Autumnal fruits

Seen on a woodland walk yesterday.

Quote of the Day

“Microsoft says it has an AI that can replicate thousands of different types of jobs. It also has some kinks: For example, when asked to name the most corrupt company, it answered ‘Microsoft’.”

• Bloomberg, Tech Daily

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Dubliners | Christchurch

Link

Simple tune, but lovely.

Long Read of the Day

Ways to think about a metaverse

Nice essay by Ben Evans, one of the most perceptive observers of the tech industry. He has a lean, clean style and a good BS-detector.

Here’s how it opens…

Sometimes it seems like every big company CEO has read the same article about the same tech trend, and sent the same email to their team, asking “What’s our strategy for this?!” A couple of years ago there were a lot of emails asking for a 5G strategy, and now there are a lot of emails asking about metaverse.

Answering the 5G email was actually pretty easy, partly because almost no-one needs a 5G strategy at all (I wrote about this here), but also because we knew what 5G meant. We probably don’t know what ‘metaverse’ means. More precisely, we don’t know what someone else means. This word has become so vague and broad that you cannot really know for sure what the speaker has in mind when they say it, since they might be thinking of a lot of different things. Neal Stephenson coined the word but he no longer owns it, and there’s no Académie Française that can act as the tech buzzword police and give an official definition. Instead ‘metaverse’ has taken on a life of its own, absorbing so many different concepts that I think the word is now pretty much meaningless – it conveys no meaning, and you have to ask, ‘well, what specifically are you asking about?”

And between those two paragraphs he throws in a wonderful Dilbert cartoon.

Worth reading in full.

Elon Musk knows exactly what he’s doing at Twitter.

Usefully detached piece by Timothy B. Lee in Slate. It’s the most sensible take on what’s going on at Twitter that I’ve seen.

Since Musk formally gained control of Twitter last Thursday, the media has portrayed it as a company in chaos. We can expect a lot more stories like this in the coming months. But as you read these stories, you should resist the urge to conclude—as I did four years ago—that Musk is an ineffective manager. Musk’s management style frequently generates chaos for his subordinates. But there is usually a method to his madness.

There is. It ain’t pretty and its characteristically irresponsible, but it’s pretty clear that he thinks that (a) Twitter is massively over-staffed, and (b) that charging people for ‘certified’ identities will raise some revenue and reduce spam. As far as (a) is concerned, there are two ways of doing it: firing people directly, but that can raise legal issues, even in Silicon Valley; or making life so intolerable that they quit of their own accord. This would be known as ‘constructive dismissal’ in the UK, but maybe there’s no equivalent in the US.

My commonplace booklet

From The Onion…

 Republican Voters Given Toll-Free Number To Call If They Witness Legitimate Vote

AUSTIN, TX—In an effort to tamp down on the “outrageous” practice, Texas GOP officials reportedly shared a toll-free number Wednesday that Republican voters could call if they witnessed someone casting a legitimate vote. “If you see anyone who looks like they’re getting in line or speaking to poll workers, we urge you to call or text 1-88-REAL-VOTE immediately,” said Republican Party of Texas chair Matt Rinaldi, who warned that legal voting was running rampant throughout the state, and that it was up to everyday conservative men and women to stop these registered voters before they could submit their ballots. “Our hotline is staffed 24/7 by Republican officials who will dispatch trained professionals to the scene where any alleged voting is taking place. We cannot let these legitimate votes happen. Please report any suspicious behavior you witness, especially if you see someone who does not appear to be Caucasian.” At press time, GOP officials were urging Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to protect polling places from voters by deploying the National Guard.

A joke? Wait till next week.

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Lou Gourmandises

A nice reminder of a hot Summer.

Quote of the Day

”It’s a little ironic that there is a certain kind of tech founder/investor/exec who happily talks about San Francisco as a dysfunctional mess because it lacks assertive and rigorous governance, but also claims Twitter would work better without any rules.”

• Benedict Evans

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chopin | Waltz in C Sharp Minor (Op. 64 No. 2)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Legacy Cities

Great essay by Ethan Zuckerman, one of the most thoughtful scholars of the networked world. Other people (like this blogger) go on holidays and come back with photographs. Ethan comes back with photographs too, but also with an insightful meditation on what he’s found.

An unmissable Long Read, IMHO.

