Pavement view

As seen by Fiona from the limestone pavement above Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales.

Quote of the Day

“If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.”

• Edgar Allen Poe

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Mayer and Ed Sheeran | Slow Dancing in a Burning Room

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Managing AI Risks in an Era of Rapid Progress

If you follow these things you will know that the UK government is hosting an ‘AI Safety Summit’ on November 1st & 2nd in, of all places, Bletchley Park. Lots of people have been using this as a peg on which to hang essays on various aspects of “the AI problem”.

Having waded through a good many of these, I’ve come to the conclusion that this paper by an interesting group of experts is the most useful background read.

Here’s how it opens:

In 2019, GPT-2 could not reliably count to ten. Only four years later, deep learning systems can write software, generate photorealistic scenes on demand, advise on intellectual topics, and combine language and image processing to steer robots. As AI developers scale these systems, unforeseen abilities and behaviors emerge spontaneously without explicit programming. Progress in AI has been swift and, to many, surprising.

The pace of progress may surprise us again.

Worth your time.

Books, etc.

My definition of ‘ideology’ is that it’s “what determines how you think when you don’t know you’re thinking”. Musing on its role in politics the other day I came on Thomas Sowell’s book, A conflict of visions: ideological origins of political struggles, which looks interesting. Here’s how its publisher described it:

Thomas Sowell’s “extraordinary” explication of the competing visions of human nature that lie at the heart of our political conflicts (New York Times)

Controversies in politics arise from many sources, but the conflicts that endure for generations or centuries show a remarkably consistent pattern. In this classic work, Thomas Sowell analyzes this pattern. He describes the two competing visions that shape our debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power: the “constrained” vision, which sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the “unconstrained” vision, in which human nature is malleable and perfectible. A Conflict of Visions offers a convincing case that ethical and policy disputes circle around the disparity between both outlooks.

Hmmm… Sowell is at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, a bastion of conservative thinking. It’ll be interesting to see how this mindset plays out in the book.

My commonplace booklet

The semiotics of kitchen design

The FT had a nice piece recently (behind the paywall) on the relentless expansion of kitchen ‘islands’ in the dwellings of the affluent bourgeoisie.

“These days, the more luxury dwellings I visit, the more I find that the size of the kitchen island is in direct proportion to the lack of cooking (or eating) actually done in the kitchen. The nuclear family has atomised and mealtimes happen elsewhere — on the sofa, in the bedroom, at a desk while checking emails — with everyone eating at different times. The island is a symbol, an idea of informal family life embodied in a deathly slab of marble, a funeral bier for food.”

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

A day in Pompeii

Amazing computer animation of what happened in 24 hours. Obliteration in 8 minutes. Reminded me of Robert Harris’s thriller, Pompeii — which I strongly recommend.

UK politics update

From the Daily Telegraph a year ago.

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You don’t say!

A serious conversation in a London cafe.

Quote of the Day

“He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night.”

• Divorce complaint of Richard Feynman’s second wife

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622 | II. Adagio

Link

I think this was the first LP I ever owned — before I even had a turntable, so I had to play it on a friend’s system!

Long Read of the Day

Absolute Powerpoint: Can a software package edit our thoughts?

And yeah I know Monday’s Long Read was about Powerpoint, but Tim Harford had mentioned this New Yorker essay by Ian Parker, and of course I followed the link and was entranced by it. As I hope you will be too.

It’s beautifully written and full of witty and insightful observations. For example, he discovered that Whitfield Diffie, the legendary cryptographer who with Martin Hellman invented public-key cryptography, played a small role in the genesis of Powerpoint. “I recently had lunch with him in Palo Alto”, Parker writes, “and for the first time he publicly acknowledged his presence at the birth of PowerPoint. It was an odd piece of news: as if Lenin had invented the stapler.”

Do read it.

Books, etc.

I’m working my way through Mike Lewis’s book on Sam Bankman-Fried, the alleged wunderkind who was responsible for the FTX implosion and who is now on trial in New York. I’m only part-way through, but as a portrait of an exceedingly complicated, clever and weirdly-detached human being it’s interesting and well done.

However, the book has attracted a lot of fierce criticism from people who are (rightly) angry about the FTX fiasco, and cross with Lewis because they think he’s been suckered by his subject. So it was interesting to stumble across a long (too long, IMHO) review essay by Cody Kommers who argues that Lewis got the balance just right. In effect, Kommers is spitting into a critical hurricane, summarised thus:

Pretty much everyone who reviewed this book agreed on two things: (a) Lewis is generationally great at narrative journalism, but (b) this time he got it wrong. Jennifer Szalai, of the New York Times, called Lewis’s book “strange”—in her opening sentence. A number of reviews said that the book on crypto you really want to read is Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up, including a compare-and-contrast in a very helpful Economist article, which notes that Lewis’s book “reveals little about the inner workings of crypto.” Even money people (as opposed to, like, literary people) really didn’t like it: Fortune declared that Lewis had unprecedented access to SBF but failed to reveal any new information. The original title of Helen Lewis’s piece for The Atlantic was “Michael Lewis is Buying What Sam Bankman-Fried is Selling.” Ouch.

