Grasses at dusk

Semur-en-Auxoise, Burgundy.

Quote of the Day

”Superintelligence is not required for ai to cause harm. That is already happening. ai is used to violate privacy, create and spread disinformation, compromise cyber-security and build biased decision-making systems. The prospect of military misuse of ai is imminent. Today’s ai systems help repressive regimes to carry out mass surveillance and to exert powerful forms of social control. Containing or reducing these contemporary harms is not only of immediate value, but is also the best bet for easing potential, albeit hypothetical, future x-risk.”

• Blaise Agüera y Arcas and colleagues, writing in the Economist.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dave Brubeck | Take Five

Link

Long Read of the Day

Revisiting the long boom

This examination of what one might call the Silicon Valley ideology (which I would call “Neoliberalism seen through rose-tinted spectacles”) is long-ish. It involves two pieces:

1. The first is by Jason Kottke who dug the 1997 article in Wired which predicted 25 years to prosperity and happiness and progress. Guess what?

2. Then Dave Karpf followed up with a terrific analysis. What drove him was that some of the people who made these Panglossian predictions are still making them. It seems they are unable to learn from their mistakes.

But then, that’s what ideology does to people, I suppose.

I like his summing-up.

The world they are invoking is one where (1) neoliberalism spread everywhere, and works great, (2) its benefits are widely distributed, (3) scientific and technological breakthroughs become easier and faster with time, and (4) on balance, none of those scientific or technological breakthroughs are used for harm. This is… not the world we inhabit today. The neoliberal economic order has not lived up to its billing. Many of our primary political divisions today are either caused or exacerbated by the failings of the neoliberal order. American is not defined by a “new spirit of generosity,” nor have we welcomed increased immigration with open arms. And while we have had plenty of technological advances in the past 25 years, we have also been constantly reminded of Kranzberg’s First Law of Technology: “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

Yep.

GPT-4 may be just an AI language parrot, but it’s no birdbrain

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

In 2017, researchers at the British AI company DeepMind (now Google DeepMind) published an extraordinary paper describing how their new algorithm, AlphaZero, had taught itself to play a number of games to superhuman standards without any instruction. The machine could, they wrote, “achieve, tabula rasa, superhuman performance in many challenging domains. Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi (Japanese chess) as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case.”

Speaking afterwards at a big machine-learning conference, DeepMind’s chief executive, Demis Hassabis (himself a world-class chess player), observed that the program often made moves that would seem unthinkable to a human chess player. “It doesn’t play like a human,” he said, “and it doesn’t play like a program. It plays in a third, almost alien, way.” It would be an overstatement to say that AlphaZero’s capabilities spooked those who built it, but it clearly surprised some of them. It was, one (privately) noted later, a bit like putting your baby daughter to sleep one evening and finding her solving equations in the morning.

That was six years ago. Spool forward to now, when a friend of mine is experimenting with GPT-4, OpenAI’s most powerful large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, outputting text) – the version to which you can get access for $20 (about £16) a month….

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Harry Frankfurt RIP

Nice memoir of him by Kieran Setiya

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt died this week. He was unexpectedly famous for a bestselling book, On Bullshit, that originated as a playful academic essay only to find a second life as an editor’s marketing dream—a mischievous gift-book for the pseudo-intellectual in your life. It earned Harry an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and a lot of money.

I particularly enjoyed Setiya’s parting shot:

I think his reply to an audience member at the lectures that became The Reasons of Love could be his epitaph.

Audience member: “What I don’t understand is how, on your view, I have any assurance that my wife will continue to love me.”

Harry: “I’m sorry, sir, I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.”

On Bullshit is lovely.

Linkblog

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

• Larry Summers thinks that Ivy League colleges need radical change. His list of reforms that places like Harvard (of which he was once President, and where he still is a professor) need to make: banning ‘legacy’ admissions (i.e. of children of alumni), eliminating “aristocratic sports” like rowing and fencing, and training college admissions staff to detect when something in an application is ‘inauthentic’. Interesting throughout. Link

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Where we get our strawberries

From Hacker’s Fruit Farm, of course.

Quote of the Day

“When Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.”

• Ted Chiang

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Pinetop Perkins | “Pinetop’s Blues”

Link

Wonderful. And he had great taste in hats, too.

Long Read of the Day

Why they’re smearing Lina Khan

Terrific, no-holds-barred polemic by Cory Doctorow.

My god, they sure hate Lina Khan. This once-in-a-generation, groundbreaking, brilliant legal scholar and fighter for the public interest, the slayer of Reaganomics, has attracted more vitriol, mockery, and dismissal than any of her predecessors in living memory.

She sure must be doing something right, huh?

A quick refresher. In 2017, Khan – then a law student – published Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox in the Yale Law Journal. It was a brilliant, blistering analysis showing how the Reagan-era theory of antitrust (which celebrates monopolies as “efficient”) had failed on its own terms, using Amazon as Exhibit A of the ways in which post-Reagan antitrust had left Americans vulnerable to corporate abuse:

The paper sent seismic shocks through both legal and economic circles, and goosed the neo-Brandeisian movement (sneeringly dismissed as “hipster antitrust”). This movement is a rebuke to Reaganomics, with its celebration of monopolies, trickle-down, offshoring, corporate dark money, revolving-door regulatory capture, and companies that are simultaneously too big to fail and too big to jail.

This movement has many proponents, of course – not just Khan – but Khan’s careful scholarship, combined with her encyclopedic knowledge of the long-dormant statutory powers that federal agencies had to make change, and a strategy for reviving those powers to protect Americans from corporate predators made her a powerful, inspirational figure…

Great piece. Khan is a remarkable figure.

Books, etc.

One of my Malaysian Press Fellows gave me this, possibly because he knew I had once shaken hands with one of the key figures in the scam. (He was the Prime Minister of Malaysia at the time.) In my defence, the Mayor of London and the UK Home Secretary also shook hands with him that evening.

