Always on(line)

Provence, Summer 2023

Quote of the Day

”Profit models are not philosophies, and should not be gussied up as such, festooned with purloined intellectual gew-gaws and other pirate fineries. Serious thinkers should not be pressed into service merely as propagandists for the cause.”

• Henry Farrell, commenting on tech industry moguls who aspire to be public intellectuals.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Shelter from the Storm

Link

Long Read of the Day

A Killer App for Large Language Models

Lovely essay by Henry Farrell about a piece that he and Marion Fourcade had published in the Economist arguing that LLMs’ most straightforward application is as “engines of organisational ritual”.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE wrote a story in which the entire universe was created so that monks could ritually write out the nine billion names of God. The monks buy a computer to do this faster and better, with unfortunate consequences for the rest of us. … Rituals aren’t just about God, but about people’s relations with each other. Everyday life depends on ritual performances such as being polite, dressing appropriately, following proper procedure and observing the law. … Organisations couldn’t work without rituals. When you write a reference letter for a former colleague or give or get a tchotchke on Employee Appreciation Day, you are enacting a ceremony, reinforcing the foundations of a world in which everyone knows the rules and expects them to be observed …

My bits of the article were inspired by two reinforcing pieces of information. One was a conversation with a friend, who works for an organization that requires Diversity, Equity and Inclusion statements. The friend described how they had spent hours writing a thoughtful serious statement; and then spun up ChatGPT to generate one. The friend ended up submitting their own handcrafted statement, but couldn’t help feeling that their organization would have preferred the bland inanity of what ChatGPT had put out, which more perfectly combined the organization’s expectations and the general form of the thing.

The second was an observation from playing around with ChatGPT, which [is that] ChatGPT is very good at generating Schelling Points…

Read on. It’s quirky and insightful.

Books, etc.

I’ve just listened to a fabulous conversation between Ezra Klein and Zadie Smith, which made me realise that I need to read her essays. What clinched it was that, like me, she’s a great admirer of Neil Postman.

My commonplace booklet

I love September. For me, it’s always been the first month of the year, which is why I don’t care much for January 1st. It’s a consequence of working for many years in universities, I suppose, but also of the rhythms of primary and secondary school. Cycling in to College the other day at 8am I suddenly remembered that it was 60 years ago — to the day — since I had walked up the drive of University College Cork for my first day as an engineering student. And what came flooding back were memories of what had been going through my mind that day.

Context: I was the first member of my family to go to university, and when I was growing up in a book-free household in small towns on the West coast of Ireland (what is now grandly called ’The Wild Atlantic Way’) the possibility of being able to get there had seemed exceedingly remote. But then, in 1964, a combination of luck, location and scholarships made possible what had once seemed unattainable, and there I was on my way into the ivory tower! It was, as PG Wodehouse put it in another context, “like dying and going to heaven without the trouble and expense”. And what I remember most vividly was the intense pleasure of finally getting into a place where ideas were taken seriously.

Which explains why I was so looking forward the other morning to breakfast in college with a dear friend who had just arrived from the US, and whose new book I had read and enjoyed.

Wodehouse nailed it — as usual.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• The Amazing Recording History of Here Comes the Sun. Want to see what consummate musical geniuses the Beatles were? See this fascinating account of how that beautiful recording of George Harrison’s song was made.

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!

Summer house

Lovely little arbour in the gardens of Muckross House, Killarney.

Quote of the Day

”Where error is irreparable, repentance is useless.”

• Edward Gibbon

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Billy Strayhorn | Lotus Blossom | Duke Ellington

Link

There’s a story behind this. In a studio at the end of a recording session, as most of the musicians were packing and getting ready to leave (and you can hear them in the background), the Duke sat down at a piano and started to play. Someone pressed the record button and here’s the result. Magical!

Long Read of the Day

 Why is Britain poor?

