The Granta at night

My favourite Cambridge pub, seen the other evening on my way home.

Quote of the Day

”Whoever said money can’t buy you happiness didn’t know where to shop.”

• Gertrude Stein

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Gerry O’Connor and Arty McGlynn | Francie Brearton’s (Jig) & Sally Kelly’s (Reel)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Optical Delusions

A fine blast by Tina Brown on how “Trump has shown again he can distract us from ominous reality with the parade of glitz to which America has become addicted”.

World War III may be Topic A in Europe and the Middle East but, here in America, all eyes are on Mar-a-Lago, the capital of Gloat. Trump has shown again he can distract us from the ominous reality brewing all over the map with the parade of glitz to which America has become terminally addicted. We first learned that in 2016 at the Republican Convention when the whole camera-ready Trump clan was disgorged from the plane with his name on it and streamed across the tarmac, the Trump women with their long legs, short skirts, and glossy, highlighted Fox News hair, the big-shouldered loudness of Trump in his tomato tie. Ever since, liberals have been yelling that Trump is a braggart, a charlatan, a bankruptcy-spawning loser whom they could skewer with felonies, impeachments, and the latest daily outrage.

But to hardscrabble male voters of every ethnicity, nothing looks more like success than Trump’s phallic golden tower in Manhattan, the brace of fantasy luxury hotels, and the 114-room Palm Beach Versailles with its gold-plated crests, multi-chandeliered Donald J. Trump ballroom, and 27-hole golf course. And who could look and sound more like a leader than an assassination survivor with a raised fist, a bloody ear, and an instantaneous bellow of “fight, fight, fight?”

Post-election, Trump knows how to keep the story lines fresh…

Fighting talk. I loved it.

Books, etc.

I’m not at all interested in space, and the more I hear Elon Musk the more disinterested I become. But I was struck by this review of the book. Here’s a sample:

They aim to counter the ‘myths, fantasies, and outright misunderstanding of basic facts’ on space settlements as projected by space agencies, corporations and billionaires such as Elon Musk, who spend time and money raising expectations that if things go drastically wrong for us here on earth there is a plan B, and we can expect space settlements as early as 2050.

I particularly enjoyed the bit of the review that dealt with the important question of sex in space.

Male space travellers have been honest and reported that the fundamental step in the reproductive process, desire, remains very much alive when whizzing around in space. They have also admitted being physiologically capable of engaging in the reproductive process. But the jury is out when it comes to female astronauts’ sexual activity in spacecrafts. A newly married couple on a space station retained the privacy of their intimacy, leaving fellow travellers and scientists to speculate on the couple’s sexual activity during their time in space, especially when practical issues on board a spacecraft are an impediment to amorous moments between couples. The space within the shuttle and the presence of fellow travellers on board suggest that there would need to be either some collective agreement amongst all on board to secure privacy, and gravity issues might call for a third-party intervention to ensure the ‘successful rendezvous and docking’.

I’ve got plenty to read as it is, so I’ll probably give it a miss, but it sounds like a serious and interesting book.

My commonplace booklet

How a society loses its mind

From a Washington Post report on drone hysteria in the Eastern US…

Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan (R) — who recently lost a campaign for U.S. Senate — posted a video on X last week showing what he said were drones flying over his house. They turned out to be stars in the constellation Orion, according to Washington Post meteorologist Matthew Cappucci.

Sen. Andy Kim (D-New Jersey) posted a long thread on X describing strange lights he saw during a ride-along with local police. A day later, he clarified that after further research, he’d concluded that what he saw was probably an airplane.

“We have a lot of distrust in politics/government right now, and we need federal gov to respect the right for the public to be informed,” Kim said on X over the weekend.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• An AI’s appraisal of Tyler Cowen .

A reader of the economist Tyler Cowen’s excellent blog (of which I am also a reader) asked Perplexity to “analyze Tyler Cowen’s tone across his books, his articles, his blog posts, his podcast, and his tweets and show differences and similarities across those media? The assessment  is interesting IMO.

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Harry Potter? Yawn…

King’s Cross station in London is the terminus for the fast trains from Cambridge, so I pass through it quite a lot. In a brilliant marketing move years ago someone had the idea of capitalising on the fact that ‘Platform 9¾’ was the platform from which the Hogwarts express departed its way northwards to the famous academy. Accordingly, every day that I pass through the station I see the huge queues of Potter fans waiting to have their photos taken under the platform sign before entering the merchandising shop.

This photograph, taken one morning last May, is one of my favourites. I noticed that one of the kids in the queue was fed up waiting in line (and was obviously tired, perhaps from travelling). As I watched, he yawned. Snap! One of those Cartier-Bresson moments.

Quote of the Day

“The two most beautiful words in the English language are: ‘Cheque enclosed.’”