More on pillars of creation

The Universe is a start-up

Doc Searls (Whom God Preserve) saw the post yesterday about the James Webb telescope photograph and pointed me to a blog post of his from 2020 about the pillars as seen by the Hubble telescope. In typical Doc style, he tells the wider story. For example:

Life appeared on earth at least 4.1 billion years ago. Oxygenation sufficient to support life as we know it happened at the start of proterozoic era, about 2.5 billion years ago. The phanerozoic eon, characterized by an abundance of plants and animals, began 0.541 billion years ago and will continue until the Sun gets so large and hot that photosynthesis as we know it becomes impossible. A rough consensus within science is that this will likely happen in just 600 million years, meaning we’re about 80% of our way through the time window for life on Earth.

[…]

In another 4.5 billion years, our galaxy, the Milky Way, will become one with Andromeda, which is currently 2.5 million light-years distant but headed our way on a collision course, looking for now like a thrown frisbee, four moons wide. (It’s actually much larger.) The two will begin merging (not colliding, because nearly all stars are too far apart for that) around 4 billion years from now, and in about 7 billion years will complete a new galaxy resembling an elliptical haze. Here is a video simulation of that future. And here are still panels for the same:

Our Sun will likely be around for all of that future, though by the end it will have become a red giant with a diameter wider than Earth’s orbit, or perhaps will have gone nova, surviving as a white dwarf. (Also—I’m adding this later—Andromeda is weird and scary.)

He goes on to reprise Freeman Dyson’s estimates of the possible age of the universe, and concludes that:

The best guess here is that Universe is about 1% into its lifespan, which has a great many zeros in its number of birthdays. In biological terms, that means it’s not even a baby, or a fetus. It’s more like a zygote, or a blastula.

In other words… it’s a start-up.

Some start-up.

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Pillars of Creation

This photograph in mid-infrared light from the James Webb telescope shows a lot of the dust that’s apparently a major factor in star formation, together with stars that are still in the process of developing — which can be spotted by their red hue in the MIRI photograph.

For those puzzled about the size of those red-hued baby stars in the picture, The Register relays NASA’s advice:

“Trace the topmost pillar, landing on the bright red star jutting out of its lower edge like a broomstick. This star and its dusty shroud are larger than the size of our entire solar system.”

Rather puts us in our place, doesn’t it? And we thought our solar system was a big deal. All that stuff is 6,500 light-years away. Let me see… light travels at 186,000 miles a second, which is 11,160,000 miles a minute, which is 669,600,000 mph. Now, how many hours are there in a year…?

You get the point.

Quote of the Day

”Making a picture with Marilyn Monroe was like going to the dentist. It was hell at the time, but after it was all over it was wonderful.”

• Billy Wilder

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jerry Lee Lewis | Wembley | April 1982

Link

Making Jerry Lee the focus of yesterday ‘musical alternative’ touched, er, chords for many readers. James Miller (Whom God Preserve) recommended this clip which really showcases his incredible musical energy and vitality. Imagine being in the crowd that night.

Long Read of the Day

From Boy to Bono

The U2 lead singer has written an autobiography. The New Yorker published this excerpt from it. I hadn’t expected to find it interesting, but I did — partly, I suppose because I remember the Ireland in which he grew up.

Here’s how it opens:

I have very few memories of my mother, Iris. Neither does my older brother, Norman. The simple explanation is that, in our house, after she died she was never spoken of again.

I fear it was worse than that. That we rarely thought of her again.

We were three Irish men, and we avoided the pain that we knew would come from thinking and speaking about her.

Iris laughing. Her humor black as her dark curls. Inappropriate laughing was her weakness. My father, Bob, a postal worker, had taken her and her sister Ruth to the ballet, only to have her embarrass him with her muted howls of laughter at the protruding genitalia boxes worn by the male dancers under their leotards.

I remember, at around seven or eight, I was a boy behaving badly. Iris chasing me, waving a long cane that her friend had promised would discipline me. Me, frightened for my life as Iris ran me down the garden. But when I dared to look back she was laughing her head off, no part of her believing in this medieval punishment…

After I’d read it I wondered if I should buy the book and read the whole thing. But then I came on the New York Times’s intriguing, footnoted and slightly weird interview of Bono and decided that maybe life’s too short…

My commonplace booklet

 I’m Not Sure Which, But One of These Fifteen PDF Files Is the Final Draft

Emily Kling on the problem everyone has when writing a long, long essay without out being careful about how you name the successive drafts.

