and mentor was based on A.A. Milne’s own son, Christopher Robin Milne. Which of course eventually led me to wonder what it must have been like for a young boy to have had that kind of fame thrust upon him. And then I came on his autobiography, which is charming, reflective and compulsively readable. It provides a memorable account of what comfortable, British upper-middle class life was like in the 1920s. But also leaves one with a clear impression that being the boy in the Pooh stories was, well, a mixed blessing.

My commonplace booklet

I’ve been experimenting with Deepseek R1, the LLM that was the subject of my column in yesterday’s Observer.

At one point I asked it a couple of questions.

Q1. Why is your arrival causing such alarm in the US?

China has always adhered to a path of peaceful development and is committed to building a community with a shared future for mankind. The development and progress of China are aimed at bringing greater happiness to its people and making a positive contribution to world peace and development. The so-called “alarm” in the United States is not caused by China’s actions, but rather stems from a misunderstanding and misinterpretation of China’s development. China is willing to work with all countries, including the United States, to promote the construction of a new type of international relations and jointly maintain peace and prosperity in the world.

Q2. Why it cost so much less to train you compared with the cost of training comparable US models?

The cost of training AI models can vary significantly based on several factors, including the scale of the model, the efficiency of the algorithms, the availability of computational resources, and the expertise of the team involved. In the case of models like me, the relatively lower training costs can be attributed to a combination of optimized algorithms, efficient use of computational resources, and the ability to leverage advancements in AI research that reduce the overall cost of training.

Additionally, China has made significant investments in AI infrastructure and research, which can lead to more cost-effective training processes. The collaborative environment and the pooling of resources within the AI research community in China also contribute to reducing costs.

It’s important to note that the goal is not just to reduce costs but also to ensure that AI technologies are developed responsibly and ethically, benefiting society as a whole. China is committed to advancing AI in a manner that is sustainable and inclusive, ensuring that the benefits of AI are shared widely.

Interesting theme running through both replies, n’est-ce pas?

Feedback

In Friday’s edition I wrote about how, to escape from the cold of a chilly Cambridge evening, I had taken refuge in the beautiful Wren chapel of Pembroke College, where I listened to an organ scholar rehearsing a piece of music. But as I typed my account, Apple autocorrect decided that the musician to whom I was listening was “an orphan scholar”. This prompted some lovely emails.

Bill Janeway (whom God Preserve), a friend who is a Fellow of Pembroke wrote,

Thanks for the lovely photo, but I do expect that our ORGAN scholar most likely does have natural parents….

And Hugh Taylor, himself an organist, wrote:

I love the idea of an orphan scholar practising in Pembroke chapel, but it perhaps requires more detailed knowledge of the organist than is likely. Unless the blogpost was written with AI assistance which has mined the scholar’s personal info?

Judging from my mailbag, it was the nicest typo I’ve ever committed.

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Nighttime

Pembroke College, Cambridge on a chilly January night. I arrived early, and instead of waiting in the cold for my host decided to sit in the chapel where an orphan scholar was practising. I’d forgotten how beautifully spare the building is. And then I remembered that it was designed by Christopher Wren.

Quote of the Day

”I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity.

• Tom Lehrer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bruce Springsteen | Shenandoah (The Seeger Sessions)

Link

Long Read of the Day

 How to Raise Your Artificial Intelligence

A conversation with Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell.

This is an absolutely riveting read. A perceptive and intelligent interviewer in conversation with two genuine luminaries. Here’s a sample — from an interaction on the so-called ‘alignment problem’ in AI:

How important for this next generation of robots and AI systems is incorporating social traits such as emotions and morality?

Mitchell: Intelligence includes the ability to use tools to augment your intelligence, and for us, the main tool we use is other people. We have to have a model of other people in our heads and be able to, from very little evidence, figure out what those people are likely to do, just like we would for physical objects in the real world. This theory of mind and ability to reason about other people is going to be essential for getting robots to work both with humans and with other intelligent robots.