As for the book: it’s a riveting tale, skilfully told. Recommended as beach or poolside reading.

My commonplace booklet

• “I knew Robert F. Kennedy, and you’re no Robert F. Kennedy.” Robert Reich on the ”dangerous nutcase” currently trading under the famous name.

• A novel way of easing global warming — really white paint. Link

Linkblog

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

• Why would you build a cloud DC in America’s hottest city? Why indeed? From The Register.

• TikTok Extends the Wasteland The Hedgehog Review Link

Errata

The other day I attributed a quote to the New Yorker writer Bill McKibben. Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) smelt a rat and referred me to Quote Inspector, which ruled as follows:

Dear Quote Investigator: The following quotation has been attributed to the writer and political commentator Gore Vidal:

“The four most beautiful words in the English language are “I told you so.”

Was this statement crafted by Vidal?

Quote Investigator: Gore Vidal did employ versions of this saying on multiple occasions. But the earliest strongly matching instance located by QI was spoken in the British House of Lords in 1953 by Lord Mancroft (Stormont Mancroft). Boldface has been added to excerpts:

”I should like to begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, for having given us the opportunity of discussing this matter this afternoon and also for the moderate and reasonable way in which he has put his point of view forward. Indeed, I should like to congratulate the noble Lord, also, on having successfully resisted the temptation to utter those happiest words in the English language, “I told you so.”

Mancroft used the adjective “happiest” instead of “most beautiful”, and he did not count the words, but the notion he expressed was very similar.

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Orwell: Politics and the French Language

Arles, 2010

Quote of the Day

”’I told you so’ are the four least satisfying words in the English language.”

• Bill McKibben

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Wagner | Tristan und Isolde, Prelude

Link

‘Haunting’ is one word for it. ‘Beautiful’, another.

Long Read of the Day

 The New Media Goliaths

Interesting essay by the formidable Renée Diresta on how our media ecosystem has radically changed, how Chomsky’s ideas about ‘manufacturing consent’ need updating and why there is no such thing any more as ‘public opinion’ (singular)/

It’s the kind of essay that Neil Postman would have enjoyed (and about which he would have had views).

Books, etc.

Milan Kundera RIP: The Nobel Prize for Literature Winner We Never Had

The celebrated Czech novelist has died at the age of 94. Kate Webb had a nice obit of him in the Guardian. And Robin Ashenden in Quillette has a rounded assessment of him which ponders the question of why Kundera’s reputation had faded in recent decades. “You get the sense,” he writes,

that Kundera, whose novels for so long were required reading for anyone drawn to world literature, was being pushed firmly to the margins. Some of it surely was his writing on sex, which since the #MeToo movement was jarringly out of fashion. Kundera was avid about it in ways that, to the squeamish, now seemed less ground-breaking than a bit creepy, with lip-smacking descriptions of the female body and sundry deviant sex acts. But sex—which we’re no longer supposed to think or care about—represented a fraction of his themes and was arguably a legacy of the communist period, one of the few ways individuals could assert their liberty in a repressive state.

Or was it just that Kundera had become

a teller of truths inconvenient to the modern age, that his ruthless analysis of male-female relationships, his omniscient male voice and his dissection of sheep-like political movements were simply too close to the bone. More than almost any other writer, he seemed in his early work to foresee our own times: an atmosphere of growing intolerance and Rhinoceros-like groupthink that increasingly resembles the Soviet world we thought we’d left behind.

I particularly liked his Unbearable Lightness of Being and Philip Kaufman’s film of it.

My commonplace booklet

Was Napoleon Hot?

That’s the question asked by Luke Winkie in a piece in Slate triggered by the launch of the trailer for Ridley Scott’s forthcoming biopic of Boney.

Let’s get this out of the way up front: Napoleon Bonaparte was not short. Most contemporary sources put him at about 5-foot-6, typical of the average 19th-century Frenchman. He earned that apocryphal diminutive reputation from an English newspaper cartoonist named James Gillray at the dawn of the Napoleonic Wars. Gillray portrayed the emperor as a stormy, teensy-tiny toddler—flipping tables, stomping his feet—a likeness that swiftly became canonized across the world.

All of this is to say that the dimensions of Joaquin Phoenix (5-foot-8) fit neatly into a historically authentic Bonapartian silhouette, which is surely why Ridley Scott tapped him to play the leading man in the forthcoming epic Napoleon. What is less clear is whether or not Napoleon possessed the striking movie-star good looks—and almost uncanny facial symmetry—of someone like Phoenix. Scott certainly seems intent on making us think so. The first trailer for the film was released on Monday, giving us an initial taste of Joaquin in full Grande Armée regalia. I watched it over and over again, stuck on the same burning question. “Wait a minute, am I supposed to think that Napoleon was hot?”

As it happens I have a dog in this fight: I’m 5’6” and definitely not hot.

Was Boris Johnson undemocratically removed from Parliament?

In a word (well, a splendid blog post by Mark Elliott, a distinguished public law scholar), No.

Although Johnson chose to avail himself of no part of it, there is a clear and carefully constructed system for dealing with situations in which MPs are found to have engaged in certain forms of misconduct that sound either in criminal conviction or suspension from the House of Commons for a period that signals the seriousness of the wrongdoing that has been established. We can also see that this system is not undemocratic. That is so for two reasons. First, the system is rooted in both the processes of the House of Commons and in legislation enacted by Parliament, and which therefore necessarily enjoys a democratic imprimatur. Second, not only is the system underpinnedby arrangements that were put in place democratically; the system also exhibits several democratic characteristics: the Committee cannot suspend, let alone remove, an MP; suspension can occur only if supported by a majority of MPs in the House of Commons; a recall petition is subject to the requirement of the support of 10 per of voters in the MP’s constituency; and the MP is free to stand in the resulting by-election should the recall petition succeed.

