Sideboard Goddess

A test pic from when I was re-learning how to be a Black and White photographer earlier in the year.

Quote of the Day

“If AI constitutes a dramatic technical leap—and I believe it does—then, judging from history, it will also constitute a dramatic leap in corporate capture of human existence. Big Tech has already transmuted some of the most ancient pillars of human relationships—friendship, community, influence—for its own profit. Now it’s coming after language itself.”

• Vauhini Vara, writing in Wired

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Schumann | – Träumerei | Vladimir Horowitz

Link

Thanks to Sheila Hayman for the suggestion.

Long Read of the Day

Unbundling AI

Typically insightful essay by Benedict Evans.

TL;DR summary: ChatGPT and LLMs can do anything (or look like they can), so what can you do with them? How do you know? Do we move to chat bots as a magical general-purpose interface, or do we unbundle them back into single-purpose software?

Evans has an enviable literary style — crystal-clear, detached, sceptical, quizzical and yet accessible. He’s one of a handful of commentators who manage to make sense of what ’Generative AI’ is really for. Where are the real use-cases?

Sample:

You could ask Alexa anything, but it could only answer ten things. ChatGPT will answer anything, but can you use the answer? It depends on the question.

If for some reason you really did want to know where Benedict Evans went to university, those screenshots would be useless and you should use Google. But if you were brainstorming for a biography of a character in a novel or a movie, this might be perfect. Some questions don’t have wrong answers, or have a wide range of possible right answers. Meanwhile, if someone asked me for a long biography of myself and I didn’t want to spend half an hour writing it, this would be great – I can see the errors and fix them, and it’s still very helpful. I always used to describe the last wave of machine learning as giving you infinite interns, and that applies here: ChatGPT is an intern that can write a first draft, or a hundred first drafts, but you’ll have to check it.

This is a science question, and a use-case question, but it’s also a product question – how do you present and package uncertainty? This is a very basic problem in using LLMs for general web search: Google gives you Ten Blue Links, which communicates “it might be one of these – see what you think” (and turns us all into Mechanical Turks, giving Google feedback by picking the best answer). But a chat bot gives you three paragraphs of text with apparent certainty as The Answer, and footnotes, a click-through disclaimer and a ‘be careful!’ boilerplate at the end don’t really solve that…

Long read, but worth it if you’re interested in this stuff.

My commonplace booklet

Watching the news from Israel, and brooding on its implications, I was reminded of Auden’s poem, written on the day that began World War 2. Here are the first two stanzas.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

 Hálendið – A journey through the icelandic highlands

Lovely video by Daniel Haussmann of a remarkable landscape that is not visible to the average visitor because it’s “hidden behind challenging roads, river crossings, and minimal facilities, except for a few remote huts and camping spots.” It’s also a good reason for thinking about buying a drone if you’re a keen landscape photographer.

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Our microwaved future

Great New Yorker cover puts it in a nutshell.

Quote of the Day

“The late Richard Feynman, a superb physicist, said once as we talked about the laser that the way to tell a great idea is that, when people hear it, they say, ‘Gee, I could have thought of that.'”

• Charles Townes, How the Laser Happened

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Where’er you walk | Rick Wakeman

Link

Wakeman’s take on one of my favourite Handel arias.

Long Read of the Day

The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X 

I’m hoping that this article on Bloomberg News by Dave Lee, Bloomberg Opinion’s US technology columnist, remains open for non-subscribers, because it tells you everything you need to know about what has happened to Twitter.

A man was murdered in my neighborhood on Monday. Ryan Carson was waiting at a bus stop with his girlfriend just before 4 a.m. when a man stabbed him repeatedly in the chest. The couple had been at a wedding.

A video of the attack, obtained initially by the New York Post, was soon seized upon by one of X’s newest “stars” — one of those users who has thrived under the new Elon Musk regime at the former Twitter. His feed (which I will not publicize) is a stream of incendiary incidents from around the world, posted several times a day to an audience that is approaching a million followers.