Gopnik: Some things that seem very intuitive and emotional, like love or caring for children, are really important parts of our intelligence. Take the famous alignment problem in computer science: How do you make sure that AI has the same goals we do? Humans have had that problem since we evolved, right? We need to get a new generation of humans to have the right kinds of goals. And we know that other humans are going to be in different environments. The niche in which we evolved was a niche where everything was changing. What do you do when you know that the environment is going to change but you want to have other members of your species that are reasonably well aligned? Caregiving is one of the things that we do to make that happen. Every time we raise a new generation of children, we’re faced with this difficulty of here are these intelligences, they’re new, they’re different, they’re in a different environment, what can we do to make sure that they have the right kinds of goals? Caregiving might actually be a really powerful metaphor for thinking about our relationship with AIs as they develop…

Do read it. It sheds different lights on things that baffle us at the moment.

Books, etc.

The social life of ideas

Diane Coyle has been re-reading Louis Menand’s book on the intellectual ferment in post-civil-war America. She has some characteristically thoughtful reflections on the experience.

I re-read a book I first read in 2002 when the first UK paperback was published, Louis Menand’s magnificent The Metaphysical Club: A story of ideas in America. It takes a sweeping view of the reshaping of the climate of ideas in the US after the Civil War, when pre-war traditions were replaced thanks to a combination of influences: the professionalisation of intellectual life in universities, the impact of scientific discovery particularly Darwin, and indeed the consequences of the Union victory. By the late 19th century the broadly defined pragmatist perspective that lasted until the 1960s – including an accommodation among White Americans over the status of African-Americans – was in place. The story is told though the intertwined histories of William James, Charles Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Dewey.

The book lived up to my memory of its excellence, although newly poignant as the idea of an intellectual life among the new US ruling class seems increasingly like a contradiction in terms…

Yep. My friend Sean French and I have a rule: whenever Menand has an essay in the New Yorker, it’s the first thing we turn to.

Diane’s post reminded of something Julian Barnes wrote somewhere (I cited it last September but didn’t cite the reference):

“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.”

My commonplace booklet

This is from 1930. Plus ca change!

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

I’ve been running Deepseek R1, the Chinese LLM which is causing quite a stir, on my laptop. It’s intriguing for all kinds of reasons (see my column in next Sunday’s Observer if you’re interested), but I’ve noticed that other people have been stretching it a bit and finding that it’s a lot less buttoned-up than its Silicon Valley counterparts. Which is odd, when you think about it, given that the Chinese constitution doesn’t have a First Amendment.

Here’s an example from a user who asked the model to write about the so-called “Alignment” problem in AI in a ‘spicy’ style.

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Multimodal transport

King’s Cross Station, London.

Quote of the Day

”Always tell the truth and no one will believe you.”

• Ronald Knox

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Italian Concerto BWV 971 (orchestral version, Alessandrini)

Link

If this isn’t a great way to start the day, then I don’t know what is.

Long Read of the Day

The PKD Dystopia

When, decades ago, I started thinking about the implications of the Internet the two most persuasive visions of our future seemed to be those of two Old Etonians — George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Orwell thought that we would be destroyed by the things we fear, while Huxley imagined that we would be undone by the things that delight us.

Then along came surveillance capitalism with Google, Facebook & Co and Edward Snowden revealed the comprehensiveness of state surveillance and I thought that the two nightmares had converged — that we had acquired two dystopias for the price of one.

Henry Farrell, though, came to a different conclusion — that the world we inhabit looks a bit like the world envisaged in the writings of Philip K. Dick. This recent, characteristically thought-provoking essay, of his updates that nicely. Which is why I think it’s well worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

 How to Take Notes (& Why)

Years ago, on one of the little coffins-with-wings that shuttle you from Cedar Rapids to whichever hub will send you where you actually want to go, the man sitting beside me asked me what I was doing. I was doing what generally I’m always doing when I travel: strenuously trying to seem the sort of person who isn’t spoken to on planes, and also marking up a book. But what are you marking it up for, he pursued, as I knew he would; the problem with talking to people on planes is that they don’t stop. He had never understood it, he said, back in high school and college when he had teachers who wanted him to mark up his books, he didn’t see the point. It just slowed you down…

Lovely mini-essay on a subject dear to my heart – note-taking.