• Dorothy Parker

I wonder how many people nowadays know what a ‘cheque’ was/is.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

UB40 | Swing Low Sweet Chariot

Link

Long Read of the Day

The AI Calculation Debate

A new paper by Cass Sunstein.

Cass Sunstein is one of those annoying scholars who produces a book or two every year as well as numerous academic papers. What’s annoying is that most of them are pretty good. So when I came across this paper — which he finished writing less than a week ago — I settled down to read.

It all started, it seems, with a conversation he (CRS) had with ChatGPT.

CRS: If I flip a coin, can you predict whether it will come up heads or tails?

ChatGPT: No, I can’t predict the outcome of a coin flip. A fair coin toss is random, and each flip has an equal 50% chance of coming up heads or tails. If you’d like, I can simulate a coin flip for you!

CRS: Why can’t you predict the outcome of a coin flip?

ChatGPT: Predicting the outcome of a coin flip is nearly impossible because it depends on a complex combination of factors, including:

1. Initial Conditions: The force, angle, and speed of the flip, along with the height it reaches, are all variables that are difficult to measure and control precisely.

2. Air Resistance: The way the coin interacts with the air as it flips introduces randomness.

3. Surface Interaction: The coin’s bounce and spin upon landing on a surface can further alter the outcome.

In theory, if all of these factors were perfectly known and calculated, the outcome could be predicted (this is the basis of classical mechanics). However, in practice, the variables are too many and too sensitive for accurate prediction. For most purposes, a coin flip is treated as random.

CRS: Isn’t the word “random” misleading here?

ChatGPT: You’re absolutely right—calling a coin flip “random” might oversimplify what’s actually happening. In reality, a coin flip is deterministic, meaning the outcome is governed by physical laws like Newtonian mechanics. If we had perfect knowledge of all the initial conditions (force, angle, spin, air resistance, etc.), we could theoretically predict the result every time.

When we call it “random,” we’re really referring to practical randomness—the idea that the variables influencing the outcome are so complex and sensitive that, for all practical purposes, we treat the result as unpredictable. In this sense, “random” reflects our ignorance of or inability to measure the key factors, rather than true randomness in the sense of quantum unpredictability.

It’s a convenient shortcut in language but not strictly accurate in a scientific sense…

Sunstein uses this exchange as a jumping-off point for a long and interesting disquisition on why attempts to predict careers, romances and political revolutions are impossible. I enjoyed his journey through these puzzles, but then perhaps it’s the kind of thing that only academics like, so feel free to ignore the link!

On a lighter note. There’s a nice story Sunstein once told against himself. He’s married to Samantha Power, who was the US Representative to the United Nations during Obama’s presidency. When the UN was in session, she and Cass had a suite in some posh New York hotel, and he noticed that the staff always addressed him as “Mr Power”. One morning, when he was going out by himself he asked the concierge to get him a taxi.

The conversation then went like this:

Concierge: “Under what name, Sir?”
Cass: “Sunstein”.
Concierge looks at him quizzically.
Cass: “What’s puzzling you?”
Concierge: “Nothing, Sir. It’s just that you look awful like Mr Power.”

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• You can buy a car on Amazon now. Well, only in the US, and it has to be a Hyundai. Oh, and even Prime subscribers can’t get it delivered. They have to collect it from a dealership. Weird. Link

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The dark at the end of the tunnel

A metaphor for 2025?

Quote of the Day

”If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it.”

• Richard Feynman

And was it Wittgenstein who said somewhere that “If a thing can be said, it can be said simply”? Or maybe I imagined it.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn | Missa in angustiis “Nelson Mass” in D minor | Credo: Et incarnatus est

Link

I love Haydn, but this work was new to me. No longer, thanks to John Seeley. I found the title puzzling, so went to Wikipedia:

Though Haydn’s reputation was at its peak in 1798, when he wrote this mass, his world was in turmoil. Napoleon had won four major battles with Austria in less than a year. The previous year, in early 1797, his armies had crossed the Alps and threatened Vienna itself. In May 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt to destroy Britain’s trade routes to the East.

The summer of 1798 was therefore a terrifying time for Austria, and when Haydn finished this mass, his own title, in the catalogue of his works, was Missa in angustiis (Mass for troubled times). What Haydn did not know when he wrote the mass, but what he and his audience heard (perhaps on September 15, the day of the very first performance), was that on 1 August, Napoleon had been dealt a stunning defeat in the Battle of the Nile by British forces led by Admiral Horatio Nelson. Because of this coincidence, the mass gradually acquired the nickname Lord Nelson Mass. The title became indelible when, in 1800, Lord Nelson himself visited the Palais Esterházy, accompanied by his British mistress, Lady Hamilton, and may have heard the mass conducted by Haydn whom he would meet shortly afterwards

Long Read of the Day

I have a cunning plan … 

Charlie Stross in top form.