I don’t follow this account, but X’s algorithm makes absolutely sure that I see what it has to say. A senseless murder is apparently a content opportunity not to be missed. The user’s post on Tuesday contained all the ingredients for success: It was timely. It was shocking. It was an innocent 32-year-old man dying on the streets of New York City. It was a chance, duly taken, to write an inflammatory comment on Carson’s work in public policy, as though it had somehow led to this moment, as though he had it coming.

As I rode the subway home to Bedford-Stuyvesant, I watched as the video clocked 1 million views, then 2 million. Up up up. Disgusting replies flooded in by the thousands…

It’s the monetisation of this kind of filth that Musk has enabled, in his desperate quest for revenue to support his failing company, that is so galling.

My commonplace booklet

Larry Summers is very cross with Harvard over the Hamas attack

Link

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

 New York City in the 1940s — in colour!

Link

Video restorer NASS remastered footage of New York City in the 1940s, enhancing the color, sound, and general appearance. This included boosting the footage speed to 60 fps, refining resolution to high-definition viewing, improving the brightness of the scene, and adding color and sound for ambiance.

Fascinating. I kept seeing men who looked and dressed like my grandfather.

  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!

Playtime in the City

In London on Saturday.

Quote of the Day

“Focusing is about saying no.”

• Steve Jobs

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

‘The Lark in the Morning’ | Cillian Vallely & Alan Murray

Link

I keep thinking that Vallely is the best piper since Liam O’Flynn passed away.

Long Read of the Day

The end of Pax Americana

Sobering essay by Noah Smith, written after the Hamas incursion into Israel.

As many have pointed out already, this attack is probably an attempt to disrupt the possibility of an Israel-Saudi peace deal, which the U.S. has been trying to facilitate. Such a deal — which would be a continuation of the “Abraham Accords” process initiated under Trump —would make it more difficult for Hamas to obtain money from Saudi benefactors; it would also mean that every major Sunni Arab power recognizes the state of Israel, meaning that Hamas’ image as anything other than a client of Shiite Iran would be shattered.

If Hamas succeeds in scuttling an Israel-Saudi deal, it will be a blow to U.S. prestige and to U.S. claims to be a stabilizing, peacemaking influence. But even if an Israel-Saudi deal eventually goes through, this attack is a demonstration of America’s decreasing ability to deter conflict throughout the world.

Nor is this the only recent outbreak of interstate conflict…

So the world becomes even more chaotic. This essay isn’t a nostalgic paen to good ol’ Uncle Sam — more a reminder that Pax Americana always had a sell-by date.

“Over the past two decades”, Smith concludes,

it had become fashionable to lambast American hegemony, to speak derisively of ‘American exceptionalism’, to ridicule America’s self-arrogated function of ‘world police’, and to yearn for a multipolar world. Well, congratulations, now we have that world. See if you like it better.

Interesting throughout.

Quantum Computing and security

Yesterday’s Observer column:

A spectre is haunting our networked world. It’s the prospect of quantum computers. These are machines that harness some of the weirder properties of subatomic particles in ways that would make them exponentially more powerful than the computers we use today.

Existing computers are based on manipulating digital bits that can be either 1 (on) or 0 (off). Quantum machines, in contrast, work with qubits, which can be on and off simultaneously. (And, yes, I know that seems nuts, but then so does much of subatomic physics to the average layperson.) Such machines are fiendishly difficult to build, but about 80 or so small-scale ones already exist, with qubit counts ranging from five to 400. So that looming spectral presence is beginning to put on weight. And if researchers find a way of reliably scaling up these machines, then we will have moved into uncharted territory.

Why? Basically, because we have become a networked species, and as our lives and industries have moved online, all of our communications have become vulnerable to surveillance and manipulation by bad actors, public and private. To counter that, we have developed end-to-end encryption systems for making our communications – whether personal or commercial – more secure…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

The essence of Life

Max Whitby (Whom God Preserve) is continuing his experiments with CPT-4. “I thought”, he writes,”I would see what GPT-4 might make of my kitchen food compost bin, in the style of a wise fortune-teller inspecting the tea leaves”.