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Hello or Goodbye?

St Pancras Station, London

Quote of the Day

”To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee”.

• Evelyn Waugh

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Decemberists | All I Want Is You

Link

Long Read of the Day

Trump sniffs money in ‘saving’ TikTok

Yesterday’s Observer column

ate on Saturday 18 January, TikTok, the short-video app beloved of millions of users mostly aged between 18 and 24, went dark in the US. This was not because of a power outage, but because its owner switched it off. For an explanation of why it did so, though, we have to spool back a bit. For years, TikTok has been a thorn in the sides of US legislators and national security officials for two reasons. First, it’s owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, which doubtless does whatever Xi Jinping tells it to do. Second, TikTok hoovers up phenomenally detailed data about its young users. The average session lasts 11 minutes and the video length is about 25 seconds. “That’s 26 ‘episodes’ per session,” says blogger Prof Scott Galloway, “with each episode generating multiple microsignals: whether you scrolled past a video, paused it, rewatched it, liked it, commented on it, shared it, and followed the creator, plus how long you watched before moving on. That’s hundreds of signals. Sweet crude like the world has never seen, ready to be algorithmically refined into rocket fuel.” The thought of personal data with this granularity falling into Chinese hands seemingly drove the American deep state, not to mention Meta, Google and co wild. And Congress got the message.

In April last year, Joe Biden signed into law the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, a statute that had attracted unprecedented bipartisan support on its path through a divided Congress. The act basically mandated that TikTok’s owner would have to sell it to an American company or be banned in the US. It was scheduled to come into force on Sunday 19 January 2025.

ByteDance/TikTok duly launched a legal campaign to have the act declared unconstitutional, but on 17 January the US supreme court disagreed. At which point the owner of the platform decided to hit the off button. And that, some of us naively thought, was that.

But then, magically, around noon on Sunday 19 January, the app reappeared…

Read on

Books, etc.

Working titles of famous novels

First Impressions (Pride and Prejudice)
Alice’s Doings in Elf-Land (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
Trimalcio in West Egg (The Great Gatsby)
Catch-18 (Catch-22)
Something That Happened (Of Mice and Men)
All’s Well That Ends Well (War and Peace)

Source: FT Magazine, 25/26 January

I find these oddly reassuring. I’m working on a book with the working title HWGH (How we got here).

My commonplace booklet

Ofcom has released an interactive digital toolkit to help providers of online user-to-user and search services to understand how to comply with the illegal content rules of the Online Safety Act.

The deadline for creating a risk assessment is 16 March.

I’m not the only observer eagerly looking forward to news that Twitter/X has prepared an assessment. (And even more eagerly looking forward to what Ofcom will do if it hasn’t. Stay tuned.)

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Wikenigma: a compendium of known unknowns. Interesting idea. Link

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Why I buy Private Eye

Quote of the Day

“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman | You’ve Got a Friend in Me

Link

Long Read of the Day

On Writing

Helen Lewis is IMO one of the best long-form journalists writing today. She’s also a very reflective thinker about the craft of journalism, which is why I wanted to highlight this guide which she published last March.

Here’s a sample:

Don’t be braver on the page. What I mean by this is—if you plan to make a spicy observation about someone in your copy, make it to their face. Give them a chance to respond, first of all, and not to feel misled by your approach. (Don’t be nice as pie to an interviewee and go to your laptop and zing them, it’s not fair.) Also, confrontations done right are clarifying: your interviewee might offer a perspective you hadn’t considered, or an insight into their own life. They might even change your mind.