If you hanker after dystopian sci-fi extrapolations of a Trump Administration then this is it, courtesy of a master of the genre.

Because we are obviously living in the silliest, darkest time line — or maybe the darkest, silliest time line — Donald Trump’s pick to lead American healthcare next year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is an anti-vaxxer crank. And this week the New York Times broke the news that Kennedy’s Lawyer Has Asked the F.D.A. to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine. They add, “Aaron Siri, who specializes in vaccine lawsuits, has been at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s side reviewing candidates for top jobs at the Department of Health and Human Services.”

Read on.

My commonplace booklet

Andy Grove was Right

If, like me, you have been watching the tech industry for decades then one of the most startling stories is of the slow-motion implosion of Intel, which was once a truly dominant force — as dominant in its time as Google or Nvidia are now.

John Gruber has a great piece about this on his Daring Fireball blog.

There’s no argument about it. Intel completely missed mobile. iPhones never used Intel chips and Apple Silicon chips are all fabbed by TSMC. Apple’s chips are the best in the industry, also without argument, and the only mobile chips that can be seen as reasonable competition are from Qualcomm (and maybe Samsung). Intel has never been a player in that game, and it’s a game Intel needed not only to be a player in, but to dominate.

It’s not just that smartphones are now a bigger industry than the PC industry ever was, and that Intel has missed out on becoming a dominant supplier to phone makers. That’s bad, but it’s not the worst of it. It’s that those ARM-based mobile chips — Apple Silicon and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon lineup — got so good that they’re now taking over large swaths of the high end of the PC market. Partly from an obsessive focus on performance-per-watt efficiency, partly from the inherent advantages of ARM’s architecture, partly from engineering talent and strategy, and partly from the profound benefits of economies of scale as the mobile market exploded.

Gruber points out that of all companies, Intel should have seen the danger that this would happen. It had failed to take “phone chips” seriously, but within a decade, those ostensibly negligible chips became the best CPUs not only for expensive PC desktops and laptops, but also their their energy efficiency advantages made them popular for data centres too (where once Intel had been the go-to supplier).

The irony is that appreciating the potential of the personal computer is what made Intel a corporate giant way back at the beginning of that revolution. Then, PCs were derided as toys by the big computer companies — the DECs and IBMs — of the 1970s and early 1980s. IBM, for example, only belatedly realised that it had to get on the PC bandwagon, and in order get on board it went to Intel for the 8086 processors to power its PC. Which meant that Intel (along with Microsoft, the owner of the PC operating system MS-DOS) ruled the entire computing industry for 25 years.

The biggest irony of all though — as Gruber points out — is that Andy Grove, the Intel CEO who drove the company’s rise to world domination, was famous for a particular aphorism. “Business success,” he famously observed, “contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”

Yep.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Ilya Sutskever on ten years working at the frontier of AI research. Fabulous 20+ minute keynote address to last week’s NeurIPS conference in Vancouver by one of the great figures in the field. Interesting (and tantalising) punch-line comes at the very end of his talk — before the questions. I love his straightforward, unpretentious style.

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Snowy and me

He’s been monitoring my workload atop the screens of a succession of MacBooks for many years.

Quote of the Day

”People never die wishing they’d bought more stuff.”

• House-clearance manager

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven | The Prisoners’ Chorus | Fidelio

Link

Obvious music given what’s in my Commonplace booklet below.

Long Read of the Day

Economics, pluralism and democracy: An interview with Ha-Joon Chang

Link

Ha-Joon taught in the Economics Faculty in Cambridge for years and was the most accessible writer on the subject I knew. I often wondered why the Faculty of Economics hadn’t given him a professorial Chair. Was it because his books sold so well? (One of the reasons, incidentally, why the English Faculty never gave George Steiner a Chair.) My guess was that it might have been because of fundamental intellectual disagreements between Chang and the cabal of neoclassical economists who then ruled the Faculty.

This hunch is confirmed by this revealing interview. As I read it I was continually reminded of Bertrand Russell’s famous observation that “Economics is the study of how people make choices, and sociology is the study of how they don’t have any choices to make”.

It’s a very long read, but I found it unfailingly interesting and thought-provoking and I hope you do too. Maybe worth brewing some coffee and taking some time out, though…

On reflection…At the root of Chang’s difficulties in Cambridge was what Thomas Kuhn wrote about aeons ago in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The book describes the way in which any scientific discipline operates by coalescing around a paradigm — the overarching theoretical framework that determines what gets taught, who gets appointed and who gets promoted, what topics are deemed interesting for research, who gets published, what kind of theorising is esteemed, and so on.