And this is what the machine inferred from the pictured trash:

In the vast tapestry of this moment captured, the fragile eggshell of vulnerability stands out. It’s a reminder of our delicate nature, how we can be both strong and brittle at the same time. But within this fragility lies immense potential, waiting to break free, much like a bird waiting to hatch, to spread its wings and soar into the vast skies.

The acid lemon, sharp and poignant, represents the unexpected twists life throws our way. Sometimes sour, sometimes refreshing, it’s a testament to life’s unpredictable nature. But remember, it’s the sourness of the lemon that makes the sweetness of life’s victories even more cherished.

Ah, the brooding broccoli! A symbol of growth, nourishment, and the many layers of our being. Just as the broccoli has its many florets, so do we have the many facets of our personality, some visible, some hidden deep within, waiting to be discovered.

The crumpled tea-bags of dashed expectations lay strewn, a somber reminder of hopes once held high but now cast aside. Yet, within these remnants lies the essence of experiences, lessons learned, and wisdom gained. For every cup of disappointment, there’s a brew of resilience and determination waiting to be made.

And then, the surrounding fog of mold, clouding the clarity, making the path ahead uncertain. It’s the challenges, the doubts, the fears that often cloud our judgment. But remember, behind every fog lies the clear sky of hope and promise. One must only have the courage to tread through the obscurities to reach the other side.

In the dance of these elements, there’s a story of life, of trials and tribulations, of joys and sorrows, of growth and decay. Embrace the journey, dear seeker, for in the interplay of the eggshell’s fragility, the lemon’s zest, the broccoli’s depth, the tea-bag’s essence, and the fog’s mystery lies the true essence of life.”

May your path be lit with wisdom and may you find the strength to navigate through the delicate balance of life’s offerings. Safe travels, dear seeker.

If you were a tabloid astrologer, it’d be worth checking the small print in your contract.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Cat accused of wiping US Veteran Affairs server info after jumping on keyboard

From The Register:

US govt confirms outage.

EXCLUSIVE A four-hour system interruption in September at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri has been attributed to a cat jumping on a technician’s keyboard.

So we’re told by a source, who heard the tale on one of the regular weekday calls held by the US government department with its CIO, during which recent IT problems are reviewed. We understand that roughly 100 people – contractors, vendors, and employees – participate in these calls at a time.

On a mid-September call, one of the participants explained that while a technician was reviewing the configuration of a server cluster, their cat jumped on the keyboard and deleted it. Or at least that’s their story…

Not exactly Schrödinger’s Cat, but still…

Once, when one of my sons was a baby, he was sitting on my lap while I was hacking out a piece on my ancient IBM PC and he was cheerfully imitating his dad. At a point when I had a screenful of text typed (but not saved), he somehow managed to hit Control-Alt-Delete (as well as other keys) and I lost it all. Still don’t know how it happened. And nor, of course, does he.

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A rose in context

Quote of the Day

“No man who ever held the office of President would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.”

– John Adams

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Catherine Ashcroft and Maurice Dickson | Táimse im’ Chodladh & King of the Pipers

Link

Nobody sleeps at the back when these two are on stage.

Long Read of the Day

What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World?

Fabulous essay in Wired by Virginia Heffernan.

TL;DR: First it was chess and Go. Now AI can beat us at Diplomacy, the most human of board games. The way it wins offers hope that maybe AI will be a delight.

Not being a player of the board-game Diplomacy I was initially baffled by the title. Now I’m not, and it’s unsettling.

Maybe AI that aims to seem human is best understood as a tribute act. A tribute to human neediness, caprice, bitterness, love, all the stuff we mortals do best. All that stuff at which machines typically draw a blank. But humans have a dread fear of nonhumans passing as the real thing—replicants, lizard people, robots with skin. An entity that feigns human emotions is arguably a worse object of affection than a cold, computational device that doesn’t emote at all.

Well worth your time.

How LLMs mislead and misinform

From Gary Marcus’s blog. He’s not impressed.

By my count, though I acknowledge I may have missed one, there are at least 7 falsehoods. (Not literally lies, since Bing doesn’t have intention):

Yes Congress really did remove McCarthy as speaker without electing a new one.

Thus far Congress has not even tried to elect a new one.