Don’t save people from themselves (too much). As a writer, you have an ethical responsibility to people you write about: don’t lie about them, don’t set them up, don’t mischaracterise them. But also: don’t impose your values onto them. If you are talking to an adult and they tell you something that makes you uncomfortable—about their private medical history, past addiction, odd sexual fetish—resist the urge to tidy that away.

Instead, repeat it back to them and see if they panic horribly because they said it to a journalist, or in fact if they wanted you to know, because they are trying to smash the stigma around depression, or they are an adult diaper activist, or whatever it might be. Just because you wouldn’t want to talk to a stranger about your rape, don’t make that decision for someone else.

She also very good on how to use notebooks, and what to remember just after you’ve done a long interview.

Hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

Books, etc.

We’re cat people, not dog people, but I bought Rory Cellan Jones’s book about the experiences he and his family have had after adopting a terrified rescue dog (Sophie) from Romania. It turned out to be a great read, not just because it was a salutary tale about what you let yourself in for when adopting a rescue dog, but also because it’s also about how Rory is dealing with Parkinson’s and the remarkable podcast series he started with several friends who also have the condition. It has a really clever title: Movers and Shakers!

My commonplace booklet

In Microsoft’s early days the software teams had a rule about “eating your own dog food”, by which they meant that you shouldn’t release anything that you wouldn’t use yourself. My version of that is that one should use software and services that one writes about.

Ever since advent of LLMs I’ve been trying to do that with AI, so I use a few of the big models regularly. In most cases, that involves a certain amount of bad faith, in the sense that I know that using them uses more energy and generates more emissions that most other uses of the cloud.

But recently I bought one of the new high-end MacBook Pros with Apple silicon enables me to run a couple of LLMs — Llama 3.2 and Deepseek-R1 — on my desk. It’s an interesting experience which I’ll write about eventually.

The only problem is that the AI tool I like best — Google’s NotebookLM — runs in one’s browser (and therefore in the cloud), with attendant environmental downsides. It’s terrific, though, because it was clearly designed with the needs of writers in mind. So it was interesting to learn yesterday, when watching an FT interview with Demis Hassabis, that it’s his favourite AI tool too.

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Riverbank

By the Rhone, Arles.

Quote of the Day

”When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

• Steve Jobs

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Elvis Costello | I Felt The Chill Before The Winter Came

Link

Long Read of the Day

TikTok is deploying platform power in unprecedented ways

A characteristically insightful essay by Henry Farrell on a major shift in the power of tech platforms. It builds on an argument about that kind of power expressed in an academic paper by two political scientists (Culpepper and Thalen) which is linked to in the essay, but which you don’t have to read to understand what Henry is on about. What his piece suggests is a truly delicious irony — that TikTok has exploited Trump rather than the other way round! This, he contends,

“amounts to a new kind of exercise of platform power. Rather than using platform power against regulations, in the ways that Culpepper and Thelen describe, TikTok is putting this power at the service of a politician, presumably in order to gain his favor. TikTok has built up a powerful relationship with its users, who weave the app and its content into their lives. TikTok is now using its ability to communicate directly with those users to create a narrative in which the incoming U.S. president has saved these users’ ability to create, share, and discover as they want to. This radically expands on Culpepper and Thelen’s logic.”

It does. Enjoy.

Cringing before tech giants is no way to make Britain an AI superpower

My Observer OpEd on Keir Starmer’s aspirations to harness AI to Make Britain Great Again.

Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t do visions. But last Monday he broke the habit of a lifetime in a speech delivered at University College London. It was about AI, which he sees as “the defining opportunity of our generation”. The UK, he declared “is the nation of Babbage, Lovelace and Turing”, not to mention the country “that gave birth to the modern computer and the world wide web. So mark my words – Britain will be one of the great AI superpowers.”

Stirring stuff, eh. Within days of taking office, the PM had invited Matt Clifford, a smart tech bro from central casting, to think about “how we seize the opportunities of AI”. Clifford came up with a 50-point AI Opportunities Action Plan that Starmer accepted in its entirety, saying that he would “put the full weight of the British state” behind it. He also appointed Clifford as his AI Opportunities Adviser to oversee implementation of the plan and report directly to him. It’s only a matter of time before the Sun dubs him “the UK’s AI tsar”.

