Anyone for truffles?

Provence (where else?)

Quote of the Day

”A toy car is a projection of a real car, made small enough for a child’s hand and imagination to grasp. A real car is a projection of a toy car, made large enough for an adult’s hand and imagination to grasp.”

• Michael Frayn

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

George Lewis | Burgundy Street Blues | Acker Bilk & his Band (1965)

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Angus Deaton: Rethinking My Economics

This is one of the most encouraging things I’ve read this week — a great economist thinking out loud about how he’s been wrong . I wish more people in public life could do this.

Economics has achieved much; there are large bodies of often nonobvious theoretical understandings and of careful and sometimes compelling empirical evidence. The profession knows and understands many things. Yet today we are in some disarray. We did not collectively predict the financial crisis and, worse still, we may have contributed to it through an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets, especially financial markets whose structure and implications we understood less well than we thought. Recent macroeconomic events, admittedly unusual, have seen quarrelling experts whose main point of agreement is the incorrectness of others. Economics Nobel Prize winners have been known to denounce each other’s work at the ceremonies in Stockholm, much to the consternation of those laureates in the sciences who believe that prizes are given for getting things right.

Like many others, I have recently found myself changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practicing economist for more than half a century. I will come to some of the substantive topics, but I start with some general failings. I do not include the corruption allegations that have become common in some debates. Even so, economists, who have prospered mightily over the past half century, might fairly be accused of having a vested interest in capitalism as it currently operates. I should also say that I am writing about a (perhaps nebulous) mainstream, and that there are many nonmainstream economists.

He thinks economics as a discipline had been wrong in:

1. ignoring the role of power in economic (and real) life.
2. stopping thinking about philosophy and ethics — and especially equating well-being with money or consumption, missing much of what matters to people.
3. being obsessed with efficiency. (The engineers who run tech companies have the same destructive obsession.)
4. having an obsession with empirical methods that focus attention on local effects, and away from potentially important but slow-acting mechanisms that operate with long and variable lags.
5. Lacking humility in the face of the complexity of the real world.

Books, etc.

The Miseducation of Kara Swisher

Nice demolition job by Edward Ongweso Jr. on the noted tech columnist’s apologia for an over-credulous life.

Though she’d been covering the industry for decades in the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, Swisher could not understand how our enlightened stewards of innovation would capitulate so quickly to an authoritarian-in-waiting. “Welcome to the brave new world,” she concluded. “Yeah, you can say it: Fuckfuckfuck.”

This apparent about-face of Silicon Valley prompted Swisher to undertake some agonized soul-searching, the results of which have been published as Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, a tortured and tortuous memoir that, in remixing swaths of past reporting and commentary, as well as regurgitating tales she’s told ad nauseam, tries to answer two burning questions: How did Silicon Valley end up in that room with Trump? And, more importantly, how did a tech journalist as good and uncompromising as Kara Swisher fail to anticipate this turn to the dark side?

The long and short of it is that Swisher is not a good journalist — or, framed more generously, that she thrived in an industry with remarkably low standards for which we are still paying the price. For decades, tech journalism and criticism has primarily consisted of glowing gadget reviews, laudatory profiles, and reprinted press releases, all of it colored by Silicon Valley’s self-aggrandizing vision of itself as a laboratory of a brighter future.

This is largely identical to what Swisher admits to having believed up until 2016.

Yep.

My commonplace booklet

How to interview a tech man-child

An object lesson from Don Lemon in how to do it properly as he politely exposes the slippery, callow gaucheness of the world’s richest man.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Neo-Utilitarians Are Utter Philistines Enjoyable rant by Justin Smith-Ruiu.

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Whitegate

As regular readers will know, I am trying to re-learn the art of black-and-white photography, after years and years of working in colour. B&W requires one to ‘see’ things differently — to look for structure, contrast, subtle changes in light and shadow.

This gate would look banal in colour, and yet it struck me as interesting when I passed it yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”If God wanted us to fly, He would have given us tickets.”

• Mel Brooks

(Came to mind while reading some fatuous nonsense about flying cars.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Namadingo Ft. Giddes Chalamanda | Linny Hoo

Link

Enchanting song by an extraordinary musician.

Thanks to Anne Chapel for suggesting it.

Remembering Ross

Ross Anderson died unexpectedly in his sleep last Thursday, leaving a large group of us devastated. He was one of those unforgettable people — fabulously erudite, generous with his knowledge and friendship, fiercely independent, and fearless. He had a kind of flinty integrity that was wholly admirable, which meant that he was often a thorn in the side of university, governmental and academic establishments, who discovered that he was no pushover.

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a recipient of the British Computer Society’s Ada Lovelace Medal. He was a world authority on computer security, cybercrime and cryptography. He was Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge, and leaves behind a remarkable cohort of PhD students who were lucky enough to have him as a supervisor.