That Johnson was not undemocratically or otherwise improperly ‘forced out’ of Parliament is thus an argument that can be made out quite straightforwardly and without taking any position on the egregiousness or otherwise of Johnson’s conduct — whether in terms of the acknowledged rule-breaking at the heart of Partygate or his subsequent statements to the House of Commons and the Committee of Privileges. The contrary narrative, according to which Johnson was undemocratically ejected from Parliament, is both deeply flawed and highly corrosive. Indeed, its post-truth character means that it can be described as Trumpian without any risk of hyperbole.

Yep.

Thanks to Quentin for alerting me to it.

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A rose by any other name…

… would smell as sweet.

Quote of the Day

”While Twitter felt like a rowdy pub at chucking-out time, Threads feels like a corporate box at a concert.”

• Helen Lewis, writing about her social media experiences.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fats Domino | Red sails in the sunset

Link

Famous song with an interesting history. It was written by the Northern Irish songwriter Jimmy Kennedy. According to the FT’s ‘Life of a Song’ column, it came about because one evening in the mid-1930s Kennedy saw the sloop, Kitty of Coleraine, sailing off the resort of Portstewart during a magnificent sunset. As he watched, he saw the boat’s white sails take on the colour of the setting sun. The rest, as they say, is history. It was the biggest hit of the 2,000 songs Kennedy wrote during his career.

Long Read of the Day

Talking about a ‘schism’ is ahistorical

Terrific essay by Emily Bender on the way the current discourse on the supposed ‘existential risk’ posed by ‘AI’ manages to avoid the really important questions — and ignores everything we already know about existing harms of the technology.

The problem with the ‘schism’ framing is that to talk about a ‘schism’ is to talk about something that once was a whole and now is broken apart — authors that use this metaphor thus imply that such a whole once existed. But this is emphatically not a story of a community that once shared concerns and now is broken into disagreeing camps. Rather, there are two separate threads — only one of which can properly be called a body of scholarship — that are being held up as in conversation or in competition with each other. I think this forced pairing comes in part from the media trying to fit the recent AI doomer PR pushes into a broader narrative and in part from the fact that there is competition for a limited resource: policymaker attention…

This is an important and perceptive essay by one of the sharpest minds around. And it provides a welcome antidote against the fake dichotomies about ‘AI’ currently being peddled by mainstream media and the tech industry.

Howard Jacobson has a blog

He’s a very good writer but an online virgin, and is therefore new to this game.

I haven’t jumped out of an aeroplane but I doubt it would be as frightening as this.

Until today I have never digitally posted anything. I have never blogged. I have never tweeted. I have never cyber-liked or cyber-disliked or sent an emoji, though I did once try to send one back. I am a stranger to WhatsApp and neither chat nor date.

In his first post, he decided that maybe he should become a flaneur like Baudelaire, and walk the streets of the city where he lives – in his case, London:

Last week, in this spirit of being simultaneously inside myself and out of it, I took to the streets. Does that sound revolutionary? Well for me it was. ‘Stay out of your head,’ I chided myself in advance. ‘Pretend this is the party you would never go to as a boy.’ And lo, as though by miracle, as I crossed from Mortimer Street into Great Portland Street the life I had come in search of, came in search of me – a very small woman, dressed in a miniature leather jacket and flimsy polka-dot shorts, pushing a very big pram. I remembered that Dickens had noted a similar sight on one of his perambulations across London, then I reprimanded myself for letting literature nudge out life. ‘Look at the mother,’ I said. ‘Let yourself be touched by the arduousness of her life – a child to look after and she scarcely bigger than a child herself.’ Why, even at first glance, was she so affecting? And then she stopped to lean into the pram and soothe the crying baby. ‘Any more of that and I’ll be taking you home,’ she said, firmly but not without kindness. And as, with tremendous effort, she lifted the baby out to make it more comfortable, I saw that she was not a mother but a little girl, no more than eight or nine years old herself. The sister of the child? Who knew? A host of questions: was she walking the baby to give the actual mother an hour off; had the actual mother died or run away leaving this little girl with a baby to look after for the rest of her childhood; was her tiny body strong enough for the task of caring for a child; was she resentful or was she consumed with love for the occupant of the pram and delighted to be trusted with it; was this a sorrowful tale or a happy one?

Once a writer, always a writer.

My commonplace booklet

• In Friday’s edition I mused about how long it would take for someone to upload the entire Old Testament corpus into an LLM. Thanks to Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve), I now know that Meta has already done it for the New Testament!
• Gadgets and Gizmos That Inspired Adam Smith — Link. Hmmm…. I’m a gadget freak and no sooner had I read this than I turned out to the contents of my trouser pocket, which consisted of a tiny fountain pen, and a mechanical pencil, both of which go everywhere with me and don’t require me to wear shirts with pockets! So I’m in no position to patronise Adam Smith’s contemporaries.

Linkblog

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

• The Fasinatng… Fascinating History of Autocorrect Link

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Cool dude & lady friend

Arles, June 25th.

Quote of the Day

“It is not that the Englishman can’t feel — it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks — his pipe might fall out if he did.”

• E.M. Forster

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Don Giovanni | ‘Là ci darem la mano’

Link

In Mozart, as in life, the devil generally gets the best tunes.

Long Read of the Day

Elite US universities are reputation-laundering machines

That, at any rate, is the takeaway I found in this marvellous essay by Scott Alexander. As someone who thinks of Harvard as a hedge-fund with a nice university attached it was music to my ears. Here’s a sample that sets the tone:

Suppose you own a very successful family business. You can leave your son your fortune, you can leave him the business, you can leave him your mansion, but you can’t (directly) leave him an aura of having deserved all these things. What you can do is make a $10 million donation to Harvard in exchange for them accepting your son. Your son gets a Harvard degree, a universally-recognized sign of being a highly meritorious person. Then when you leave him the business, everyone will agree he deserves it. Who said anything about nepotism? Leaving a Harvard graduate in control of your business is an excellent decision!

