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.

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