Many people found him formidable and indeed sometimes forbidding. He didn’t do small talk. And yet when you were lucky enough to get to know him (as I was) he was great company. He and I used to walk round the ‘800’ Wood near Cambridge with his two lovely dogs, deep in conversation about the sordid ingenuity of cyber-criminals, the short-sightedness of academic administrators, the intrusiveness of national security agencies, as well as about Celtic folk music of which he knew a lot. (He was a piper and shared my interest in Uileann piping.)

I learned such a lot from those conversations. Ross changed the way I looked at computing, and alerted me to the political economy of the technology which has shaped my thinking ever since. He always spoke his mind — which is why when an email from him would arrive at 8am on Sunday mornings I knew that he had read my Observer column and had something to say about it, and accordingly braced myself before reading further.

The last time I saw him was a few weeks ago, when we both snuck into a talk given by Matt Clifford (who has become Rishi Sunak’s go-to man on “AI Safety”). He had been invited by a student group, and Ross and I were the only two grizzled veterans in the room. Before Clifford embarked on his boosterish talk, I got out my pen to take notes, and then noticed that Ross had opened his MacBook. So I put my pen away. He always took the most detailed and accurate notes of any event he attended, and I knew that if I needed to check something later about Clifford’s performance, Ross’s record would provide the evidence I needed.

Ross was furious about Cambridge University’s remorseless determination to force academics to retire at 67, and he had been mounting a campaign against the policy. At 5pm on the day he died, he had an email conversation with one of his colleagues, Jon Crowcroft, about the possibility of harnessing generative AI to add spice to the campaign. Ross sent Jon a link to a song he had just prompted suno.ai to create.

As Jon observed afterwards, it could almost serve as an obituary.

Ross’s death marks the passing of the last of the five computer scientists who made Cambridge such a pioneering centre of research in the field — Maurice Wilkes, Roger Needham, David Wheeler, Karen Spärck Jones and Ross.

May he rest in peace. We were lucky to have known him.

Frank Stajano, one of Ross’s colleagues in the Computer Lab, has written a lovely tribute to him in the blog that Ross and his colleagues have been running since 2006.

Long Read of the Day

What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?

You know the answer, but this sharp New Yorker essay by Sam Knight gives some useful detail.

Sample:

Some people insisted that the past decade and a half of British politics resists satisfying explanation. The only way to think about it is as a psychodrama enacted, for the most part, by a small group of middle-aged men who went to élite private schools, studied at the University of Oxford, and have been climbing and chucking one another off the ladder of British public life—the cursus honorum, as Johnson once called it—ever since. The Conservative Party, whose history goes back some three hundred and fifty years, aids this theory by not having anything as vulgar as an ideology. “They’re not on a mission to do X, Y, or Z,” as a former senior adviser explained. “You win and you govern because we are better at it, right?”

Another way to think about these years is to consider them in psychological, or theoretical, terms. In “Heroic Failure,” the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole explains Brexit by describing Britain’s fall from imperial nation to “occupied colony” of the E.U., and the rise of a powerful English nationalism as a result. Last year, Abby Innes, a scholar at the London School of Economics, published “Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail,” which argues that, since Thatcher, Britain’s political mainstream has become as devoted to particular ideas about running the state—a default commitment to competition, markets, and forms of privatization—as Brezhnev’s U.S.S.R. ever was. “The resulting regime,” Innes writes, “has proved anything but stable.”

Read on. It’s perceptive, realistic … and depressing (if you live in the UK).

How did a developer of graphics cards for gamers become the third most valuable firm on the planet?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

A funny thing happened on our way to the future. It took place recently in a huge sports arena in San Jose, California, and was described by some wag as “AI Woodstock”. But whereas that original music festival had attendees who were mainly stoned on conventional narcotics, the 11,000 or so in San Jose were high on the Kool-Aid so lavishly provided by the tech industry.

They were gathered to hear a keynote address at a technology conference given by Jensen Huang, the founder of computer chip-maker Nvidia, who is now the Taylor Swift of Silicon Valley. Dressed in his customary leather jacket and white-soled trainers, he delivered a bravura 50-minute performance that recalled Steve Jobs in his heyday, though with slightly less slick delivery. The audience, likewise, recalled the fanboys who used to queue for hours to be allowed into Jobs’s reality distortion field, except that the Huang fans were not as attentive to the cues he gave them to applaud.

Still, it made for interesting viewing. Huang is an engaging speaker and he has built a remarkable company in the years since 1993, when he first sketched his idea for Nvidia in a Silicon Valley diner. And the audience were in awe of him because they regard him as a man who saw the future long before they did, and hoped to catch a glimpse of what might be coming next.

And in this they were not disappointed…

Do read the whole thing

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