His last resting place
W.B. Yeats’s grave in Drumcliff Churchyard, Co. Sligo. We always visit it when driving north or south on the N15. Despite the tourists it’s still a magical place, with Ben Bulben in the background.
Quote of the Day
”What’s the difference between a maths PhD and a large pizza? A large pizza can feed a family of four.”
- A famous old joke about academia. Especially relevant nowadays.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
HAIM | Down to be wrong
Weird video, but catchy song.
Long Read of the Day
Why stablecoins – crypto for adults – have suddenly become a big deal
My recent Observer column…
Why are stablecoins suddenly such a big deal? Because they are digital natives that sit comfortably on blockchains: shared digital ledgers that everyone can see and no one can secretly change, and which automatically keep a permanent record of every transaction. That means that they are useful for monetary transactions, especially of a cross-border kind.
These normally require wading through bureaucratic treacle involving banks that have to correspond with one another, payment processors such as Swift and paying fees to everyone along the way. In principle, stablecoins could bypass most of this. On a blockchain, for example, there are no opening hours. Anyone can send a transaction at any time that clears in minutes and no bank approval is required. In other words, stablecoins could transform any multistep international transfer into a single blockchain transaction at a very low cost. Which is why – eventually – a lot of international trade is likely to be conducted in stablecoins.
But which one(s)? At the moment, there are about 250 of them, and since everything that happens on digital networks eventually winds up as a monopoly or oligopoly, it’d be useful to know which coin is likely to become dominant in the next few decades…
NOTE. The Observer has recently introduced a paywall, which means that from now on the Web version of my column may be only fully available to subscribers. I’ve decided to follow a practice that some columnists on other papers (like Tim Harford on the FT) have adopted: to provide a copy of the column on their blogs a few days after its publication in the paper. If that’s of interest you can find a pdf of the above column here.
Books, etc.
Yesterday I gave a keynote address on “What Machines Don’t Know” to an AI conference in Cambridge yesterday. The Abstract for the talk reads:
Large Language Models are cultural technologies and, as such, moderately useful. But they (and those who build them) have two blind spots. One is their embodiment of a ludicrously narrow concept of ‘intelligence’. The other is the delusion that when one has ‘read’ everything that’s been written, one knows everything worth knowing.
When I was preparing the talk I dug out one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read — Howard Gardner’s 1983 book arguing that the idea of intelligence being measured by a single number is nuts: there’s a multiplicity of different intelligences — Linguistic, Musical, Logical-Mathematical, Spatial, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Emotional, etc.). And of course I also ranged over the question of what kind of knowledge is embodied in LLMs. (Answer: only knowledge that has been written down.) It was useful to be motivated to dig out Howard’s book, and refreshing to read the passages I was looking for. Sadly though, it was also an argument supporting my book-hoarding habit!
Feedback
From Michael Higgins on O Sole Mio(as featured in Wednesday’s edition):
I too have heard a gondolier singing that song – on a canal through the inside of a casino/shopping centre in Las Vegas. With the passengers restrained by seat-belts and warning sign about the water depth – 24 inches I think.
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