This happens a little, but I think it mostly isn’t this obvious. More often the transactions are for abstract goods: prestige, associations, favors. The Maharaja of Whereverstan sends his daughter to Harvard so that she appears meritorious. In exchange, Harvard gets the credibility boost of being the place the Maharaja of Whereverstan sent his daughter. And Harvard’s other students get the advantage of networking with the Princess Of Whereverstan. Twenty years later, when one of them is an oil executive and Whereverstan is handing out oil contracts, she puts in a word with her old college buddy the Princess and gets the deal. It’s obvious what the oil executive has gotten out of this, but what does the Princess get? I think she gets the right to say she went to Harvard, an honor which is known to go mostly to the meritorious.

People ask why Harvard admissions can still be bribed or influenced by the rich or well-connected. This is the wrong question: the right question is why they ever give spots based on merit at all. The answer is: otherwise the scheme wouldn’t work. The point of a money-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty money, then mix them together so thoroughly that nobody can tell which is which. Likewise, the point of a privilege-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty privilege, then stamp both with a Harvard degree. “Fairly-earned privilege” means all the brilliant talented ambitious youngsters admitted on the basis of their SAT scores and grades and impressive accomplishments; “dirty privilege” means the kids of various old-money aristocrats, foreign potentates, and ordinary super-rich people. Colleges mix them together, with advantages for both groups.

Do read it. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Important appointments

Free Speech Tsar

Wonderful blog post by Kieran Healy.

The news that Arif Ahmed is to be appointed the UK’s first ‘Free Speech Tsar’ — a position that apparently comes with “the power to investigate universities and student unions in England and Wales that wrongly restrict debate” and to “advise the sector regulator on imposing fines for free speech breaches” — is disappointing for various reasons. One of them (not the most important one) is that it suggests Britain’s capacity to name things continues to decline. To see this once-great country reach for a foreign title that not only originates with one second-rate empire trying to recall the glory of the Romans but that was first popularized as a job-title within the administrative apparatus of another is really quite sad, given that England has so many equally preposterous but largely home-grown (or at least Norman French) titles available right on its own doorstep. It’s a scandal, really. A kind of Tsargate, if you will.

Here I present a few alternatives of my own…

They’re wonderful. I particularly liked:

• The Duke of Discourse.
• Warden of All Chit-Chat.
• Gold Stick To The Point.
• The Earl of Axiom.
• The Keeper of the King’s Premises.

Britain, remember, has a member of the Royal Household called “Silver Stick in Waiting”. And no, I did not make that up. And he’s the deputy to — yes, you guessed it — Gold Stick in Waiting. (Who is currently Princess Anne.)

Chart of the Day

The context windows of LLMs – the amounts of text that models can process and respond to – are growing rapidly. In Q2, Anthropic released a new, 100k-token version of its model Claude. Thanks to its massive context window, Claude can process the entirety of The Great Gatsby and answer questions about it in 30 seconds.

This is really interesting. The capacity (and therefore usefulness) of LLMs seems to be increasing very quickly. No doubt someone already has a plan to upload the whole of the Old Testament into Claude!

Source: Azeem Azhar’s newsletter.

My commonplace booklet

I hate to say this but I found this piece about John le Carré, published in The Mail Online in 2011, fascinating. I think it was timed to coincide with the release of the film version os his Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy novel. Which reminds me, I need to see the film, if only to compare it with the TV series that starred Alec Guinness as George Smiley.

Linkblog

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

• Evernote, the memory app people forgot about, lays off its entire US staff — Ars Technica. I used it for years, until better stuff came along.

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Provence, sans eau

Normally, this fountain provides endless amusement for kids on a hot day. But not at the moment: Provence, like many other places around the world, is short of water.

Quote of the Day

A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.”

• Kevin Kelly

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Telegraph Road | Dijon 2013

Link

Long Read of the Day

‘Why I might have done what I did’: conversations with Ireland’s most notorious murderer.

Link

Riveting. And see below for a review of the book.

Edward Fredkin, RIP

A remarkable computer scientist has passed away at the age of 88. He had an astonishing life and career which is nicely chronicled in a very good NYT obit. It includes this remarkable photograph of four central figures in the history of computing.

Books, etc.

Killer in a cravat

Nice review by Ruth Dudley Edwards of Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder, a biography of a double murderer who was once at the centre of a political scandal in 1980s Ireland.

‘And so it was that, on the evening of August 4, 1982,’ writes Mark O’Connell halfway through this gripping portrait of double killer Malcolm Macarthur, ‘the Irish government’s most senior legal official had his housekeeper prepare the spare room for his friend, a man who had just days previously murdered two strangers, and who had that very evening botched an armed robbery at the home of an acquaintance.’

The police arrested Macarthur at the flat nine days later. The morning after, the innocent and bewildered attorney general, Patrick Connolly, having cleared it with the police and Charles Haughey, the Taoiseach, set off for a long-planned holiday in New York. The story had broken by the time he arrived. Ireland was in uproar and Connolly was hounded by reporters (the New York Post would run the headline ‘Irish Biggie Flees Here After Slay Scandal’). Haughey summoned him back to Dublin, where he resigned from the tottering government. Haughey described it as ‘a bizarre happening, an unprecedented situation, a grotesque situation, an almost unbelievable mischance’. Haughey’s merciless enemy Conor Cruise O’Brien shuffled his adjectives to create the acronym by which the murders are still known: GUBU.

Hmmm… Interesting. I just might have to buy the book.

If Threads is the final nail in Twitter’s coffin, where will the hacks and politicos go?

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

the hucksters are still staying away. As of February this year, more than half of Twitter’s leading 1,000 advertisers before the acquisition had stopped advertising on the platform. And, according to the New York Times, Twitter’s US advertising revenue for the five weeks from 1 April to the first week of May was $88m, which is 59% lower than a year earlier. All of which makes it tempting to interpret what’s happening to Twitter as the beginning of a death spiral.

