G’day, sunshine!
Stars of a glorious herbaceous border in Devon the other day.
Quote of the Day
”Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.”
- Woody Allen
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Handel | ‘Where’er you walk’ | Semele | Academy of Ancient Music
Lovely orchestral version of a favourite arias.
Long Read of the Day
How to learn about politics from two Democratic-leaning women in New York
Lovely piece of reportage by the economist Branko Milanovic on two conversations he had recently, sitting at the bar of a fancy eaterie in the city.
This’ll give you a flavour of the piece.
Of course, she was an artist. She did pottery and knitting. I had some doubts whether her pottery and knitting alone would buy her dinners in fine restaurants but I left them to myself. I added however that I knew nothing about modern plastic arts. She was not pleased with such an open expression of philistinism. But the conversation ended when she told me about some social platforms (the only acceptable social platform that may be used, according to her) and of which I have never heard. I told her that instead of that particular and socially-acceptable platform I like Twitter. It was the last straw. She expressed outrage that anyone may use Twitter in a language not less intemperate than had I confessed to some special adoration of the Satan.
She was touching in her self-oblivious self-righteousness.
Luckily, on my right, sat another woman, perhaps only five years younger than the lady of the liberal East Coast establishment with whom I had just ended this charming conversation. She was as appalled by Trump as the other was, but disliked Democratic party establishment equally. And told me the story that captures the entire history of American involvement with globalization: the story of American industrial rise, decline, and inability to ever get industrialized again. All told through her small fashion business. She owns a small or middle size successful fashion company. She started it some 35 years ago. The company at first bought all of its material, fabrics, prints and dyes etc. from within the United States, from California to the East Coast. But gradually US suppliers became too expensive…
Observant and revealing. Hope you enjoy it.
Zuckerberg’s ‘superintelligence’ sermon
Yesterday’s Observer column …
Dearly beloved, our reading for today is a sermon by the supreme leader of Meta (nee Facebook), Mark Zuckerberg (hereinafter known as Zuck), given on the 30th day of July in the year of our Lord 2025. For those who have been holidaying on Mars, Zuck, who in an earlier life was a socially challenged nerd, has now been reborn as a believer in the importance of “masculinity” and as a mixed martial arts fighter. So devoted to this latter activity is he that he has even posed topless with “legendary fighters Israel Adesanya and Alex Volkanovski”.
And now he wishes to enthuse us on the newest new thing: artificial general intelligence.
The subject of his sermon is “personal superintelligence”. It runs to 625 words and is available online on the Meta site, where readers with robust constitutions may peruse it, having made sure that a sick bag is readily to hand. Its basic message is this: superintelligence is coming and it will be mighty, but fear not, little people, for my great corporation will put this power into your own tiny hands so that you may flourish...
My commonplace booklet
Ever since Joe Weizenbaum’s experiments in the 1960s with the first chatbot, Eliza, we’ve known that machines that can talk back have weird effects on (some) humans. ChatGPT and its peers are revealing how widespread this syndrome has become. A while back OpenAI — the creator of ChatGPT — had released a model (GPT-4o) to which it appears that many people have become ‘emotionally’ attached. And then, a few days ago, the company released its newest — supposedly super-duper — model, GPT-5, which supplanted GPT-4o and it seems that suddenly many ChatGPT users went into mourning over the loss of their new best friend and eventually OpenAI relented. (I am not making this up).
The bit that’s really interesting, though, is that the grief was manifest even in China, where if you want to access ChatGPT you have to go through the palaver of using a VPN (and, I guess, possibly incurring the displeasure of Xi Jinping).
Writing in the ChinaTalk newsletter, Irene Chang reports that
Some of the loudest voices criticizing GPT-5 since last week came from people “dating,” or otherwise engaging in long, companion-like roleplay conversations with, GPT-4o. They say GPT-5 is emotionally distant, lacks nuance, and just “doesn’t feel the same,” perhaps resulting from OpenAI’s work on making the model less sycophantic. The subreddit r/MyBoyfriendisAI (17k subscribers) is currently full of distraught users thanking the heavens that 4o is back, as if their actual loved ones were briefly lost to the digital void.
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