This essay by Ed West is a really long read, but a salutary one if, like me, you are puzzled by how a large country stuffed with smart people has been sliding inexorably into absolute as well as relative decline. It’s really a kind of informal executive summary of Foundations, a remarkable online pamphlet by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes and Sam Bowman on why Britain has stagnated.

Here’s a sample that captures the flavour of the piece:

France is the most natural comparison point to Britain, a country ‘notoriously heavily regulated and dominated by labour unions.’ This is sometimes comical to British sensibilities, so that ‘French workers have been known to strike by kidnapping their chief executives – a practice that the public there reportedly supports – and strikes are so common that French unions have designed special barbecues that fit in tram tracks so they can grill sausages while they march.’ Only in France.

It is also heavily taxed, especially in the realm of employment, and yet despite this, French workers are significantly more productive. The reason is that France ‘does a good job building the things that Britain blocks: housing, infrastructure and energy supply.’

With a slightly smaller population, France has 37 million homes compared to our 30 million. ‘Those homes are newer, and are more concentrated in the places people want to live: its prosperous cities and holiday regions. The overall geographic extent of Paris’s metropolitan area roughly tripled between 1945 and today, whereas London’s has grown only a few percent.’ One quality-of-life indicator is that ‘800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.’

They also do transport far better, with 29 tram networks compared to seven in Britain, and six underground metro systems against our three. ‘Since 1980, France has opened 1,740 miles of high speed rail, compared to just 67 miles in Britain. France has nearly 12,000 kilometres of motorways versus around 4,000 kilometres here… In the last 25 years alone, the French built more miles of motorway than the entire UK motorway network. They are even allowed to drive around 10 miles per hour faster on them.’

Footnote Worth noting also that the Foundations paper covers some of the same ground as the Resolution Foundation’s remarkable study, Ending Stagnation. Both carry the same message: decline isn’t inevitable; the problems are soluble — provided some things that Britons hold sacred are changed. The worrying thing is that the new Labour administration doesn’t seem interested in tackling these.

How Apple was able to get into the hearing-aid business

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Like many professional scribblers, I sometimes have to write not in a hushed study or library, but in noisy environments. So years ago I bought a set of Apple AirPods Pro, neat little gadgets that have a limited degree of noise-cancelling ability. They’re not as effective as the clunky (and pricey) headphones that seasoned transcontinental airline passengers need, but they’re much lighter and less obtrusive. And they have a button that enables you to switch off the noise cancellation and hear what’s going on around you.

I remember wondering once if a version of them could also function as hearing aids, given the right software. But then dismissed the thought: after all, hearing aids are expensive, specialised devices that are often prescribed by audiologists – and also signal to the world at large that you are hard of hearing.

But guess what? On 12 September, I open my laptop, click on the Verge website and find the headline: “Apple gets FDA authorisation to turn the AirPods Pro into hearing aids.”

Read on

Books, etc.

As promised, my review from yesterday’s Observer.

My commonplace booklet

From Seth Godin’s daily newsletter:

Professional woodworkers rarely have to be reminded to sharpen their tools. Of course they know this.

The rest of us, on the other hand, regularly use digital tools we don’t understand, don’t maintain and haven’t optimized.

Sometimes, our lack of care in the choice and use of tools only wastes our time. Often, it actually degrades the quality of what we’re seeking to create.

If you’re not regularly getting better at your digital toolbox, you’re actually getting worse.

Hmmm… uncomfortable thought for a blogger who is trying to figure out how to integrate LLMs into his workflow.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Physicist Murray Gell-Mann on Einstein Entertaining snippet from an interview with the great physicist. Ends with a great story.
• Your Phone Is Not a Bomb Ian Boghost, writing in The Atlantic about exploding pagers in Lebanon and related matters.
• What is the Most Valuable Benefit You Got from Becoming a Mathematician? Lovely essay by Keith Devlin (Whom God Preserve).

Errata

The lake in Friday’s photograph taken from the grounds of Glenveagh Castle is Lough Veagh, not — as I said — Lough Gartan, which is in the next valley.

