Monday 7 October, 2024

Roll out the barrel

Rooting around in my vast photo archive what should I find but this? Taken on Boxing Day (December 26) 2008 when a large number of ostensibly sane male residents of Grantchester, a nice village near Cambridge, decided that they would compete to see which of them could roll a barrel fastest along a stretch of village road, watched by many hundreds of their dependents, spouses, neighbours and the odd puzzled visitor from abroad.


Quote of the Day

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Celtic Thunder | Galway Girl (Live From Ontario)

Link

The group is now to me, so thanks to Quentin for spotting them. Steve Earle’s song has been wildly popular in Ireland for years. If you doubt that, then have a look at what went on in Galway on 11 June, 2016!


Long Read of the Day

The long and the short of our confidence in AI

This is a fabulous essay by Rob Nelson which packs a lot of wisdom and perceptiveness into an extended review essay about these two important books. It’s a long read, but worth every minute of the time spent.

Here are just two samples to give you a flavour of Nelson’s insight into this stuff:

On AI Snake Oil

The habit of confident prediction, especially when expressed probabilistically, gives a rational sheen to the most unhinged speculation. Narayanan and Kapoor don’t use the term, but one of the book’s central points is that we need more fallibilism, a recognition that when it comes to science, we know nothing with absolute confidence. Such uncertainty eases the way for con artists to make fraudulent claims, but identifying snake oil is not just about detecting bullshit; it is also about evaluating the social harms that come with genuine advances. For example, Narayanan and Kapoor write, “The biggest danger of facial recognition arises from the fact that it works really well, so it can cause great harm in the hands of the wrong people.” Many skeptics are so focused on proving AI doesn’t work that they miss it when AI works exactly as intended, sometimes with disastrous consequences for individuals or society.

And…

The advantage of generative AI is that, like actual snake oil, there really is some value there. The temptation to bottle up whatever this is and put a label on it becomes an obligation to those living on what Nate Silver calls “the river,” a gambling mindset with deep roots in American culture. The uncertain truths of this latest advance in machine capability have created an epic opportunity for the right man, a confidence man for the twenty-first century.

The AI snake oil impresario who leads OpenAI is just such a man. From his star turn in the comedy of remarriage last year as he left and came back in one madcap weekend to his slow-motion character subversion into the villain we all wanted him to be, Sam Altman understands that a good story is the key to a complicated and lucrative scam. His prognostications, along with the outrage of his critics, serve Altman’s purpose, which is to distract the public from books like AI Snake Oil or projects like François Chollet’s ARC Prize. Dave Karpf nails it: “The business model of OpenAI isn’t actually ChatGPT as a product. It’s stories about what ChatGPT might one day become.” Alternating boardroom dramatics with scripted demos of black box breakthroughs keeps the AGI currents sparking and crackling, and the eyes on him.

On The Ordinal Society

William Thomson explained an essential truth of the modern world: “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.” Fourcade and Healy describe the social order that has emerged since this observation: “a society oriented toward, justified by, and governed through measurement.” If to measure something is to know it, then to put that measure into an algorithm is to automate our knowledge of it. Such automation, as we have learned, is powerful, especially when organized and mediated through the Internet. It is even more powerful when the “it” is our own sense of self.

Fourcade and Healy argue that we have welcomed that power into our lives for what it gives us, and especially the experiences it provides. Our human desire to rank and be ranked is now realized through an internet-created social “system of organization, evaluation, and control that is remarkably convenient, often delightful, and at times frightening.” It is not simply that giant corporations gather data and use it for their own purposes—though they certainly do. It is that, in so doing, they give people what they want. They tell individuals and institutions where they fit in the social order.

It’s terrific. Well worth your time if you want to rise above the current chaotic and often clueless discourse about AI and AGI.


The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted

Yesterday’s Observer column:

If you log into Dave Winer’s blog, Scripting News, you’ll find a constantly updated note telling you how many years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds the blog has been running. Sometime tomorrow morning the year field will switch to 30. Which will mean that every single day for three decades Dave’s blog will have been stirring things up.