All that is bad. But you know it’s really bad when Noah Smith weighs in without having even read the book…

I can’t help thinking that there’s such a moralistic force-field surrounding SBF (as the lad seems to be universally known) that people have difficulty being objective about the book. But sometimes, when you find a noisy consensus, it’s worth being sceptical.

I’ll read on to see what I think.

My commonplace booklet

Responses to Tim Hartford’s essay on PowerPoint (Monday’s Long Read) included this interesting reflection:

I’m a civil servant and unsurprisingly we use PowerPoint a lot, most often when we really shouldn’t. Tim Harford’s argument is that we use it because it’s easy and within reach.

That may be a part of the explanation. But another part of the explanation for PowerPoint’s ubiquity has to include expectations. When a senior leader asks for something, they often ask for a slide or two, regardless of whether it’s appropriate or not.

Another part of the explanation has to include the now default meeting mode – video calls. It’s even harder to sit in meetings with cameras off if there’s no slide deck to look at, just our colleagues’ bizarre choices of profile picture.

And then finally, what else can we use to cover up the void where charisma should be. Not everyone that presents has the charisma necessary to present without something to lean on. Similarly, not everyone writes well enough to put a plain document together. Not everyone can build an infographic that captures the imagination. PowerPoint slide decks are the lowest common denominator.

And the payoff: “Poorly made slide decks put audiences at ease.”

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Evening in Norfolk

Brancaster Staithe (where I hope to be again fairly soon)

Quote of the Day

“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils”

• Hector Berlioz

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Mayer & Steve Miller | The Joker

Link

Exuberant audience but a great performance.

Long Read of the Day

 Why You Can’t Trust X for News

It’s not news that the “company formerly known as Twitter” is a shell of what it once was, but the transcript of this interview with Casey Newton, a veteran observer of these things, is illuminating and insightful.

A video was recently posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) with a caption informing viewers that they were watching footage of Hamas fighters shooting down an Israeli helicopter in Gaza. The video has been viewed more than 2.5 million times and reposted more than 2,500 times. The issue? It’s totally fake. The clip is from a video game called Arma 3. It’s not in Gaza. It’s not in Israel. Nothing about it has anything to do with the current conflict.

Other videos, horrifying real ones from Israel and Gaza, are all over X with little or no warning. It has turned the platform—a place people used to go for news—into a ghastly brew of suffering and confusion over what’s real, what’s not, and what’s being posted just for clicks.

On Friday’s episode of What Next: TBD, I spoke with Casey Newton, founder and editor of the technology newsletter Platformer, about how the war between Israel and Hamas is revealing how broken X really is. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Do read on.

Books, etc.

This is an interesting book to come from a political scientist. Landemore argues that democratic leadership is determined by a method roughly akin to jury service: every now and then, your number comes up, and you’re obliged to do your civic duty by taking a seat on a small-scale legislative body. For a fixed period, your job is to work with the other people in the body to solve problems and decide on action. And when your term is up, you go back to normal life and work.

Nathan Heller has an interesting piece about the author in the New Yorker.

On my reading list.

My commonplace booklet

James Payne’s trailer for his YouTube treatment of Alice in Wonderland in his ‘Great Books Explained’ series.

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Last rose of Summer?

I wonder. Taken the other day in very bright evening sunshine.

Quote of the Day

”To achieve greatness, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”

• Leonard Bernstein

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jackson Browne & Billy Strings | Running On Empty (live), San Francisco, Sept. 29, 2022

Link

Long Read of the Day

How Generative AI reduces the world to stereotypes

Way back in February, Ted Chiang likened ChatGPT to “a blurry JPEG of the Web”. It’s a nice metaphor but maybe a bit too generous. LLMs are more like blurry JPEGs of lots of stereotypes. That, at any rate, is the conclusion that the admirable Rest of World site came to when it analysed 3,000 AI images produced by Generative AIs to see how these tools visualise different countries and cultures.

The results — outlined in a visually imaginative report are fascinating — and depressing. And instructive. They remind me of something I overheard a while ago: “If you want to know what the Internet thinks, just ask ChatGPT.”

This is well worth your time. Thanks to Sheila Hayman for spotting it.