Thanks to John Darch for spotting the error.

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!

Lakeview

Lough Veagh seen from the grounds of Glenveagh Castle, Co. Donegal

Quote of the Day

”There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy; it is not the bad taste of a country which knows no better; it has not the nervous vulgarity of England, or the blinded vulgarity of Germany. It observes beauty, and chooses to pass it by. But it attains to beauty’s confidence.”

• E.M. Forster, writing in Where Angels Fear to Tread about an indifferent performance of Lucia di Lammermoor.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder & David Lindley | Sí Bheag, Sí Mhór

Link

Unexpected gem: Cooder and Lindley playing a lovely little Irish tune composed by Turlough Ó’Carolan, (1670 – 1738), a famous blind Irish harper, composer and singer.

If you’re interested, here is a lovely traditional rendition of the piece by Camerata Kilkenny and the Uileann piper David Power.

Long Read of the Day

 The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think

Fabulous essay by Shannon Vallor in Noema magazine on the glib and sinister barbarism of a tech industry that talks of its creations as being “superhuman”. This kind of rhetoric, she argues, “implicitly erases what’s most important about being human.”

She’s right, which is why this essay is worth your time. Here’s how she kicks it off:

Today’s generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini are routinely described as heralding the imminent arrival of “superhuman” artificial intelligence. Far from a harmless bit of marketing spin, the headlines and quotes trumpeting our triumph or doom in an era of superhuman AI are the refrain of a fast-growing, dangerous and powerful ideology. Whether used to get us to embrace AI with unquestioning enthusiasm or to paint a picture of AI as a terrifying specter before which we must tremble, the underlying ideology of “superhuman” AI fosters the growing devaluation of human agency and autonomy and collapses the distinction between our conscious minds and the mechanical tools we’ve built to mirror them.

Today’s powerful AI systems lack even the most basic features of human minds; they do not share with humans what we call consciousness or sentience, the related capacity to feel things like pain, joy, fear and love. Nor do they have the slightest sense of their place and role in this world, much less the ability to experience it. They can answer the questions we choose to ask, paint us pretty pictures, generate deepfake videos and more. But an AI tool is dark inside…

The tech crowd who use this rhetoric have a crude, ludicrously skewed, inhumane view of what it means to be human. Vallor is their most articulate critic. She’s just published a splendid book, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking which is on next week’s reading list.

My commonplace booklet

The dangers of ‘phishing’ scams have been radically increased by the advent of Generative AI, so this advice from Seth Godin is timely:

Please be on the alert for:

Spam that includes your name, address, phone number and other personal details.

Phone calls that are from human-sounding bots that pretend to be from friends or trusted brands.

Job offers.

Video mashups that include AI-generated people that seem to be made just for you.

Security alerts that are actually precisely the opposite.

Links that sure look trustworthy, but go somewhere you don’t expect.

It makes me sad that people with skills spend their time building ever-more ornate scams. It also bums me out that the emails from this blog often end up in the spam folder, but spam somehow manages to make it to my inbox.

Linkblog

• Our Research Centre has an interesting online event next Wednesday on the micro-sociology of polarisation in two American towns. Click here to sign up for it.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

The Lighthouse

This is not my photograph, but I wish it was, because it’s perfect. It’s by John Darch, a gifted landscape photographer who also happens to be my brother-in-law. The lighthouse is on St John’s Point in Co Donegal and I’ve often tried to photograph it. But John got it one day when it was reflected in a small pond, and the symmetry was, well, perfect. A real decisive moment.

Quote of the Day

”The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

• H.P. Lovecraft

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Field | Nocturne No. 5 in B flat major

Link

Long Read of the Day

I was wrong about E.M. Forster

Lovely essay by Julian Barnes.

Sometimes, when our tastes become more defined, they become narrower. But this doesn’t have to be the case. I want to address a rarer changing of the mind, which is altogether more enriching: when a writer you had previously been indifferent to, indeed actively despised, suddenly makes sense to you, and you realise – with, yes, a kind of joy – that at last you see the point of them.