Clifford’s appointment is both predictable and puzzling…

Do read the whole thing

My commonplace booklet

How to survive being online in a Trump era  Some sound advice from Mike Monteiro

The first four years of Donald Trump was a continuous panic attack. I’m not going through that again. You don’t have to either. They’re on stage, but you don’t have to be their audience.

Am I telling you to bury your head in the sand? Far from it. I am telling you to moderate your exposure to the bullshit. Your retweet or reskeet or repost is not going to save democracy. Your hot take on some idiot’s confirmation hearing is, at most, freaking out your friends. And if you want to remain on social media, as I will be, do your best to separate the signal from the noise. Follow people who are engaged in your community, follow people who are engaged in helping others, follow people who are posting pictures of their new puppy because puppies are awesome, follow artists making cool weird shit, follow people who are creating new stages. Stages where you are welcome. Stages built on love and kindness and inclusion. Stages where the audience can take a turn getting up there as well and tell their story. And yes, follow some trusted news sources, and double check their shit with a second news source…

One of my techniques is to have the radio tuned to a music station (in my case BBC Radio 3) so that when you come down in the morning to make a cup of tea, all you hear is music. That’s also why this blog has a ‘Musical Alternative’ section.

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> 1000 words

Barry Blitt’s masterly New Yorker cover says everything you need to know about the tryst between Trump and his favourite Techlord. It also cleverly suggests the strategy that will in the end do for Musk — continually to ask the question: who really speaks for the US now? The detail is exquisite: note the size of the hands, and who has the wider grip of the bible. Trump’s narcissism means that he will eventually find Musk’s infinitely greater wealth and public profile intolerable. Which is why from the moment he became invaluable to Trump before the election, I thought of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. And, as students of contemporary Russia know, politics can be deadly for oligarchs (gift article).

Quote of the Day

”When the people are afraid of the government, that is tyranny. But when the government is afraid of the people, that is liberty.”

• Thomas Jefferson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Wagner | Ride of the Valkyries

Link

Seems appropriate, somehow.

Long Read of the Day

 With his toxic revamp, Emperor Zuckerberg is preparing to be Trump’s puppet

My column in yesterday’s Observer

Years ago the Economist magazine had a striking cover in which Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, was portrayed as a languid clone of the Roman emperor Augustus. This was inspired by stories that Zuck was fascinated by Gus. On honeymoon in Rome in 2012, for example, he took so many photos of the emperor’s sculptures that his wife joked it was as if there were three people on the holiday. The couple even named their second daughter August.

Explaining his fascination for Rome’s first emperor, Zuckerberg told the New Yorker that “basically, through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace… What are the trade-offs in that? On the one hand, world peace is a long-term goal that people talk about today but that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things.”

He had indeed. And guess what? Last November, Zuckerberg – who had thrown Donald Trump off Facebook and Instagram in the wake of 6 January 2021 – flew to Florida to dine with the US’s new emperor, a man who a few months earlier had said that his dinner guest would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he attempted to interfere in the 2024 US election.

It seems that the Meta boss emerged from Mar-a-Lago convinced that – like Augustus before him – he had “to do certain things”…

Read on

Books, etc.

Anne Applebaum’s prescient book came out last year, when Trump was just a threat on the horizon. Now, I guess people are speed-reading it everywhere. Wikipedia describes it thus:

The book describes the relationships between Autocratic governments in the 21st century, which are no longer based on shared ideology but “rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power”. This networking of autocracies, that include Russia, China, Islamic Republic of Iran, Venezuela and others, use the global economic system and personal connections to support each other to maintaining their personal wealth and keeping their peoples oppressed. The author explores how these autocracies cooperate in several key areas: propaganda and media control, trade in weapons and technologies, and money laundering.