Coupled to this is the fact that increasing chaos on the platform has led to an exodus to a range of services such as Mastodon, Reddit, Discord, LinkedIn, Substack’s Notes and the invite-only Bluesky Social, a Twitter-like platform developed by Jack Dorsey (a co-founder of Twitter) – and, from last week, Instagram Threads, courtesy of Meta. It goes without saying that all these alternatives have pros and cons: all have some Twitter-like features, but none of them looks to me like a proper replacement for it. And Meta’s product comes with the company’s usual comprehensive surveillance.

In that respect, the most significant thing about the exodus is that there is one particular class of user who doesn’t seem to have joined it – professional journalists and politicians, for whom Twitter seems to remain an absolutely must-have service…

Do read the entire piece.

Dangerous metaphors

I’m fascinated by metaphors and often use them as a way of introducing unfamiliar ideas to an audience. But they can sometimes be both convincing and dangerously misleading, as this example from the Johnson column in The Economist nicely illustrates.

Some metaphors are more persuasive—and more dangerous. Take the metaphor of a “deal”. Typically, if a deal is rejected, the status quo ante obtains, notes Anand Menon of King’s College London. Brexiteers believe that, to get a better “deal”, Britain should just stay cool and be willing to walk away. “No deal is better than a bad deal,” some claim.

That would be true if Brexit were like buying a second-hand car. You size up the vehicle, hoping not to spend all of the £5,000 in your pocket. But the dealer wants the lot. You walk away; he still has his car, you still have your £5,000. But this is not the case with a no-deal Brexit. Supply lines, trade links and more would be disturbed. You don’t keep the £5,000. You end up with less—and no car. Which, metaphorically speaking, is what has happened to the UK.

My commonplace booklet

On Friday I reported on my jaundiced reaction to Meta’s Twitter-clone, Threads.

Jason Gilbert had a more eloquent reaction. Using Threads was, he said, “Like a $19 turkey sandwich at an airport”.

Warming to the topic, he says…

• Threads feels like when a local restaurant you enjoy opens a location in an airport.
• It feels like a Twitter alternative you would order from Brookstone.
• It feels like if an entire social network was those posts that tell you what successful entrepreneurs do before 6AM.
• It feels like watching a Powerpoint from the Brand Research team where they tell you that Pop Tarts is crushing it on social.
• It feels like Casual Friday on LinkedIn.

On the other hand…

My friend Charles Arthur, who’s one of the most perceptive tech critics I know, had a different reaction.

On Wednesday night UK time, working late, I installed the Threads app on my phone, found it had signed in to my personal Instagram account, and went to bed. At 7am on Thursday morning, when the Do Not Disturb setting turned off automatically, my Apple Watch started making occasional BOINGG noises. Usually those mean some sort of news story, so I dozed on. But the noises kept on coming, and eventually I thought something worth investigating must be happening. Turned out that Threads was sending a notification to my Watch every time someone started following me. And they were doing so with a surprising regularity and intensity.

So I opened the app in my befuddled state and took a look at what was going on. And there I saw something that I hadn’t seen for absolutely ages; for years and years, in fact. I scrolled and scrolled, and there was one emotion on show: people were happy. They were making jokes, laughing in text. The screen was full of joy.

His view is that because Instagram has a billion users, and Threads is hooked into that, its arrival means that Twitter is now in terminal trouble.

Here’s how Charles sums it up:

It was like that all over the place. People were delighted to have somewhere new to use where everyone already seemed to be there. Apparently there were 30 million signups within the first few hours, and by the end of its first day there were 95 million posts. That’s a lot of happiness. Because Threads seems, despite its rudimentary state (no bookmarking, strange URL structure, no content search, algorithm-only timeline), to have all the things people want from Twitter, but without, well, being Twitter.

What it comes down to, I suppose, is that some people like social media and some can’t abide it. And I’m in the latter camp.

Linkblog

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

• Trump’s reaction to learning that the Queen had died.

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Two horses and fancy upholstery

My favourite 2CV adaptation turned up at the Boules court the other day. It’s such a lovely piece of work. Note the wicker picnic-box on the rear.

Quote of the Day

”When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

• Charles Goodhart

Often called “Goodhart’s Law” ever since he articulated it in 1975.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Violin Concerto No. 2 in E Major, BWV 1042 – III. Allegro

Link

Short but very sweet.

Long Read of the Day

Untangling quantum entanglement

This essay by philosopher Huw Price and physicist Ken Wharton is the most startling thing I’ve read in a while. It’s about one of the strangest aspects of quantum mechanics, the study of the sub-atomic world — in which most of what we have learned in the ‘real’ world of billiard-balls, planets and gravity and Newton’s Laws, doesn’t seem to apply.

And entanglement is at the heart of the weirdness. Wikipedia describes it as

“the phenomenon that occurs when a group of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in a way such that the quantum state of each particle of the group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, including when the particles are separated by a large distance.”

In their essay, Price and Wharton suggest a new way of thinking about it. Here’s how they open the batting:

Almost a century ago, physics produced a problem child, astonishingly successful yet profoundly puzzling. Now, just in time for its 100th birthday, we think we’ve found a simple diagnosis of its central eccentricity.

This weird wunderkind was ‘quantum mechanics’ (QM), a new theory of how matter and light behave at the submicroscopic level. Through the 1920s, QM’s components were assembled by physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Alongside Albert Einstein’s relativity theory, it became one of the two great pillars of modern physics.

The pioneers of QM realised that the new world they had discovered was very strange indeed, compared with the classical (pre-quantum) physics they had all learned at school. These days, this strangeness is familiar to physicists, and increasingly useful for technologies such as quantum computing.

The strangeness has a name – it’s called entanglement – but it is still poorly understood. Why does the quantum world behave this strange way? We think we’ve solved a central piece of this puzzle.

Read on and wonder.

Fintan O’Toole on RTE’s slow-rolling crisis.