I first read EM Forster when an English master handed out a list of Great Books to be read one summer holiday. A Passage to India was on that list. I still have the Penguin edition – a reprint of 1960, costing three shillings and sixpence – in which I read the novel. There are no notes in the margin, not a single cry of “Irony!” It clearly made little impression on me. Later, of my own volition, when I was about 20, I read A Room With a View, and actively began to take against Forster. It seemed to me a fusty, musty, dusty read, with rather antique prose and a storyline and characters which failed to engage me. The English novelists of the next generation – Huxley, Waugh, Greene – spoke to me with much more clarity.

Read on to find out what changed. It’s compelling IMHO.

My commonplace booklet

”Demand for High-End Cameras is Soaring”. So says the Economist in an interesting snippet.

Buying a Leica feels like buying a piece of art. Made in Germany, the cameras are sold in the swankiest neighbourhoods, sometimes in shops which double as galleries. The current models pack the latest imaging technology into sleek all-metal bodies. For decades they have been the chosen cameras of masters of photography such as Henri Cartier-Bresson (pictured) and Annie Leibovitz. Their price is extravagant. Leica’s latest compact model, the Q3, costs around $6,000 (an accompanying thumb rest is available for an extra $245). Opt for a flagship M-series camera with a couple of lenses and the bill can easily run into five figures.

Today few see the need for a dedicated camera. High-quality pictures can be snapped, edited and uploaded onto social media all with your smartphone. When in 2011 an interviewer asked Ms Leibovitz to recommend a camera, she responded by taking out her iPhone 4s, calling it “the snapshot camera of today”. The camera on Apple’s flagship device has improved with each new version, including the one released this week. Since Ms Leibovitz’s remarks, the share of photos taken on smartphones has grown from 25% to over 90%. Digital camera sales, meanwhile, have fallen by 93%. Entry-level models are steadily disappearing from the market.

Premium cameras, however, are bucking the trend. Waiting lists for Leica’s Q3, released in 2023, were initially six-months long. Its success contributed to record sales at the 110-year-old firm last year. The latest version of the premium x100 camera made by Fujifilm has been sold out since its launch in February. The cameras are being flogged online for multiples of their original price of $1,600. Rivals such as Nikon have also begun to prioritise higher-end models. As a result, the average price of a camera has tripled in the past six years, according to the Camera and Imaging Products Association (CIPA), a trade group.

One reason (mentioned in the piece) is that while modern smartphone cameras (like the one in the iPhone 15 Pro) are really pretty good, wedding photographers who showed up just with a smartphone might not impress the client.

I’ve used Leicas for aeons and only once bought a brand new one. It’s still going strong. Also, Leica has revived its M6 film camera, which apparently is selling well. Perhaps this is an echo of what’s happening with analog Hi-Fi amplifiers and turntables with the revival of vinyl?

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Smart Goose Deterrent System Link. Not a problem we have, but I like the combination of ingenuity and humaneness. Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the 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!

Picasso’s guitar

Amazing what you can do with a distorting lens.

An experiment from 2007, which explains why it’s not a high-definition print.

Quote of the Day

”I’m smart enough to know I’m dumb.”

• Richard Feynman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Peter Knight | The Water is Wide

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Third Framing

A useful (and readable) dissection by a distinguished economist of the neoliberal international order (the so-called “Washington Consensus”) that is now falling apart.

In practice the neoliberal international regime that debuted in the 1980s is dead. The major countries that defined its rules have ceased to abide by them. We are thus facing a strange situation where the main architects and the founders of the neoliberal international order no longer believe in it and do not apply it, but somehow the system should be still apparently adhered to by the rest of the world. This is an untenable situation. There is no way in which a World Bank mission to an African, Latin American or Asian country can seriously complain about government subsidies, trade discrimination, seizure of assets of political opponents, trade bloc trading, or industrial policy while the very same policies are prosecuted by the framers of the international economic system. The contradiction can be papered over for a while, but cannot be ignored forever. If the international neoliberal rules are no longer considered the appropriate rules for the United States and Europe, should they be considered as the right rules for the rest of the world?