Liz Cheney is not the new Speaker. She is no longer in the House, so she isn’t even eligible ¹. (And hence no longer a Republican rerpresentative in Wyoming).

She was not nominated to the post by any coalition

She did not win any such election

Nor did anyone else win an election by a vote of 220-215, since no such election has yet been conducted

Jim Jordan didn’t (yet) lose an election that has not yet happened, and wasn’t so far as I know has not thus far been nominated.

The worst part is not that every single sentence contains at least one lie, but that the whole thing sounds detailed and real. To someone who wasn’t following matters closely, it might well all sound plausible.

It’s the confident, plausible way they spout nonsense that is most worrying.

My commonplace booklet

An excerpt from General Mark Milley’s speech on stepping down from his post as Chairman of the Join Chiefs.

The motto of our army, for over 200 years…has been “This We’ll Defend,” and the “this” refers to the Constitution….

You see, we in uniform are unique…among the world’s armies. We are unique among the world’s militaries. We don’t take an oath to a country. We don’t take an oath to a tribe. We don’t take an oath to a religion. We don’t take an oath to a king or a queen or to a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual.

We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.…

(From Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack.)

Milley has told friends that if Trump is re-elected he expects to be thrown into prison.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

 Richard Stallman is battling cancer

From The Register

He said that he is suffering from follicular lymphoma, a form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. This a blood cancer, which causes B lymphocytes to form clumps in the lymphatic system.

Although a non-Hodgkin lymphoma was also the cause of death of the late Paul Allen, the more charismatic of Microsoft’s co-founders, there are multiple types of NHL disease and Stallman has one of the slower-developing types. He said that his prognosis was good and that he hopes to be around and active in GNU for years to come.

He’s cussed, but also an inspiration. I wish him well.

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Getting to the point…

Brandon Point, Kerry.

A St Bridget’s Cross marks the spot.

Quote of the Day

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

• Max Planck

In other words, science advances “one funeral at a time”.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Lou Monte | Lazy Mary | 1958

Link

Thanks to Dave Winer for the suggestion.

Long Read of the Day

 Amazon Is the Apex Predator of Our Platform Era

Characteristically sharp OpEd by Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) on the FTC’s antitrust case against Amazon. He starts by putting the case into its historical context, the democratic need to rein the industrial trusts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Those ‘robber barons’, he writes,

couldn’t lay a railroad or erect a steel mill without time-consuming capital and logistical hurdles. Today’s tech barons at huge platforms like Amazon, Google and Meta can deploy anticompetitive, deceptive and unfair tactics with the agility and speed of a digital system. As in any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye.

And Amazon is the apex predator of our platform era. Having first subsidized end-users and then offered favorable terms to business customers, Amazon was able to exploit its digital flexibility to lock both in and raid them for an ever-increasing share of the value they created. This program of redistribution from platform users to shareholders continued until Amazon became a vestigial place, a retail colossus barely hindered by either competition or regulation, where prices go up as quality goes down and the undifferentiated slurry of products from obscure brands is wreathed in inauthentic reviews…

In my Observer column on Sunday, I wrote that the current antitrust section against Google iS the landmark case du jour. I suspect that Cory disagrees with that and believes that the Amazon case is the big one. He may be right. But the important thing is that the sleeping giant of the US Department of Justice has finally woken up.

Books, etc.

In what some marketing genius thought would be a major coup, Michael Lewis’s book on Sam Bankman-Fried, the maestro of the FTX fiasco, came out on the day that the lad’s trial opened in New York. And it rapidly became clear that Lewis’s winning formula for producing bestselling long-form journalism may have come unstuck. As the New York Times review, put it, “Even Michael Lewis Can’t Make a Hero Out of Sam Bankman-Fried”. With this particular protagonist, the Lewis recipe of upbeat narrative plus unsung genius didn’t fit.

Bankman-Fried was supposed to be another hero in this vein — or at least that’s what Lewis suggests in the opening pages of “Going Infinite,” recalling how a friend who was about to close a deal with Bankman-Fried had asked Lewis to look into him. After his first meeting with Bankman-Fried at the end of 2021, Lewis says, he “was totally sold.” He called up his friend: “Go for it! Swap shares with Sam Bankman-Fried! Do whatever he wants to do! What could possibly go wrong?”