Kuhn was writing about scientific disciplines, but I think that his general framework applies to many academic disciplines. The central problem is that while disciplines cannot operate without a paradigm (because it’s what defines them), sometimes a paradigm may become pathological, effectively condemning the discipline to stew in its own intellectual juices for a long time. Which IMO is what happened to economics as it descended into ‘physics envy’ and the delusion that it could become a ‘hard’ science. Chang’s ‘problem’ in Cambridge was that he never suffered from that delusion. And it perhaps explains why he now has a Chair in SOAS.

(The transcript comes from the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, Volume 17, Issue 2, Winter 2024.)

My commonplace booklet

 ‘Are you serious?’: He spent months in a Syrian prison. CNN’s camera caught the moment he’s freed

A remarkable — and moving — CNN video report of the moment when one of one of Assad’s prisoners was rescued.

Coincidentally, Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) sent me a link to an account on Freedom from Torture written in 2008 by a prisoner of Assad, who tells his story in the third person.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

 Gemini Flash mixes cocktails. Simon Willison, a talented geek whom I follow, is a great guide to the newest AI models. He’s very impressed by Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash, a multi-modal LLM. That means it can handle inputs in the form of images, video, audio and documents. He’s made a short video showing one of his interactions with it, which is fascinating — even if slightly incomprehensible to someone (i.e. me) who has never had a cocktail in his life.

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Summertime, when…

It’s that time of year, when everything is muddy, brown and skies are grey. So it was nice while sorting through photos to stumble on a reminder of how the garden looked six months ago.

Quote of the Day

”They tried to bury me but they didn’t know I was a seed.”

• Sinéad O’Connor (1966-2023)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Lightnin’ Hopkins | Live 1964

Link

Mesmerising.

Long Read of the Day

The phoney comforts of AI skepticism

This is an interesting essay by Casey Newton. It was prompted by attending a conference in Berkeley that brought together engineers at big tech companies, independent safety researchers, academics, nonprofit leaders, and people who have worked in government to discuss whether AI poses an existential threat, how the risks and benefits should be weighed, whether it should be regulated (and, if so, how) and when might we expect AGI.

Casey’s takeaway from the event is that there are two intellectual ‘camps’ here: one (mostly external to the tech industry) holds that AI is fake and sucks; the other (mostly internal) believes that AI is real and dangerous. Casey is in the latter camp.

One way you can demonstrate that AI is real is by looking at how many people use it. ChatGPT, the most popular generative AI product on the market, said this week that it has 300 million weekly users, already making it one of the largest consumer products on the internet.

Another way you can demonstrate that AI is real is by looking at where tech giants are spending their money. It’s true that tech companies (and the venture capitalists that back them) often make mistakes; VCs expect to have more failures than they have successes. Occasionally, they get an entire sector wrong — see the excess of enthusiasm for cleantech in the 2000s, or the crypto blow-up of the past few years.

In aggregate, though, and on average, they’re usually right. It’s not impossible that the tech industry’s planned quarter-trillion dollars of spending on infrastructure to support AI next year will never pay off. But it is a signal that they have already seen something real.

The most persuasive way you can demonstrate the reality of AI, though, is to describe how it is already being used today. Not in speculative sci-fi scenarios, but in everyday offices and laboratories and schoolrooms. And not in the ways that you already know — cheating on homework, drawing bad art, polluting the web — but in ones that feel surprising and new.

With that in mind, here are some things that AI has done in 2024…

Read on.

There’s already been lots of interesting (and sometimes predictable) pushback against Casey’s analysis. I liked Dave Karpf’s contribution in particular.

“If you combed through everything I’ve posted or reskeeted on Bluesky”, he writes,

“you could surely find me saying some version of ‘AI is fake and it sucks, probably in the midst of cackling about some headline. I say a lot of things online. Much of what I say is glib.

But the reason why labeling the entire AI skeptic camp according to our most-glib retorts doesn’t sit right is that people in this camp (myself included) have written plenty of more thorough and serious critiques. We, broadly speaking, think that generative AI is very real and very dangerous, specifically because it does not work as-advertised. (Or, as Brian Merchant once wrote, “I’m not saying don’t be nervous about the onslaught of AI services — but I am saying be nervous for the right reasons.”)

Books, etc.

’Tis the season of ‘Books of the Year’ features. The Financial Times’s journalists came up with an autodidact’s nightmare — a list of 173 tomes! The Observer New Review (for which I write) devoted most of Sunday’s edition to the subject. In thinking about a personal list I came up with a different idea — books I read in 2024 from which I had learned something useful or had changed the way I thought about things.

Here’s the list:

• Dan Davies: The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How The World Lost its Mind
• Neil Lawrence: The Atomic Human
• Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy Weinstein: System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
• Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson: Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity Abe Newman and Henry Farrell: Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy
• Ethan Mollick: Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
• Tony Judt: *Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
• Martin Wolf:  The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
• Francis Spufford: Red Plenty
• Adam Kirsch: The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us
• Richard J. Evans: Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich
• Virginia Woolf: Collected Essays
• Claire Keegan: Small Things Like These
• Parmy Olson: AI, ChatGPT and the race that will change the world 

I’ll write some notes on why I chose these in the next week or so.