There is simply no current answer to this question. The new rules have to be invented and introduced or the entire system will become incoherent and internally contradictory so much that eventually no “system” at all will exist. The world will be back to individual country optimization under the rules of the jungle.

By showing Musk’s X the red card, has Brazil scored a goal for all democracies?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

At 10 minutes past midnight on 31 August, Elon Musk’s X (nee Twitter) went dark in Brazil, a country of more than 200 million souls, many of them enthusiastic users of online services. The day before, a supreme court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, had done something hitherto unthinkable: ordered the country’s ISPs to block access to the platform, threatened a daily fine of 50,000 Brazilian reis (just under £6,800) for users who bypassed the ban by using virtual private networks (VPNs) and froze the finances of Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service provider in the country. The order would remain in force until the platform complied with the decisions of the supreme federal court, paid fines totalling 18.3m reis (nearly £2.5m) and appointed a representative in Brazil, a legal requirement for foreign companies operating there. Moraes had also instructed Apple and Google to remove the X app and VPN software from their stores, but later reversed that decision, citing concerns about potential “unnecessary” disruptions.

Cue shock, horror, incredulity, outrage and all the reactions in between. Musk – who has been sparring with Moraes for quite a while – tweeted: “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.” The animosity between the two goes back to 8 January 2023, after the defeat of Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, when a mob of his supporters attacked federal government buildings in the capital, Brasília. The mob invaded and caused deliberate damage to the supreme federal court, the national congress and the Planalto presidential palace in an abortive attempt to overthrow the democratically elected president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva…

Read on

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

“There are no AI-shaped holes lying around”

This is how I reconcile the facts that (a) AI is already powerful and (b) it’s having relatively little impact so far

Making AI work today requires ripping up workflows and rebuilding for AI. This is hard and painful to do…

From a tweet by Matt Clifford, a UK AI enthusiast and Chair of ARIA.

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!

Vanishing point

In Donegal, after the rain.

Quote of the Day

”Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.”

• Ernest Hemingway

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten, BWV 202 | ”Wedding Cantata”: No. 7, Aria.

Link

Long Read of the Day

What’s become of The Times & Co.?

If, like me, you’re a subscriber to the New York Times, you may be puzzled by the strangely contorted way it is covering the presidential election. In particular, the way it continues to fall into the ‘balance as bias’ trap is a mystery.

Turns out that Jeff Jarvis, the veteran journalist and NYU professor, is likewise puzzled. And on his Buzzmachine blog he’s written the most insightful analysis of the phenomenon that I’ve come across. In it he discusses — and dismisses — two of the prevailing explanations of the phenomenon (the effect of the Timess increasing reliance on subscription revenue; and the idea that liberalism is bad for business in a mainstream publication) and advances an interesting theory of his own.

His most intriguing thought (for me, anyway) is the question of why journalists seem so averse to critical reflection on what they do for a living. Jeff has a book coming out soon about this.

I began the book intending to write a defense of internet freedoms, but it became a critique of media’s moral panic over the internet and the impact that is having on those freedoms. News institutions as companies never acknowledge their own conflict of interest in covering what they see as a new competitors on the net.

I see a much larger problem at work: Journalists and news executives — and I include myself in this critique — were never equipped with the tools of theory and history to inform self-reflection on our field and to imagine alternative means and models of serving our publics.

This is why I hold that simply teaching the craft and skills of journalism in journalism schools is wholly inadequate to the profound challenges in our field. Journalists see themselves as producers of the commodity they call content and they define their value according to their roles in that process of manufacture. They would be better served to also learn from the disciplines of media studies, communication, history, sociology, ethics, and others — empowering them to reimagine and reform our field.

