Contrails
If you were a conspiracy theorist, you’d be wondering where all these planes were going to meet up. Sadly, I think the answer was Stansted Airport :-(
Quote of the Day
”Any sufficiently advanced punditry is indistinguishable from bollocks”.
- Dan Davies, riffing on Arthur C. Clarke’s celebrated adage that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Dónal Lunny and Aimee Farrell Courtney | Banish Misfortune
Lunny, one of the most inspiring Irish musicians of his generation, has died and is being lamented wherever Irish music is played. He’s credited with introducing the bouzoki into Irish music (though there is, as usual, some arguments about that). More importantly, he was involved in founding two great groups, Planxty and the Bothy Band. May he rest in peace.
Long Read of the Day
Hannah Arendt on MAGA
Like me, Andrew Brown has gone back to reading Hannah Arendt. But whereas I took to her book on The Human Condition (because of references in Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, Andrew went to her book on The Origins of Totalitarianism, which led him to write this essay.
German thinkers of the mid twentieth century are valuable today because they got here first. They had seen everything civilised smashed up and ground to bits between 1914 and 1945. To excavate the causes of the catastrophe from among the ruins was a task almost as urgent as finding food, warmth, and shelter in a country which had been devastated physically as well as morally.
Those who had spent the war in safe exile in the USA started first. They had no material cares. The two I have read with attention are Golo Mann and Hannah Arendt. When George W Bush invaded Iraq I started to read Golo Mann’s History of Germany to understand the madness: even then the idea of Weimar America made a lot of sense to me.
And now I am reading Hannah Arendt, long overdue. I hadn’t realised when I got it on Kindle, that The Origins of Totalitarianism is a huge book, 750 pages in paperback. To read it is to be buffeted by the strong mind of a woman who has read everything and expects you to keep up, so I am only half way through but I seem to have taken 7,000 words of notes. Of course these are mostly highlighted passages to work through, copied automatically to my hoarding program; had I copied them out by hand they would have stuck with me better. Nonetheless, certain themes emerge, and one of them is the uncanny prescience with which she describes the rise of MAGA, which is, in her taxonomy, a “mass movement”, not a party or even a mob. If the term has an equivalent today, it would be “populism”…
Do read on. It’s sobering.
Those rumours of the death of programmers? Greatly exaggerated
My recent Observer column
Jeremy Scheff runs a successful little computer games company. But he’s also a programmer, and he’s just written a poignant obituary for his trade. He says that he was very slow to use AI but noted that many programmers had taken to it. Maybe, he muses, that is because they “never actually liked programming and are thrilled to have a machine do it for them”.
He’s the opposite. As a kid he loved solving crosswords but found programming even better. “It was a puzzle,” he says, “but the scope was limited only by your imagination. It was a game, but you were creating real things with real value.” And so he built a life around it. “Programming turned into one of the greatest jobs you could imagine. You got paid to work on tricky little logic puzzles. The trickier the puzzle, the more you got paid. But even pretty simple puzzles were worth a lot of money because regular people just couldn’t do it! No, they needed us. They would give us a problem and we would solve it the way we wanted. We set the strategy, we made the timeline, we defined what was and was not possible.”
In time, programmers became “software engineers”, a step up the cognitive ladder. But not like engineers in other fields, who are caged in by the laws of physics. They have to cope with the fact that there is no way that water can be persuaded to flow uphill, that there is no such thing as a frictionless bearing, or acceleration without force, and no way that a SpaceX rocket can “slip the surly bonds of earth” without liberating the chemical energy pent up in its fuel tanks.
Being a programmer in the pre-AI era was like being Napoleon before the retreat from Moscow. It was a medium in which the limits were set by your imagination Being a programmer in the pre-AI era was like being Napoleon before the retreat from Moscow. It was a medium in which the limits were set by your imagination
Software engineering, though, is different. In software, you can programme a set of pixels to move endlessly in a circle and, if you leave them to it, they will continue to do that for ever. They need neither fuel nor food, and they will never complain. In that sense, being a programmer in the pre-AI era was like being Napoleon before the retreat from Moscow. It was a medium in which the limits were exclusively those set by your own imagination and skill.
And now? With AI coding, “It’s no longer solving little logic puzzles,” writes Scheff. “More like being plugged into the Matrix, gaining new abilities without truly understanding, accomplishing great things with little effort.”
Well, up to a point. Paradoxically, Scheff’s obituary for programming appears alongside a report from Anthropic, the AI giant, describing how the company used its AI tools to build a new source control system, codenamed Scion, for managing the colossal body of software that its engineers create and have to maintain. For years Anthropic relied on the industry-standard solution – named “git” – to do the job, but git was buckling under the scale of the company’s software output, which recently produced 30,000 code updates in a single day.
Building a new system from scratch to handle this was a gigantic engineering challenge. In the old days it would be what the industry sometimes called a “death march” and would take four years. Anthropic did it in five months. This project, writes one industry commentator, “stands out as a well-documented example of serious engineering that takes full advantage of the latest tools. AI coding tools are no longer limited to vibe-coding lightweight apps; they are revolutionising the craft of building large-scale, mission-critical distributed systems.”
Does this mean that from today programming is dead? Personally, I doubt it. Building Scion was an amazing feat of architectural design, much like building the Severn Bridge or the Shard. But the world is full of smaller construction projects and local builders. And here the great sci-fi author Cory Doctorow has something useful to say. In a recent essay he points out that one of the oldest pleasures in computing is “scratching your own itch” – writing a little tool that does exactly what you need. AI “vibe coding” puts that pleasure within reach of millions of people who could never have done it before.
But vibe coding can only take you so far. It may be that you aren’t able to articulate your needs clearly enough to get results. What you need is someone who understands the technology better than you, who can tease out of you what you’re really trying to do. In other words, a programmer.
My commonplace booklet
Last week, a Bentley went up for sale. Only six years old, a mere 7,000 miles on the clock, painted in racing green and a steal at £125,000. There was just one catch: the car’s previous owner was the former prince, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
I’m not in the market for a Bentley — or maybe it’s fairer to say that a Bentley isn’t in the market for me — but the original ownership means I wouldn’t take the car even if it were offered to me for nothing. Curious, given I’m genuinely looking for a second-hand car at the moment and the previous owner has never factored as a consideration. But once that piece of information is available, there’s no going back.
Rebecca Watson, FT 18 October.
Political news
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