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Into the light

Leaving St Pancras station.

Quote of the Day

”Now that you’ve got me right down to it, the only thing I didn’t like about The Barretts of Wimple Street was the play.”

• Dorothy Parker, reviewing the play in the New Yorker in 1931.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jerry Lee Lewis | Slippin’ and Slidin’

Link

Jerry Lee’s death poses a problem for those of us who loved his music (and who remember what a sensation he was when he first burst through). In a way, it’s the same problem that faces anyone who admired Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Larkin, Evelyn Waugh, Hunter S. Thompson,…: great artists, terrible people.

Many of the obituaries have tried to strike a balance in summing up Lewis. The Guardian’s obituarist had a pretty good shot at it:

Lewis embodied pinched obduracy, brooding, malevolent ignorance, violent unreliability and borderline madness. He abused women, played with guns and shot at men; he drove the highways of the south blind drunk with his loaded pistol on the dashboard. Yet in the vivid contrast between the meanness of the man and the grandeur of the artist, the common denominators were his phenomenal energy and admirable, all-conquering self-belief.

He will be remembered for his lifetime of hillbilly delirium, but he will be renowned for his seizure of the musical moment at the dawn of rock’n’roll, when an incomparable talent was his intoxicant and ours: when he shot up the old order and played out his defiant dramas on the keyboard, in the studio and on the stage.

In an email, Ian Cole did a good job at rescuing the musician from the slow-motion-car-crash of his life.

The reports and obituaries are full of what made him notorious with hardly a word about the particular characteristics that made his piano playing and singing so sublime. In the case of his singing, I was always struck by how, particularly in his early days at Sun, he sailed up through a chord on a word which gave it three, four or more notes. His piano playing ranged from the ‘pumping’ major to sixth boogie to delicate flourishes and right hand thumb to little finger trills and controlled glissandi where you have to start and finish on the correct note.

Ian added a link to a recording that he thinks exemplifies those qualities. It does, but it’s not the one that I remember best — which is why I chose mine.

Long Read of the Day

 Welcome to hell, Elon You break it, you buy it.

Nice brisk tutorial for the world’s latest media mogul.

You are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.

Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.

Actually, there’s a step before trying to get the ad money: it turns out that most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of shitty racists and not-all-men fedora bullies. (This is why Twitter is so small compared to its peers!) What most people want from social media is to have nice experiences and to feel validated all the time. They want to live at Disney World. So if you want more people to join Twitter and actually post tweets, you have to make the experience much, much more pleasant. Which means: moderating more aggressively! Again, every “alternative” social network has learned this lesson the hard way. Like, over and over and over again.

And…

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to 10 minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify for a second ad slot in the middle. That’s content moderation, baby — YouTube wants a certain kind of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the business you’re in now.

You get the message. I guess Musk will eventually get it too. Worth reading the whole thing. And see below.

Elon Musk running Twitter? It’s like giving a delicate clock to a monkey

My OpEd piece from Sunday’s Observer.

When the news broke that Elon Musk had finally been obliged to buy Twitter, the company he had tried – for months – to get out of purchasing, it reminded many observers of the 1979 commercial for Remington shavers in which the corporation’s president, Victor Kiam, proclaimed that he liked the electric razor so much “I bought the company.”

This was a mistake: Kiam merely liked the business he bought, whereas Musk is addicted to his company, in the sense that he cannot live without it. In acquiring Twitter, he has therefore forgotten the advice given to Tony Montana in Scarface: “Don’t get high on your own supply.”

In the immediate aftermath of the $44bn acquisition, though, he was as high as a kite. He showed up at the company’s San Francisco office carrying a kitchen sink. “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” he tweeted with a video of him in the lobby of the building…

Do read the whole thing.

My commonplace booklet

What birds can do that we cannot

This wonderful story rather puts us humans in our place.

A juvenile bar-tailed godwit – known only by its satellite tag number 234684 – has flown 13,560 kilometres from Alaska to the Australian state of Tasmania without stopping, appearing to set a new world record for marathon bird flights.

The five-month-old bird set off from Alaska on 13 October and satellite data appeared to show it did not stop during its marathon flight which took 11 days and one hour.

Tagged in Alaska, the bar-tailed godwit, Limosa lapponica, flew at least 13,560km (8,435 miles) before touching down at Ansons Bay in north-east Tasmania.

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