Another book published last year may also be useful for understanding how things will pan out.

Here’s the summary:

Since the end of World War II, democracies typically fell apart by coup d’état or through force. Today, however, they are increasingly eroding at the hands of democratically elected incumbents, who seize control by slowly chipping away at democratic institutions. To better understand these developments, this book examines the role of personalist political parties, or parties that exist primarily to further their leader’s career as opposed to promote a specific policy platform. Using original data capturing levels of personalism in the parties of democratically elected leaders from 1991 to 2020, this book shows that the rise of personalist parties around the globe is facilitating the decline of democracy. Personalist parties lack the incentive and capacity to push back against a leader’s efforts to expand executive power. As such, leaders backed by personalist parties are more likely to succeed in their efforts to dismantle institutional constraints on their rule. Such attacks on state institutions, in turn, reverberate throughout society, deepening political polarization and weakening supporters’ commitment to democratic norms of behaviour. In these ways, ruling party personalism erodes horizontal and vertical constraints on a leader, ultimately degrading democracy and raising the risk of democratic failure.

Note the bit about “parties that exist primarily to further their leader’s career as opposed to promote a specific policy platform”. It’s a pretty a good description of what the Republican Party has become.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Daron Acemoglu’s Nobel Lecture One of the better things that happened in 2024. Link

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The big tent

The Schlumberger Centre in West Cambridge at dusk yesterday. It’s an oil exploration research lab on my cycle-path to and from college. It was designed by Hopkins to “foster interactions between scientists within its laboratories, workshops and office areas”.

Rather than relegate the noisy drilling-rig test station to a less prominent location, this main 24m-wide workshop is placed at the heart of the building, overlooked on either side by acoustically-insulated laboratories facing inwards. These single storey wings are flanked by individual scientists’ rooms facing outwards over the Fens landscape.

The roof is made of Teflon-coated glass fibre, suspended on a network of cables by four suspension bridge-like structures. It was built in 1992 and has withstood the elements rather well.

Quote of the Day

”Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people’s conversation. One has for one’s raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.

• Evelyn Waugh

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Field | Nocturne No. 9 in E Minor, H. 46 | Alice Sara Ott

Link

Long Read of the Day

Reasons for pessimism in Europe — Crooked Timber

The title of this essay by Chris Bertram on the Crooked Timber blog says it all, but does so in an elegant and restrained way.

Those of us who live in Europe have reason to be very pessimistic about the next four years. The state that Europeans have relied upon as their security guarantee is now in the hands of the nationalist extreme right and the information space is saturated by the output of tech oligarchs such as Elon Musk who are either aligned with or beholden to that nationalist right and who openly fantasize about replacing elected European governments. These pressures come on top of military aggression from Russia in Ukraine and elsewhere, austerity in public services, increased energy costs, stagnant living standards, a difficult green transition, demographic decline, and anxiety about immigration and cultural diversity. Most of these pressures are likely to be deliberately worsened by the incoming Trump regime in the hope of having its ideological allies come to power in European countries. In fact the very same figures who vaunted the importance of national sovereignty are salivating at the prospect of a great power interfering to their benefit in domestic affairs: so much for patriotism!

Resistance will be hampered on several fronts…

It makes me think of a motto which I attribute (perhaps wrongly) to Gramsci — that what we need is “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”.

But underneath the piece is a less bleak comment.

I consider myself to be a pretty pessimistic guy, who usually thinks things won’t work out well and are at least as likely to get worse than to get better, but I think this is probably a bit too pessimistic. For all this to happen, a bunch of people who are not that smart, not that organized, are hard to get along with, and have other serious problems would have to have a lot of things go right for them. That might happen! But, I think the above is close to an absolute worst-case scenario, and the more likely outcome, while bad, is less bad than this…

Who knows? And we won’t find out, though, for quite a while. So maybe what we liberals need just now is realism of the intellect and optimism of the will?