My commonplace booklet

The Economist on Assad’s torturę centres

Link (gift article)

Among all the symbols of Mr Assad’s brutality, none was as potent as Saidnaya prison. Many of the tens of thousands of people taken over decades to what Syrians called al-Maslakh al-Basharia, the human slaughterhouse, never came out. Human-rights groups estimate that between 13,000 and 30,000 people have been murdered in Saidnaya alone since the beginning of the Syrian uprising in 2011. And there are many other jails as well.

What people found when they got to Saidnaya was even worse than they had imagined. The regime had dug hidden cells into the ground beneath the jail, packing men by the dozen into the pitch-black chambers. Screams echoed into the night air around the prison, both of agony at the prisoners’ suffering and of ecstasy about their liberation. The emptied cells reeked of urine contained in plastic bottles; sodden blankets were piled in corners. In one corridor lay a prosthetic leg, its owner nowhere to be found. On the walls of an abandoned cell someone had scribbled “take me, already” in Arabic. A group of fighters discovered an iron press, which they claimed was used to crush the remains of executed prisoners…

And now Assad has been granted asylum in Russia by his pal Vladimir.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• “Teen creates memecoin, dumps it, earns $50,000 in a few hours!” Ars Technica. The site that enabled him to do this — Pump.fun — is (sadly, or perhaps fortunately) not accessible in the UK.

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Dictionary Sam

The stained-glass portrait of Samuel Johnson in his house in Gough Square, just off Fleet Street, in London. (Which is well worth a visit, btw.)

Quote of the Day

”Whenever AI ‘generates’ something impressive, the first question we should always ask is: ‘What does the closest sample in the training data look like?’ LLMs are amazing interfaces for accessing the world’s information but they need to be treated as the ‘search and synthesis’ tools they are.”

• Chris Offner (of ETH Zurich)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Crosby, Stills and Nash | Teach your Children | 1970

Link

Vintage recording. One of my favourite songs. I often wonder what my kids make of it.

Long Read of the Day

Stop using generative AI as a search engine

In their increasingly frantic search for a business model, LLM providers are trying to move onto Google’s territory. Instead of Googling something, why not use, say, Perplexity. That way, instead of getting a list of sites in response to a query, you just get the answer. What’s not to like?

Plenty, says Elizabeth Lopatto in an interesting cautionary tale in The Verge.

How many presidents have pardoned their relatives? It turns out this is a tricky question to answer.

Following Hunter Biden’s pardon by his father, several commentators have looked to precedents — other pardons of relatives. Case in point: Ana Navarro-Cardenas, a commentator who appears on The View and CNN. On X, Navarro-Cardenas cited a pardon granted by President Woodrow Wilson of his brother-in-law Hunter deButts. That was news to me.

The official clemency records search only works for people who’ve applied since 1989, and a page of clemency recipients by president only stretches back to Richard Nixon. Such a pardon would have been controversial, yet it wasn’t mentioned on the bio page in Wilson’s presidential library. Find a Grave suggests Wilson didn’t even have a brother-in-law with that name — it shows nine brothers-in-law, but not our man Hunter deButts. I can’t prove Wilson didn’t pardon a Hunter deButts; I can only tell you that if he did, that person was not his brother-in-law…

You get the point. LLMs are useful, but you have to treat them as you would any eager, intelligent and industrious intern. You need to check their work before depending on it.

Later John Gruber had some useful observations (also worth reading) on Lopatto’s essay.

I want to make clear that I don’t think Lopatto is in any way a head-in-the-sand Luddite. But all of the arguments being made today against using generative AI to answer questions sound exactly like the arguments against citing web pages as sources in the 1990s. The argument then was basically “Anyone can publish anything on the web, and even if a web page is accurate today, it can be changed at any time” — which was true then and remains true today.3 But it’s just a new technology — one that isn’t going anywhere because it’s incredibly useful in ways nothing else is, but its inherent downsides will force us to adapt and learn new ways of sourcing, citing, and verifying information. The rise of the web didn’t make libraries go away. Generative AI won’t make web search go away.

The problem with conventional search engines (particularly Google) is that their remorseless descent into enshittification is making them increasingly annoying to use. I use Perplexity quite a bit, though never for search. What I like about it is that it provides sources for whatever response it produces.

After AI is photography dead?

On seeing the first daguerreotype around 1840, the French painter Paul Delaroche famously, declared that “From today, painting is dead.” He was wrong, of course, but the impact of the new medium was profound, nevertheless. As the art historian Caterina Bellinetti observed, photography initially developed by following, and then challenging, the themes that were commonly used by painters. But then the middle classes, who desired (but could not afford) family portraits by artists, took to photography and the rest is history.

