Picasso’s guitar
Amazing what you can do with a distorting lens.
An experiment from 2007, which explains why it’s not a high-definition print.
Quote of the Day
”I’m smart enough to know I’m dumb.”
- Richard Feynman
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Peter Knight | The Water is Wide
Long Read of the Day
The Third Framing
A useful (and readable) dissection by a distinguished economist of the neoliberal international order (the so-called “Washington Consensus”) that is now falling apart.
In practice the neoliberal international regime that debuted in the 1980s is dead. The major countries that defined its rules have ceased to abide by them. We are thus facing a strange situation where the main architects and the founders of the neoliberal international order no longer believe in it and do not apply it, but somehow the system should be still apparently adhered to by the rest of the world. This is an untenable situation. There is no way in which a World Bank mission to an African, Latin American or Asian country can seriously complain about government subsidies, trade discrimination, seizure of assets of political opponents, trade bloc trading, or industrial policy while the very same policies are prosecuted by the framers of the international economic system. The contradiction can be papered over for a while, but cannot be ignored forever. If the international neoliberal rules are no longer considered the appropriate rules for the United States and Europe, should they be considered as the right rules for the rest of the world?
There is simply no current answer to this question. The new rules have to be invented and introduced or the entire system will become incoherent and internally contradictory so much that eventually no “system” at all will exist. The world will be back to individual country optimization under the rules of the jungle.
By showing Musk’s X the red card, has Brazil scored a goal for all democracies?
Yesterday’s Observer column:
At 10 minutes past midnight on 31 August, Elon Musk’s X (nee Twitter) went dark in Brazil, a country of more than 200 million souls, many of them enthusiastic users of online services. The day before, a supreme court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, had done something hitherto unthinkable: ordered the country’s ISPs to block access to the platform, threatened a daily fine of 50,000 Brazilian reis (just under £6,800) for users who bypassed the ban by using virtual private networks (VPNs) and froze the finances of Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service provider in the country. The order would remain in force until the platform complied with the decisions of the supreme federal court, paid fines totalling 18.3m reis (nearly £2.5m) and appointed a representative in Brazil, a legal requirement for foreign companies operating there. Moraes had also instructed Apple and Google to remove the X app and VPN software from their stores, but later reversed that decision, citing concerns about potential “unnecessary” disruptions.
Cue shock, horror, incredulity, outrage and all the reactions in between. Musk – who has been sparring with Moraes for quite a while – tweeted: “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.” The animosity between the two goes back to 8 January 2023, after the defeat of Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, when a mob of his supporters attacked federal government buildings in the capital, Brasília. The mob invaded and caused deliberate damage to the supreme federal court, the national congress and the Planalto presidential palace in an abortive attempt to overthrow the democratically elected president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva…
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
“There are no AI-shaped holes lying around”
This is how I reconcile the facts that (a) AI is already powerful and (b) it’s having relatively little impact so far
Making AI work today requires ripping up workflows and rebuilding for AI. This is hard and painful to do…
From a tweet by Matt Clifford, a UK AI enthusiast and Chair of ARIA.
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 at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!