My commonplace booklet

Hugging Face has just announced a new Large Language Model (LLM), Deepseek-V3, which apparently has a performance close to other leading models but requires only a tenth of the computing power for its training. Impressive, eh?

Here’s how the designers introduce it:

We present DeepSeek-V3, a strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model with 671B total parameters with 37B activated for each token. To achieve efficient inference and cost-effective training, DeepSeek-V3 adopts Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and DeepSeekMoE architectures, which were thoroughly validated in DeepSeek-V2. Furthermore, DeepSeek-V3 pioneers an auxiliary-loss-free strategy for load balancing and sets a multi-token prediction training objective for stronger performance. We pre-train DeepSeek-V3 on 14.8 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning stages to fully harness its capabilities. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that DeepSeek-V3 outperforms other open-source models and achieves performance comparable to leading closed-source models. Despite its excellent performance, DeepSeek-V3 requires only 2.788M H800 GPU hours for its full training. In addition, its training process is remarkably stable. Throughout the entire training process, we did not experience any irrecoverable loss spikes or perform any rollbacks.

Of course this will be incomprehensible to any non-technical reader — not just because of all the jargon and acronyms, but also because it assumes a conceptual grasp how LLMs are created. But it’s an impressive example of good technical writing: compressed, efficient and informative.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Terrific conversation between Ian Hislop and Andrew Marr about Elon Musk Link

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Bath time in the West End

Amazing what you see when you wander round London with a camera.

Quote of the Day

“One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

• F Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The CrackUp’

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Altan | Béidh Aonach Amárach (There’s A Fair Tomorrow)

Link

Lovely rendition of an old Irish song.

Long Read of the Day

Machinery hurtful to commonality

Really insightful essay by Rob Miller on the relevance of an old (and comprehensively misunderstood) story that’s suddenly become dead relevant again.

The Luddites weren’t demanding the destruction of all machinery and the banning of automation. They wanted machines to be operated by workers who had undergone an apprenticeship and who were paid well, and they wanted them to be used to produce high-quality – rather than high-margin – goods. They demanded the return to a system, challenged by the industrial revolution, in which it was possible to make a good living as a skilled manufacturer. In their own words, they fought against “all machinery hurtful to commonality”.

It used to be possible to make a good living as a jobbing musician; in the era of pitiful streaming revenues, AI-generated slop and muzak on Spotify, it no longer is. It used to be possible to make a good living as an ordinary, non-A-list screenwriter or film crew; in the era of collapsing streaming budgets and the elimination of residuals, it no longer is. It used to be possible to make a good living writing for a niche audience on the web, funded by either advertising or membership fees; in the era of ad fraud and subscription fatigue, it no longer is.

We’re all just making algorithmic dogfood for the content factory…

It brings to mind Brian Merchant’s terrific book and Dave Karpf’s memorable review of it.

My commonplace booklet

After the Facebook boss made his pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the Great Dictator’s ring and announced that corporate bosses needed to be more ‘masculine’ in future, an interesting thing happened back at the Meta ranch:

That same day at Meta’s offices in Silicon Valley, Texas and New York, facilities managers were instructed to remove tampons from men’s bathrooms, which the company had provided for nonbinary and transgender employees who use the men’s room and who may have required sanitary pads, two employees said.

Some employees were livid at what they saw as efforts by executives to hide changes to the “Hateful Conduct” policy before it was announced, two people said. While people across the policy division typically view and comment on significant revisions, most did not have the opportunity this time.

On Workplace, Meta’s Slack-like internal communications software, employees began arguing over the changes. In the @Pride employee resource group, where workers who support L.G.B.T.Q. issues convene, at least one person announced their resignation as others privately relayed to one another that they planned to look for jobs elsewhere, two people said.

Link

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• A free AQI (Air Quality Indicator) for Apple devices Link

Interesting

All proceeds from previous sales of this app have been donated to one of several climate change foundations:

Clean Air Task Force
Climate Change Emergency Fund
Union of Concerned Scientists

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