The profusion of exclamation points is a tipoff that Lewis is at least somewhat aware how dumb such optimism looks in retrospect…

It sure does.

The Guardian had an excellent Long Read about Lewis and his modus operandi. And Molly White (Whom God Preserve) has a wonderful preview of the trial.

My commonplace booklet

The Tory strategy

Perceptive blast from Jonty Bloom

The battle lines are being drawn up by the Tory party for the next election. They are going for the votes of older people, drivers, Brexit ultras, climate change deniers, and racists.

Unfortunately, for them, a Venn diagram of those groups is pretty circular, it looks like they are trying to win the votes of the same people again and again. But they are not stupid and they must have done some polling that suggests there is a chance to get a bandwagon rolling.

But to do that they are willing to ruin the planet, reverse decades of political consensus, kill pedestrians, and now threaten to break international law and withdraw from some of the most respected and universally supported international agreements.

And the funny thing is that people used to think that Sunak was a more reasonable guy than Truss and Johnson.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

NASA is plotting how to build houses on the moon by 2040

NYT

Yeah, and who gave them Planning Permission?

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Stained glass

This striking window is in a modern Catholic Church in Cong, Co. Mayo. Can’t remember who the artist was, alas. (Memo to self: always make notes when photographing interesting things.)

Quote of the Day

“A danger sign that fellow-obsessionals will at once recognize is the tendency to regard the happiest moments of your life as those that occur when someone who has an appointment to see you is prevented from coming.”

• Peter Medawar, Memoirs of a Thinking Radish

I once sat next to him at lunch when I was a graduate student and shyly asked him what advice he gave to his students. “What I tell them”, he said, “is that research is a straightforward business: you have to pick a problem that is big enough to be worth solving…” and then he paused before continuing “… and small enough to be solved!”

I’ve been dispensing this advice ever since, and miming profundity.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Robert Schumann: Konzertstück für 4 Hörner op.86 | First movement

Link

I’m always amazed that anyone can play a brass instrument. Fortunately, they can.

Long Read of the Day

The red bourgeoisie

Absolutely fascinating memoir by Branko Milanovic about realities of life in the Soviet empire.

We were attracted to the “forbidden” things happening there. So I remember when several days later as the insurrectionist students communicated with the city only through large banners, I first saw the words “Down with the Red Bourgeoisie”. It was a new term. The students were protesting against corruption, income inequality, lack of employment opportunities. They renamed the university of Belgrade, “The Red University Karl Marx”. It was very difficult for an officially Marxist-inspired government to deal with them. The days of uncertainty ensued: the newspapers attacked them for destroying public property and “disorderly conduct”, but rebellious students continued skirmishes with the police, and proudly displayed the name of their new university. I remember vividly a bearded student with a big badge “The Red University Karl Marx” standing in the bus, and everyone around him feeling slightly uncomfortable, not sure whether to congratulate him or curse him.

But the slogan was true. It was a protest against the red bourgeoisie, the new ruling class in Eastern Europe. It was a heterogeneous class: some came, especially so in the underdeveloped countries like Serbia, from very rich families; others from the educated middle class, many from workers’ and peasants’ families. Their background was similar to the background of students who were protesting against them now.. Had the students won in 1968, they would have become the new red bourgeoisie.

The red bourgeoisie itself was the product of huge inequities of underdeveloped capitalist societies…

Great read. It reminded me of Leah Ypi’s  Free: Coming of Age at the End of History about growing up in communist Albania.

My commonplace booklet

Raspberry Pi5 is here!

It’s the first Raspberry Pi to come with an in-house graphics chip. Powered by a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor running at 2.4GHz, which means it’ll be two or three times faster than my Raspberry Pi4. And it’s still the size of a credit-card.

According to The Verge, it runs hot! I’m not surprised.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

** We finally know for sure what a trilobite ate Tens of thousands of fossils later, we’ve found a trilobite with a full stomach.

Not a terribly interesting diet IMO, but still. Amazing research.

Link

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!