RTE is Ireland’s national broadcaster and it’s now embroiled in an epic crisis because of revelations about its chaotic management, casual ethics and undercover payments to a leading broadcasting celebrity named Ryan Tubridy. The trigger point for the crisis was the discovery of undercover payments made to Tubridy during the Covid lockdown to compensate him for reductions in his non-broadcasting income caused by the pandemic.

Since public money is involved, the Republic’s legislators opened hearings on the matter, which meant that from Day One my fellow-citizens have been enthralled (and increasingly enraged) by daily revelations about the managerial chaos, ineptitude and arrogance that prevailed in the country’s leading media organisation.

From the outset, though, Tubridy maintained an air of high-minded detachment. All of those non-disclosed payments had been negotiated by his agent, Noel Kelly, disclosed to the revenue authorities, and the tax due on them had been duly paid. “Nothing to see here: any questions see my agent” was the general tenor of his responses.

This pose has exasperated Fintan O’Toole, Ireland’s leading opinion columnist, and he penned a terrific column about it the other day. Like most of his stuff it is hidden behind the Irish Times’s paywall, but since I pay through the nose for a subscription I think it’s time some of his high-octane indignation got a wider airing. So here goes…

He starts with a story about Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s greatest poet since Yeats.

In 1981, Seamus Heaney wrote to his American agent, Selma Warner, about the fees she was demanding for readings by him on US campuses. He was angry because they were too high.

Heaney was not yet quite as famous as he would become, but his reputation was already very considerable and he was a mesmerising performer of his own work. Warner had started to ask for $1,000 for a reading – the equivalent of about $3,300 today.

Heaney’s complaint was that this was too much money: “I do not wish to be a $1,000 speaker. Apart from my moral scruples about whether any speaker or reader is worth anything like that, I do not wish to become a freak among my poet friends, or to press the budgets of departments of literature at a time when the money for education is drying up in the United States.”

Which later brings him to Tubridy:

Let’s not succumb to “my agent made me do it” stories. Agents, however colourful and assertive, are intermediaries: these deals were done between RTÉ and Tubridy.

It was Tubridy’s job to have the “moral scruples”. Kelly is not his Father Confessor – he’s his attack dog. It is always up to the conscience of the client as to whether the dog should be called off before he bites off any particular pound of flesh.

I was the Observer’s TV Critic for nine years, and in that time got to know the British TV industry quite well. I wasn’t much impressed by it. It was fantastically complacent, male-dominated, over-compensated, sexist and unbelievably indulgent to its senior (male) executives. The stories coming out of RTE at the moment bring back memories of those stirring times.

Books, etc.

Revenge of the Librarians

This came as a surprise present from a dear friend the other day. Tom Gauld is a cartoonist and illustrator whose work is regularly published in the The Guardian, The New Yorker and New Scientist. What’s lovely about it is that he has a penetratingly wry insight into the world of writers and would-be writers, e.g.

My commonplace booklet

• Fiat tries to compete with the Vespa Fiat has launched a tiny new EV that supposedly can be driven by 14-year-olds — in Italy at least according to this link. That’s because it has a top speed of only 28mph. It has a small 5.4kWh battery and a range of 47 miles. Neat idea, but somehow I can’t see many teenagers thinking it’d be as cool as a Vespa. Especially if the said scooter were an EV too.
• Meta launches Threads — its supposed alternative to Twitter. On the grounds that columnists should do these things so others don’t have to suffer, I downloaded the app when it first appeared on Thursday morning. Then discovered that in order to access it I needed to open Instagram, which I’ve only used a few times years ago and for which I’d mislaid my password. So went through the usual reset-my-password nonsense and discovered that Instagram is just as nauseating as I remembered, but eventually got through to Threads. It’s kind-of like Twitter, but has the usual Facebook/Meta surveillance practices, and so, after a cursory inspection of naff Threads postings, deleted it. I enjoyed the subliminal wit in Jack Dorsey’s comment on it, though: “All your Threads are belong to us”!

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On the beach

Benedict Evans (see Long Read below) used Midjourney to create this image in response to the prompt “A photograph of advertising people discussing creativity on stage in a panel on a beach at Cannes Lions.”

Reflecting on it, Ben observes:

It’s matched the pattern almost perfectly – that looks like the beach at Cannes, these people are dressed like advertising people, and they even have the right haircuts. But it doesn’t know anything, and so it doesn’t know that people never have three legs, only that it’s unlikely. This isn’t ‘lying’ or ‘making things up’ – it’s matching a pattern, imperfectly.

Quote of the Day

”Cemeteries are full of indispensable men.”

• Charles de Gaulle

They sure are.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” with Prince, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Steve Winwood

Link

Thanks to Keith Devlin (Whom God Preserve) for suggesting it.

Long Read of the Day

 AI and the automation of work

Benedict Evans’s characteristically perceptive reflections on how ‘Generative AI’ will change the employment landscape over the longer term. What I love about his essays is his knack for finding images and metaphors which elegantly illuminate a particular point.

At one stage in the essay, for example, he’s making a point that I’ve often tried to make myself in lectures about how revolutionary spreadsheet software was when it first appeared in the late 1970s. But he does it with a still from a 1960 film The Apartment. It shows Jack Lemmon (though Ben calls him ‘Lemon’) as an insurance clerk using a mechanical calculating machine in a huge open-plan office populated by other clerks doing exactly the same thing. Here’s Ben’s payoff:

Everyone in that shot is a cell in a spreadsheet, and the whole building is a spreadsheet. Once a week someone on the top floor presses F9 and they recalculate. But they already had computers, and in 1965 or 1970 they bought a mainframe, and scrapped all the adding machines. Did white collar employment collapse? Or, as IBM advertised, did a computer give you 150 extra engineers? 25 years later, what did the PC revolution, and the accounting department in a box, do to accounting?

Enjoyable, informative and worth reading. Go to it.

