Building for Global Britain
Can this really be the site office for one of the incessant central Cambridge construction projects?
Quote of the Day
”Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.”
- Ernest Hemingway*
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Fáinne Geal an Lae (The Dawning of the Day)
Lovely version of an old Irish song by na Casaidigh
Long Read of the Day
ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving
I can’t understand why some many teachers in the Humanities seem to be panicking about LLMs. At least some of the panic is centred on the way the technology makes it difficult to assess student performance. But surely the question we should be asking: what’s the big deal about essays (other than they’re easy to grade)? And what is it about writing that’s important?
In my view this question was answered many decades ago by E.M.Forster, when he wrote (somewhere — can’t find the reference) that “There are two kinds of writer: those who know what they think and write it down; and those who find out what they think by trying to write it”. Since the vast majority of us fall into the latter category, the real case against using LLMs to write your essay is that it you’re denying yourself the opportunity to figure something out for yourself, and the educational benefits thereof.
All of which is a long-winded way of explaining why I’ve been so taken with John Warner’s essay, in which he asks (and answers) the awkward question: “If an algorithm is the death of high school English, maybe that’s an okay thing.”
Do read it.
English can now be a programming language. Oh yeah?
Last Sunday’s Observer column:
Way back in 2023, Andrej Karpathy, an eminent AI guru, made waves with a striking claim that “the hottest new programming language is English”. This was because the advent of large language models (LLMs) meant that from now on humans would not have to learn arcane programming languages in order to tell computers what to do. Henceforth, they could speak to machines like the Duke of Devonshire spoke to his gardener, and the machines would do their bidding.
Ever since LLMs emerged, programmers have been early adopters, using them as unpaid assistants (or “co-pilots”) and finding them useful up to a point – but always with the proviso that, like interns, they make mistakes, and you need to have real programming expertise to spot those.
Recently, though, Karpathy stirred the pot by doubling down on his original vision. “There’s a new kind of coding,” he announced, “I call ‘vibe coding’, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs … are getting too good…
My commonplace booklet
From Niall Ferguson:
”It is exactly a century since John Maynard Keynes published “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill,” a devastating takedown of the policies of the Conservative government in which Winston Churchill served as Chancellor of the Exchequer—the British equivalent of Treasury Secretary.
Keynes predicted—correctly—that the government’s decision to return the pound to the gold standard would lead to “unemployment and industrial disputes,” “great depression in the export industries,” and “credit restriction.”
“It will not be safe,” he ironically advised Churchill, “politically to admit that you are intensifying unemployment deliberately in order to reduce wages. Thus you will have to ascribe what is happening to every conceivable cause except the true one. … About two years may elapse before it will be safe for you to utter in public one single word of truth.”
Interesting, isn’t it, how history sometimes repeats itself. The Trump crowd are already in denial mode about what’s happening. I’m looking forward to the moment when a Wall Street analyst is arrested for spreading “fake news” about the ‘booming’ Trump economy.
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