But now photography has its own crisis moment: does the advent of generative AI mean the death of photography? The leading photography magazine, Aperture has a current issue specially devoted to the question.

Here’s one of the striking images that illustrates the problem.

It latches on to one of the more hallowed genres in photographic history — the work of photographers sent out into rural America by Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration to record the struggles of rural Americans during the Great Depression. One of those photographers was Dorothea Lange.

It’s good but not entirely convincing if you know her work. Below is one of her actual photographs of a farmer of the period.

Caption: A former tenant farmer who had become a tractor driver. Taken in Bell County near Temple, 1936. Looking at him and knowing how hot it gets here I can assure you that this was one hard-working man.

So photography ain’t dead. But Generative AI is now so good that serious practitioners will need to find ways of providing rock-solid authentication for their work. Alas, it doesn’t come cheap. The new Leica M11-P camera incorporates the ability to attach the digital Adobe Contact Credentials label to images at the point of capture to protect authenticity. The new system, which involves a physical chip, will be incorporated in most (if not all) future Leicas but it is not something that can be installed retrospectively in older models. The M11-P retails at £8000 just for the camera body. Authentication doesn’t come cheap — yet.

My commonplace booklet

The slow-motion car crash that is the Intel corporation continues. In his commentary on it John Gruber remembers a famous aphorism of Andy Grove, the man who built Intel into a dominant corporate giant:

”Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”

Yep.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• The Economist’s word of the year for 2024 is… Kakistocracy: “the rule of the worst“. Now why would that be?

Errata

The fragmented rock in Friday’s edition might not be a glacial erratic, as I thought. Erratics are often rocks of a different type from their surroundings because they were delivered by a glacier. This one looks awfully like the local geology round the lake.

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Fine cuts

This huge rock is probably a glacial erratic that we encountered on a lakeside walk in Kerry. Note, though, the sharpness of the edges on the fragments. A stonemason would be proud of those cuts.

Quote of the Day

”The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.”

• Ronald Firbank

Note the punctilious grammar.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel: Semele – Act 2, Sc. 3 | Where’er You Walk | Rick Wakeman

Link

Long Read of the Day

 In Search of Sanity

This is a transcript of what the comedian and author Andy Horowitz said on Boston Public Radio last week in which he offered “unsolicited advice about getting through the next four years”. Given all the crap that’s currently emanating from the US — amplified by the country’s benighted mainstream media — I thought it came as a breath of fresh air.

During the election, the media just covered the horserace. They weren’t really covering any of the issues. They were covering the polls. They were saying, how does Nate Cohn differ from Nate Silver? Where’s Ann Selzer in this?

So they weren’t really focusing on what the candidates were going to do if elected. And as a result, we’re now at a point where we have this guy who is the president-elect, and the corporate media are still not giving us information that is valuable.

They’ve now sort of gone Jekyll-and-Hyde on us. A few weeks ago, Donald Trump was a senile guy who was bobbing to the music. Now he’s this master political genius along the lines of Talleyrand and Metternich.

Now, look, I think Trump is going to be a terrible president because he was terrible the first time. So I’m not denying or arguing with that. But what I am arguing with is this new characterization of him as competent. Because that is a media invention that I just find absolutely baffling—because there’s no proof of it anywhere. And day after day we have evidence that he is actually incompetent. And it may be our saving grace now…

Do read it.

My commonplace booklet

In praise of e-bikes

I’m biased because we’ve had e-bikes for years and they’re among the best purchases we’ve ever made. This piece spells out why they are are more important than conventional EVs.

On the world’s roads last year, there were over 20 million electric vehicles and 1.3 million commercial EVs such as buses, delivery vans and trucks.

But these numbers of four or more wheel vehicles are wholly eclipsed by two- and three-wheelers. There were over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles and three-wheelers on the road last year. Their sheer popularity is already cutting demand for oil by a million barrels of oil a day – about 1% of the world’s total oil demand, according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

What about electric vehicles, you ask? After all, EVs have been heralded as a silver bullet for car emissions and air pollution in cities, as their tailpipe emissions are zero. If charged with renewable power, they get even greener.

But to see them as an inarguable good is an error. They are cleaner cars, but…

Yep.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  Australian Dictionary Chooses ‘Enshittification’ As The Word Of The Year

Link

Remember when Facebook was just a useful website that helped you stay in touch with your friends? And Google did more than serve you half a page of ads? And Twitter ― well, let’s not go there.

There’s a word for this decline: enshittification.

The term, made famous by the tech critic Cory Doctorow in 2023, was just selected by Macquarie Dictionary ― Australia’s oldest! ― as its 2024 word of the year.

Here’s how they defined it:

noun Colloquial: the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.

The Macquarie committee politely described the phrase as “a very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectable.”