Doc Searls: Moving on 

Many moons ago Doc Searls and Dave Winer, two of the Wise Elders of the Net, were Berkman Fellows at Harvard, and one of the innovative things they did was to persuade the Center to host blogs. Doc moved his blog onto the server. I think that Dave continued to use his own Scripting.com, but he may also have blogged on the Berkman site for a while. Now, though, Harvard is shutting down the server and this was Doc’s final post on it. I’m looking forward to seeing where he’ll host it from now on.

The tale of two ships

Titan and the Adriana

One of the more nauseating aspects of mainstream media in the last few weeks has been the contrast between the obsessive interest in the fate of a five-person submersible containing five people with more money than sense, and the relative lack of interest in a boat criminally overloaded with migrants which, despite being overseen by a Greek coastguard ship, capsized with the loss of 600 people. One conventional apologia for the twisted news-values involved is that the Titan story had a ticking-time-bomb aspect (when would they run out of oxygen?), whereas the Greek tragedy was ‘just one of those disasters that had already happened’.

But had it not also embodied an implicit valuation that one super-rich life is effectively equivalent to 120 migrant lives?

My commonplace booklet

On December 5, 2022, Tortoise Media (of which I am a proud member) published a podcast by Paul Caruana Galizia setting out claims of serious sexual misconduct by Crispin Odey, founder and owner of one of the UK’s most successful hedge funds. The response? Zilch. A few weeks later Odey was lauded at a hedge-fund knees-up during which his company was named the best-performing fund of the year (with gains of 101% over the year). In other words, if you had invested your fortune in his fund, then he had doubled it for you in a year.

But then Mr Galizia teamed up with two remarkable investigative reporters on the Financial Times (Madison Marriage and Antonia Cundy) and the trio did more serious digging, eventually coming up with a story published in the FT on 8 June – “How Crispin Odey evaded sexual assault allegations for decades”. The reporters had found thirteen women who had experienced harassment and abuse at the hands of the founder and 75% owner of the hedge fund.

Only then did the Odey empire start to unravel. Three big banks announced that they would no longer co-operate with the fund, investors stampeded to get their money back and in the end the remaining partners expelled Odey from his creature.

On the face of it, this looks gratifying: evil is detected, exposed and punished. But an awkward question remains: given that Odey’s predilections were well known both inside and outside his company, and he had faced — and been acquitted after — a criminal case about his behaviour some time earlier, why did nothing happen even after Tortoise broke the story in the first place?

This is the question that Paul Caruna Galizia has now told in a fascinating podcast the other day. It’s basically a story of how serious money, polite society and the law enabled one of the UK’s most successful and powerful hedge funders, amid mounting allegations of sexual harassment and assault over many decades, to prosper for years. The only heroines in the story are the women he abused — and the journalists who did the digging needed to make it impossible for the establishment to ignore.

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The Conversation

Quote of the Day

“The war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.”

• Roland Barthes

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tuba Skinny | Jubilee Stomp | Royal Street

Link

Long Read of the Day

How to interact intelligently with a Large Language Model

As recounted by Terence Tao on his blog.

Terence Tao is a world-class mathematician. (He won the Fields medal — math’s equivalent of a Nobel prize — in 2006. He also serves on the US President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology.) This blog post is a fascinating example of how one might make good use of a resource like CPT-4.

Here’s the process he followed.

1. First he asked GPT-4 to answer the questions of how might AI technology and its successors contribute to human flourishing, and how might we as society best guide the technology to achieve maximal benefits for humanity – and then to generate an essay that he might write on this topic.
2. While the machine was thinking, he wrote the first draft of the article himself.
3. Then he gave GPT-4 his essay and asked it to rewrite it to more closely resemble his personal style.
4. Finally, he asked the model to directly improve the writing of his own article to make it more effective.

The post reproduces all the essays involved in this interaction.

I found it fascinating. Hope you do too.

Chatbots: social media on steroids

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

The other thing about chatbots is they enable the effortless creation of massive quantities of “content” on an extraordinary scale. As James Vincent of the Verge puts it, “Given money and compute, AI systems – particularly the generative models currently in vogue – scale effortlessly. They produce text and images in abundance, and soon, music and video, too. Their output can potentially overrun or outcompete the platforms we rely on for news, information and entertainment. But the quality of these systems is often poor, and they’re built in a way that is parasitical on the web today. These models are trained on strata of data laid down during the last web age, which they recreate imperfectly.”

Soon, though, the web might consist not only of what was there in the pre-AI era, but all the stuff created by current and future chatbots. Which raises the intriguing possibility of an online world populated by bots inhaling the textual exhaust of their mechanical peers, and a consequent spiral into the infinite recursion that programmers call “stack overflow”!

In such circumstances, what should truth-seeking institutions do? Answer: look at what they are doing at Wikipedia…

Do read the entire piece

Moral depravity, UK style

From the morning edition of the FT newsletter the other day.

The British government’s Rwanda policy continues to be a great piece of statecraft: by Paul Kagame, that is. He has essentially bought the government’s Africa policy with £120mn of the UK’s own money — paid by the British government to the Rwandan one — before a single deportation flight has left the UK for the African nation. He can look forward to much more money if — though it is a very big “if” — the UK government ever manages to implement the policy. It will seek permission to appeal against the Court of Appeal’s latest ruling at the Supreme Court.

Last week the US and the EU called on Rwanda to cease its alleged support for M23, the militia that re-emerged in 2021 to wage an offensive in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The US, EU and the DRC all say the group is backed by Kagame’s government. … But, because of the deal struck with Kigali, the UK has said nothing at all.

Last week the UK Court of Appeals ruled that the government’s scheme to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda is unlawful, on the grounds that Rwanda is not a safe third country.

Which it isn’t.