He’s a truly remarkable figure, a gifted hacker and software developer who embodies the spirit of the early internet. In the 1980s he created ThinkTank, a new kind of software called an “outliner”, which computerised the hierarchical lists we all use when planning an article or a presentation, but which were up to then scribbled on paper. Like Dan Bricklin’s spreadsheet, it was a novel idea at the time, but now you find outliners built into almost every kind of software for writing. There’s even one in Microsoft Word, for God’s sake!

In 1983, Winer founded a company, Living Videotext, to develop and commercialise the outlining idea, and six years later sold it to Symantec for enough money to enable him to do his own thing for the rest of his life…

Read on


My commonplace booklet

The historian Jill Lepore has been in conversation with ChatGPT in its ‘Advanced Voice Mode’ and has a lovely essay in the New Yorker about her experience (and lots more besides) which is, alas, behind the paywall. But here’s a bit that made me laugh out loud:

Advanced Voice Mode also told me that thing about Alan Turing presenting a paper at Teddington in 1958, and, because its personality is wide-eyed and wonderstruck, it added some musings. (Unlike standard Voice Mode—which involves recording your question and then uploading it, in a process that feels sluggish and, sweet Jesus forgive me, old-timey—Advanced Voice Mode talks with you in real time and inexhaustibly, like a college roommate all het up about Heidegger whispering to you in the dark from the top bunk at three in the morning.) “It’s fascinating to think how forward-thinking Turing was, considering how integral learning algorithms have become in modern A.I.,” it said, dormitorially. But Turing had died in 1954, so he wasn’t at the conference, either.


Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Largest brain map ever reveals fruit fly’s neurons in exquisite detail

From Nature

A fruit fly might not be the smartest organism, but scientists can still learn a lot from its brain. Researchers are hoping to do that now that they have a new map — the most complete for any organism so far — of the brain of a single fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). The wiring diagram, or ‘connectome’, includes nearly 140,000 neurons and captures more than 54.5 million synapses, which are the connections between nerve cells.

“This is a huge deal,” says Clay Reid, a neurobiologist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, who was not involved in the project but has worked with one of the team members who was. “It’s something that the world has been anxiously waiting for, for a long time.”

The map is described in a package of nine papers about the data published in Nature today. Its creators are part of a consortium known as FlyWire, co-led by neuroscientists Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung at Princeton University in New Jersey.

This is truly amazing. 139,255 cells


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Friday 4 October, 2024

Ireland’s Lake District

The view from Aghadoe Heights over Killarney.


Quote of the Day

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”

  • Albert Einstein.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

‘Fairytale of New York’ played at Shane MacGowan’s funeral

Link

Shane McGowan’s funeral in Dublin was never going to be a staid affair, and so it proved.


Long Read of the Day

The American historian Heather Cox Richardson was one of the first big stars on Substack. Her Letter from an American remains a must-read for anyone interested in the madness going on over there, because she writes calmly and brings to bear her wide knowledge and historical perspective on every subject she touches. Tuesday’s edition of her blog was particularly gripping and revelatory. It starts with J.D. Vance’s persistent lying in the vice-presidential debate and then goes back to a gripping account of what went on in the run-up to the ‘insurrection’ on January 6, 2021.

Here’s an extended sample that gives a flavour of the essay.

By late November, neither the legal challenges nor the threats had worked. So in early December the conspirators decided to get the people who would have been the electors if Trump had won to sign certifications saying that they were the legitimate electors and were casting their electoral votes for Trump. The lawyer who came up with the plan, Ken Chesebro, admitted that “the votes aren’t legal” but thought Congress could use them to challenge the real votes.

Many of the electors were wary of the plan, but Trump and his conspirators managed to get the slates of fake electors on December 14, the appointed day for real electors to meet. The plan was for Vice President Mike Pence, who as president of the Senate would preside over the counting of the electoral votes, to use the fake electors to say there were competing slates of electors and thus to “negotiate a solution to defeat Biden.” On December 19, Trump posted: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6. Be there, will be wild!”