My commonplace booklet

 After ChatGPT disruption, Stack Overflow lays off 28 percent of staff

Wow! Stack Overflow used to be one of the wonders of the online world. But ChatGPT. Now, according to ArsTechnica,

Stack Overflow used to be every developer’s favorite site for coding help, but with the rise of generative AI like ChatGPT, chatbots can offer more specific help than a 5-year-old forum post ever could. You can get instant corrections to your exact code, optimization suggestions, and explanations of what each line of code is doing. While no chatbot is 100 percent reliable, code has the unique ability to be instantly verified by just testing it in your IDE (integrated development environment), which makes it an ideal use case for chatbots. Where exactly does that leave sites like Stack Overflow? Apparently, not in a great situation. Today, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar announced Stack Overflow is laying off 28 percent of its staff.

Errata

In last Friday’s edition I reproduced the first two stanzas of W.H. Auden’t great poem 1 September, 1939 and wrongly stated that it had been composed on the first day of World War II. Not so, says Pam Appleby (Whom God Preserve) who wrote to point out that the war started on September 3, and that she remembers the day well: she was 11 at the time! So, thanks to her, and apologies to readers everywhere.

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The path taken

(With apologies to Robert Frost.)

Quote of the Day

“The handicap under which most beginning writers struggle is that they don’t know how to write.”

• P.G. Wodehouse

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Air on the G String

Link

Triggered by a clue in the Irish Times crossword the other day: “Bach put air on a thing that gets minimal coverage“ (1,6)

Long Read of the Day

Daniel Dennett on Thinking — and AI

Transcript of an interesting interview with an interesting man.

Sample:

Q: Where do you see AI going? Do you think that it’s something we should be concerned about? Dennett: A thousand times yes. In fact, in the last few months, I’ve been devoting almost all my energy to this. I did a piece for The Atlantic called “The Problem of Counterfeit People.” I’m just back from Santa Fe, where I gave a talk to a group and said the whole point of my talk was to scare the bejesus out of them.

I’m an alarmist, but I think there’s every cause for alarm. We really are at risk of a pandemic of fake people that could destroy human trust, could destroy civilization. It’s as bad as that. I say to everybody I’ve talked to about this, “If you can show that I’m wrong, I will be so grateful to you.” But right now, I don’t see any flaws in my argument, and it scares me.

The most pressing problem is not that they’re going to take our jobs, not that they’re going to change warfare, but that they’re going to destroy human trust. They’re going to move us into a world where you can’t tell truth from falsehood. You don’t know who to trust. Trust turns out to be one of the most important features of civilization, and we are now at great risk of destroying the links of trust that have made civilization possible…

Fascinating throughout.

Books, etc.

Like me, the historian David Vincent kept a diary during the Covid lockdown. Mine was initially an audio version which appeared on this blog every day. (I later published the transcripts as 100 Not Out: A Lockdown Diary.) David’s diary was published on Covid2020diary, a collective blog written by witnesses from eight different countries. But then he spent a couple of years reflecting, in the way that only a good social historian can, on the pandemic as a phenomenon. The book that resulted from those reflections has recently appeared — already to some critical acclaim.

Now, as an accompaniment to that reflective volume, David has published his diary as a Kindle book — A Time of the Infection.

I’ve been dipping into it. It’s a delight — quirky, learned, witty, serious, never pompous. It constantly triggers memories of one’s own experiences of that weird period of lockdown. And it’s an antidote to the fading of memories of a time when the populace of a democratic nation broadly acceded to restrictions of which dictators can only dream.

Musk’s plan X: keep users in the dark, feed them dung and watch sales mushroom

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Many observers are puzzled by Musk’s apparent determination to destroy his expensive new toy. How could an ostensibly intelligent multibillionaire be so stupid, they ask? But maybe that’s the wrong question. What if Musk knows what he’s doing – that he sees a viable business in encouraging shitposting and mining the resultant ordure? That, at any rate, is the interesting hypothesis advanced in an entrancing essay by Johns Hopkins political scientist Henry Farrell, one of the sharpest dudes around.

Its underlying metaphor is that of the mushroom, a fungus that thrives on being kept in the dark under a pile of manure. Farrell’s point is that “some people are quite happy to be kept in the dark, well fertilised with horseshit. And that is the foundation for a business model. Not a rapidly expanding one of the kind that could allow Twitter’s massive debt burden to ever be paid off. But it can keep on producing its cash crop, year in, year out.”

It’s basically the business model that enabled the infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to become a multimillionaire – at least until he came a cropper in the US courts…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Max Weber on Journalists

Now that’s a headline you wouldn’t expect to see. But Andrew Batson points out that there’s an extended digression on journalism in that famous 1919 lecture on “Politics as a Vocation”.

David Runciman gave a great talk about the lecture in his first ‘History of Ideas’ series.

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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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