My commonplace booklet

End of the (paper) Line

This is the front page of the Wiener Zeitung on Friday, the last day it appeared as a printed newspaper. In it the Editor penned a farewell letter (in German) which Google Translate rendered thus:

Dear readers, as I say goodbye, I would like to invite you to attend my last journey, which finally brought me to you in printed form. Delivered for the last time because even a newspaper owned by the Republic of Austria has to admit that from time to time you are at the mercy of politicians who have decided to only publish me digitally in the future. Robbed of my outfit, from tomorrow the haptics will no longer be determined by paper, but exclusively by swiping on the smartphone and clicking on the screen with the mouse. My future inner values, i.e. the content that the largely newly composed editorial team will only deliver digitally from tomorrow? You will see it if you want. I don’t know it.”

Linkblog

Some things I noticed while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

• Embracing change and resetting expectations. Those of us who work with computers grew up taking as an article of faith that every instruction we gave to a machine had to be precise in every pedantic detail. The advent of tools like LLMs, argues Terence Tao, means that these assumptions will need to be recalibrated, if not abandoned entirely.
• Carriers plan to rescue a few more unused smartphones • The Register. The GSM Association reckons that five billion mobile phones are “currently sitting unused in desk drawers around the globe”. Their innards contain 50,000 tonnes of copper, 500 tonnes of silver and 100 tonnes of gold. There’s also enough cobalt to build batteries for ten million electric vehicles. The Register’s correspondent is “puzzled by this talk of desk drawers”. His dead mobiles are scattered among “a rather nice wicker picnic basket, a filing cabinet, and That Box Full Of Old Tech I Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case”. Me too.

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The White House

Dusk on a Summer’s evening in northern Burgundy.

Quote of the Day

“First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”

• F. Scott Fitzgerald

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Cello Suite No.1 in G Major Yo-Yo Ma

Link

Eighteen minutes of pure bliss. The kind of thing you can enjoy when you’re on holiday.

Long Read of the Day

Marc Andreessen Is (Mostly) Wrong This Time

You may remember Wednesday’s Long Read — Dr Pangloss’s take on ‘AI’ and how it’s going to save the world.

Well, Gideon Lichfield, the current Editor of Wired, is gratifyingly unimpressed and provides an enjoyable critique of Andreessen’s boosterism.

Andreessen begins, he writes,

”with a 7,000-word screed, another stab at framing the narrative; this time, the story is that “AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it.” Much of it is devoted to debunking AI doom scenarios, and the rest to touting AI as little short of a civilizational savior.

This is of course predictable. Andreessen invests in technological revolutions, so he has little incentive to do anything but hype them up. His post does have value, though, in two ways. First, its obvious blind spots are a useful guide to the thinking of the biggest AI hypesters and where they go astray. Second, its takedown of some of the more hysterical AI fears is actually (somewhat) on target…

One of my complaints about Andreessen’s panglossian credulity is picked up by Lichfield. For example:

He argues that when technology makes companies more productive, they pass the savings on to their customers in the form of lower prices, which leaves people with more money to buy more things, which increases demand, which increases production, in a beautiful self-sustaining virtuous cycle of growth. Better still, because technology makes workers more productive, their employers pay them more, so they have even more to spend, so growth gets double-juiced.

There are many things wrong with this argument. When companies become more productive, they don’t pass savings on to customers unless they’re forced to by competition or regulation. Competition and regulation are weak in many places and many industries, especially where companies are growing larger and more dominant—think big-box stores in towns where local stores are shutting down…

And so on. Andreessen is undoubtedly clever — and rich. But sometimes he affects a childlike innocence about the world.

Chart of the day

FTX’s finances.

One of Molly White’s comments on the Interim CEO’s most recent report;

Interim CEO John J. Ray III filed the second interim report in the FTX bankruptcy, which follows the first one that was published in April. If SBF writing “We sometimes find $50m of assets lying around that we lost track of; such is life” rings a bell, that came from report number one.

John Goodenough RIP

From The Register…

One of the people who made our current lifestyles possible has died at the age of 100. John Goodenough shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (with Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino) for the invention of the lithium-ion battery. In 1980, when he was Head of the Inorganic Chemistry Department at Oxford, he and three colleagues identified the cathode material (cobalt oxide — which, at a molecular level, has spaces that can house lithium ions) thereby enabling development of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

My commonplace booklet

A couple of questions that have been bothering me.

• How did Richard Wagner come to be mixed up with a brigade of Russian mercenary thugs? Answer (according to the NYT) the group took its name from the nom de guerre of its leader, Dmitry Utkin, a retired Russian military officer who is said to have chosen Wagner to honour Hitler’s favourite composer. As Thomas Beecham might have said, I don’t much like his music, but I sometimes admire the noise it makes.
• Why are Western mainstream media continually underestimating Joe Biden? It’s really exasperating when you see what Biden has been achieving in the face of a Republican Party that has given up on democracy. His misnamed Inflation Reduction Act is an inspired act of industrial revival almost on an FDR scale (and if you doubt that just look at how freaked other Western democracies are by it). Biden’s support for Ukraine is the main reason why Putin’s invasion has stalled and may even now be going into reverse. And he has formulated a strategy for containing Chinese expansionism, especially in technology. To me he looks like (whisper it) a much more effective (if less photogenic) President than Obama. Is media reluctance to take him seriously actually an act of unconscious (or covert) ageism? Just askin’.

Linkblog

Some things I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose, which might be of interest.

• The Guardian’s approach to generative AI – like most media outfits the Guardian now has a policy on it. I can’t see what the panic is about. It’s like having free, hardworking but inexperienced interns who sometimes make things up. So you never let their work reach the public before it has passed through an editorial brain.
•  Victims speak out over ‘tsunami’ of fraud on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. This is news???
• Robert Reich on why he’s not running for President . Really insightful piece. He lists three reasons: (i) he’s not narcissistic enough; (ii) you need to be wildly extroverted and he’s not; and (iii) you need to be a method actor — someone who is able to will yourself into feeling whatever a situation demands, so you come off as authentic. As they say, if you can fake authenticity, you’ve got it made.

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