He’s dead right about this. And if journalism as a trade (for it isn’t a profession) is to endure, its teachers and practitioners have to grapple with more than just reporting so that they can understand what’s happening to the media ecosystem.

Books, etc.

Just started on this. I’m reviewing it for Sunday 22 September in the Observer.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  Mountain Bike Flips on a Moving Train. Do not try this on any British train.

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!

How the wind blows

This is what happens to a tree growing up on Ireland’s so-called ‘Wild Atlantic Way’.

Quote of the Day

”Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.”

• Robert Louis Stevenson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman | Birmingham

Link

Wonderful song.

On This Day 23 Years Ago…

I still think that Jeff Jarvis’s memoir is the best thing written about that terrible day.

Yes, I am blessed to be alive.

I was a block away from the World Trade Center, at Broadway and Liberty Street, when the first of the two towers collapsed yesterday morning. Completely engulfed in its debris, I joined a mob running away, screaming, unable to see, unable to breathe anything but the black cloud.

As the first of the tidal wave of debris bore down on us, some people crouched behind large concrete planters, believing they would protect them. But I kept running. I fell. Others fell around me. I got back up and kept running. I heard large pieces of the destroyed building hitting cars on the street. I heard more terrified screams.

There was no air. I breathed through my handkerchief and even so, my mouth, nose and lungs were filled with black. There was no light. I could see nothing, only black. I slammed into a building, and a tree, and another building.

I heard people and asked where we were. No one answered. I kept going and finally saw light at Chase Plaza II, where the building managers opened the doors, letting us refugees and much smoke inside…

Keep reading.

My commonplace booklet

How Joe Biden Engineered Apple’s New AirPods

Interesting blog post by Matt Stoller.

Apple said that after FDA clearance in the fall, the hearing features will be available via a software update. The AirPods Pro 2 will cost $249.

To set up hearing enhancement, users can take a hearing test inside the Apple Health app that’s based on the pure-tone test used by audiologists. The results of the test automatically adjust your AirPods’ sound levels, or you can download the test as a PDF to show an audiologist. (You can also input existing hearing test results into the Health app.)

Apple engineers turning AirPods into hearing aids is wonderful, but it’s not a uniquely difficult endeavor. In fact, what’s happening here is that a set of elected leaders opened up a market closed off by a cartel that had secured a comfortable position, shielded by the Food and Drug Administration. And engineers, many of whom care deeply about hearing, acted in this new legal space to create tools to help people live better lives…

Joe Biden’s administration enabled this, in other words.

There’s a general lesson here. It is that lots of worthwhile things that can be done (in the sense that they are technically feasible) are not being done because doing so would threaten the comfortable rents being extracted by incumbent companies — especially ones that have captured regulators in their industries.

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!

Stoned

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

Quote of the Day

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

• Henry Farrell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

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

Link

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

Long Read of the Day

There is no “woke mind virus”

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

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

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

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

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

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

So tech titans are not above the law after all

Yesterday’s Observer column

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

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

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

Read on

Later…

This from the New York Times:

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

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

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

My commonplace booklet

**Intel’s problems in a nutshell:

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

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

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Churchill: the naked truth

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

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

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The Bridge

Crossing the Severn last Sunday.

Quote of the Day

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

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

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

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

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

Link

Pure schmaltz, but what the hell.

Long Read of the Day

 Silicon Valley is an aristocratic culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worth your time if you are interested in this stuff.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

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

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

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• The Geek’s Prayer

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

the strength to avoid automating the tasks that do,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

From Phil Giammetti’s Mastodon, via Quentin.

Feedback

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

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

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

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The wisdom of dogs

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

Quote of the Day

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

• Edsger Dijkstra, a great computer scientist.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sorcha Richardson | Map of Manhattan

Link

Long Read of the Day

Stone Age builders were good engineers.

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

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

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

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

My commonplace booklet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

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

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