But the plan hit a snag. Pence maintained he did not have the power to do any such thing. The more Pence refused, the more insistent Trump became. After another argument on January 1, 2021, Trump told Pence that “hundreds of thousands of people are going to hate your guts,” “people are gonna think you’re stupid,” and, finally, “You’re too honest.”

Trump, Bannon, and Trump’s lawyers all continued to pressure Pence, and Bannon normalized the plan on his podcast. Trump continued to talk publicly of fighting to make sure his opponents didn’t take the White House and continued to pressure Pence. On January 5—the day before the election certification proceeding—he talked to Bannon, and less than two hours later, on his podcast, Bannon told his listeners: “All Hell is going to break loose tomorrow” in Washington, D.C.

Concerned at Trump’s escalating fury at Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short alerted Pence’s secret service detail…

You get the point. Do read it.


Books, etc.

This arrived yesterday. I knew that Kissinger had been thinking about AI for a while, but not that he was working on a book with the former CEO of Google and a former senior Microsoft executive. It’s now on my list. Strange title, though.


My commonplace booklet

How Hurricane Helene became a monster storm.

Great report in The Verge. I particularly liked a quote from Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who “likens the effect of climate change to the world having a weakened immune system. ‘It doesn’t mean that you will become sick. It just increases your tendency to become sick’”.

In a British tabloid the headline would have been “A Perfect Storm”.


Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

  • London saw a surprising benefit to fining high-polluting cars: More active kids Link

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Wednesday 2 October, 2024

Colour

Sometimes, B&W just doesn’t cut it!


Quote of the Day

“I’m very careful to only predict things which have already happened.”

  • Marshall McLuhan

Great advice for anyone covering the tech industry.


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Band | I Shall Be Released (The Last Waltz)

Link

Wonderful album.


Long Read of the Day

Jimmy Carter’s First Century.

He was 100 yesterday. James Fallows — a great journalist who had once been Carter’s speechwriter — had a nice essay on his blog looking back on his life, times and fate.

On October 1, 1924, James Earl Carter Jr. was born in the small southwestern Georgia town of Plains. It was a different world. Calvin Coolidge was in office, as the 30th US president. Electricity had not yet come to the rural South, which was still officially segregated and the scene of lynchings. Radio broadcasts were in their infancy. TV did not exist. The most popular US car was the Ford Model T.

Today, October 1, 2024, the 39th US president, Jimmy Carter, turns 100. He is by far the longest-tenured former president, having spent nearly 44 years in that role. In distant second place is Herbert Hoover, who lived for 31 years after he left office. Five others former presidents—John Adams, Hoover, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and the first George Bush—survived into their early 90s. Only Carter has made it this far.

Early last year, when Carter announced that he was entering hospice care, I wrote an appreciation of his time in and out of public office, for The Atlantic. I had worked for Carter as a speechwriter during his 1976 campaign and then as chief speechwriter for his first two years in office. With the magazine’s permission I quoted the story on this site when it first came out. Nineteen months later, on the occasion of Carter’s centennial, I do so again. I have updated two or three date references but otherwise have left this unchanged. I think it stands up…

It does. Carter — like Joe Biden — played a bad hand well. But the Iranian hostage crisis did for him, largely I think because an ambitious rescue effort failed when one of the helicopters crashed. He later used to say that he came within one broken helicopter of re-election!


Books, etc.

John Steinbeck’s tips on writing

  1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
  2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
  3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
  4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it — bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
  5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
  6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

From Steinbeck: A Life in Letters.


My commonplace booklet

I love fountain pens and whenever possible write with one. (I also collect them.) One day, some years ago, Victoria Smith, a talented artist friend, looked at my open notebook, became fascinated by the sheet of blotting paper lying in it and asked if she could have it. She later asked for some more blotter sheets, and I readily but (puzzedly) complied. And then, one day, she sent me a note to say they had featured in an exhibition of her work! This was one of them.


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