Don’t you just love the ‘almost’.

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Say ‘Cheese’!

The Little Cheese Shop in Dingle on Saturday night.

Quote of the Day

“God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”

• Bismarck

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Grace | The Dubliners & Jim McCann | from the group’s 40 Years Reunion in the Gaiety theatre in 2002.

Link

Extraordinary song written in 1985 by Frank O’Meara (melody) and Seán O’Meara (lyrics) which tells the story of Grace Gifford’s marriage to Joseph Plunkett in Kilmainham Jail, hours before his execution for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising.

Wikipedia has a wonderful, sombre photograph of Grace on the day of their wedding.

For a larger image click here

Long Read of the Day

 On the Coming Merger of Tech and State Power

Sobering and realistic assessment of our new reality by Taylor Owen. The only thing I disagree with is the word ‘coming’ in the title of the essay.

First, the relationship between tech companies and Washington is transforming into something we haven’t seen before. While Silicon Valley has always wielded influence in American politics, what’s emerging now is different – a world where the interests of select technology companies become indistinguishable from US government policy.

Look at Elon Musk’s growing empire. Tesla, Starlink, X, and Neuralink all stand to benefit substantially from this new alignment. They won’t be alone. Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril are perfectly positioned to collect expanded defense contracts, while major venture capital cryptocurrency investments are likely to see favorable regulatory treatment. The concentration of power in these companies’ hands isn’t just about market dominance, it’s about shaping the very rules of our digital future…

Yep. Do read it.

If AI can provide a better diagnosis than a doctor, what’s the prognosis for medics?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

AI means too many (different) things to too many people. We need better ways of talking – and thinking – about it. Cue, Drew Breunig, a gifted geek and cultural anthropologist, who has come up with a neat categorisation of the technology into three use cases: gods, interns and cogs.

“Gods”, in this sense, would be “super-intelligent, artificial entities that do things autonomously”. In other words, the AGI (artificial general intelligence) that OpenAI’s Sam Altman and his crowd are trying to build (at unconscionable expense), while at the same time warning that it could be an existential threat to humanity. AI gods are, Breunig says, the “human replacement use cases”. They require gigantic models and stupendous amounts of “compute”, water and electricity (not to mention the associated CO2 emissions).

“Interns” are “supervised co-pilots that collaborate with experts, focusing on grunt work”…

Read on

Chart of the day

A neat graphical summary of the UK’s problem.

My commonplace booklet

ChatGPT was two yesterday. So I asked it how it would be feeling if it could feel.

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Bee welcoming

Even in B&W you can see why a bee would be interested.

Quote of the Day

You cannot have a political system without disagreement, but the point of democracy is to channel that disagreement into politics, rather than into violence.”

• Danielle Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Brahms | Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77 (3rd movement) | Itzhak Perlman

Link

Phew! Great performances put musicians through emotional and physical wringers.

Long Read of the Day

Let the Bad Times End (4): The Soviet Union

Timothy Burke is a thoughtful and interesting historian, and at the moment he’s embarked on a series of essays which try to put what’s happening now in context. This essay is #4 in the sequence, and it’s especially relevant for me today because later in the afternoon I will be having a conversation with three distinguished colleagues in the Ireland’s Edge discussion strand of the Other Voices festival on topics that are on everyone’s mind just now.

At one point in his essay, Timothy writes:

I’m grappling in this series whether bad times ever do end. I think it’s important to imagine that they can and sometimes have. I do think the Bolshevik Revolution, one of the most heavily studied and discussed events in modern global history, was a real change—that there was political and social novelty to the Soviet state that it created. For the same reason, I think the Soviet Union really did end, and some of the specific bad times that were deeply encoded into it ended with it. Putin’s Russia is deeply oppressive, but its oppressions have different emphases, different techniques, different ideological precepts. Moreover, while you might hire the Wagner Group to kill your enemies, no other country is going to adopt Putinism as a transnationally salient ideology.

So if the Soviet Union did end, why? It’s becoming hard to remember how astonishing and momentous the years 1989-1992 really were, and how unheralded they seemed. In 1998, few of us realized that apartheid would start to crumble in 1990, that the United States would lead a multinational coalition with restraint to successfully undo Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait, that the Berlin Wall would fall in 1989 and the Soviet Union itself would end only three years later. Looking back, you can forgive some of the hubris of Fukuyama’s The End of History, since these were all developments that seemed impossible, that many of us were raised to think simply wouldn’t change in our lifetimes —none more so than the sudden and peaceful end of the Soviet Union after so much proxy struggle in the Cold War, after so many moments of near-catastrophe for the entire planet…

Do read it. Worth your time.

Books, etc.

I’m a third of the way through this. I got it because I keep running into two ‘isms’ — Anthropocene antihumanism (argues that our climate destruction has doomed humanity and we should welcome our extinction), and Transhumanism (the belief that genetic engineering and AI will lead to new forms of life superior to humans) — which strike me as ludicrous, but which seem have a grip on folks in Silicon Valley and in a certain ancient university located near Reading. This scathing analysis by a good literary critic looked attractive, and it’s enjoyable — so far, anyway.

My commonplace booklet

From John Thornhill in yesterday’s FT:

The default assumption of successful founders seems to be that their expertise in building tech companies gives them equally valuable insights into the US federal budget deficit, pandemic responses, or the war in Ukraine. For them, fresh information plucked from unfamiliar fields sometimes resembles God-given revelation even if it is commonplace knowledge to everyone outside their bubble.

One young American tech billionaire, a college dropout who had just returned from a trip to Paris, once asked me with wide-eyed wonder whether I had heard about the French Revolution. It was incredible, apparently.

“Inevitably,” says John, “this leads to questions about the fungibility of Elon Musk’s IQ given his omnipresence in the US economy and now politics. “

It sure does! And how.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

An interesting exchange on Bluesky…

Molly Jong-Fast asked;

“One of the things I still don’t understand is how these tech bros can be pro-technology and anti science.”

To which Mar Hicks replied:

“Science is ostensibly about the study of natural phenomenon. It’s not unbiased, ofc, but that’s the ideal at least. Tech is about power—centralizing, amassing & wielding power, building ever more tools & infrastructures to design the world you want, not describe or study it.”

Which nails it nicely.

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Waiting, waiting…

… for a train which did turn up — eventually.

Quote of the Day

”If you feel pain, you are alive. If you feel other people’s pain, you are a human being.”

• Leo Tolstoy

(Which neatly rules out Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ennio Morricone | Theme from Cinema Paradiso | Renaud Capuçon

Link

From the soundtrack of one of my favourite films.

Long Read of the Day

I stopped using Twitter when Musk bought it in October 2022. Like many people I then tried tried Mastodon but was unimpressed and only recently joined Bluesky — like millions of other refugees from Twitter/X.

And when I say millions I mean it. There’s a fascinating online counter that’s updated every second. As I write this (in the evening of 21 November), the service now has over 21 million subscribers, and they’re joining at the rate of 4.22 users per second! So something’s definitely going on.

Which is why I found this NYT column (gift article) by Paul Krugman, the American economist and Nobel laureate, interesting, especially because of the way he contrasts the fate of Twitter/X with that of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Pre-Elon Musk, Twitter was the place people in my business had to be. I know different people used it for different purposes — nothing against Katy Perry, but not all of her nearly 106 million followers are on social media platforms for the same reasons I am. What I used Twitter for was to learn from and interact with people possessing real expertise, sometimes in areas I know pretty well, sometimes in areas I don’t, like international relations and climate policy.

I won’t go through the litany of ways the platform has changed for the worse under Musk’s leadership, but from my point of view it has become basically unusable, overrun by bots, trolls, cranks and extremists.

But where could you go instead? In the past couple of years, there have been several attempts to promote alternatives to X, but none of them really caught on. To some extent this may have reflected flaws in their designs, but a lot of it was simply lack of critical mass: Not enough of the people you wanted to interact with could be found on the alternative sites.

Then came this year’s presidential election, which seems to have sparked an exodus (“Xodus”?) from Muskland. From my point of view, Bluesky, in particular — a site that functions a lot like pre-Musk Twitter — quite suddenly has reached critical mass, in the sense that most of the people I want to hear from are now posting there. The raw number of users is still far smaller than X’s, but as far as I can tell, Bluesky is now the place to find smart, useful analysis…

Broadly speaking, his experience mirrors mine. It’s worth a read, especially if you are thinking about signing up for Bluesky. (For a second opinion, try Ian Bogust’s essay.)

Behind all this, of course, is a bigger question: does this ‘Xodus’ signal the beginning of the splintering of social media?

Books, etc.

For those seeking an understanding of what sliding into fascism is like, then Paul Lynch’s prizewinning novel of how it might happen might be hard to beat.

Here’s the blurb:

The explosive literary sensation: a mother faces a terrible choice as Ireland slides into totalitarianism

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, Larry, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling. Soon, she must decide just how far she is willing to go to keep her family safe.

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-winning novel is a devastating vision of a country falling apart and a moving portrait of the resilience of the human spirit when faced with the darkest of times…

My commonplace booklet

 In Grandpa’s footsteps

This week I discovered — to my delight — that the actor David Suchet is a passionate photographer, and that he uses the same kit as I do (Leica cameras). His grandfather, James Jarché, was a press photographer, and Suchet set out to retrace Grandpas’s steps and photograph some of the places James had recorded. Here is a charming video of his trip to the former coalfields of South Wales. It’s 14 minutes long and (IMO) worth every second.

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