Non-potable
Quote of the Day
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
- William Faulkner
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Alison Krauss & Union Station | Dimming Of The Day
Long Read of the Day
‘Empire’s tolling bell’: What China hears from America
This is an interesting essay by Michael Ignatieff speculating on what the Chinese leadership might be thinking as they watch the chaos in Washington.
According to a recent Chinese report, the sound that Xi Jing Ping and the Chinese leaders hear when they listen to America is “the heavy and haunting toll of an empire’s evening bell.”
What does it mean for the stability of the world when a rising power hears only a melancholy echo of fading power from its once dominant rival? Will this encourage Xi Jing Ping to make a play for global dominance now, or will he bide his time and wait patiently for his rival to collapse?
What happens if America comes to believe its power is ebbing away? Does it make peace with its rival and accept genteel decline, or does it strike before it becomes too weak to avert its own fall?
These are questions as old as the Greek historian, Thucydides’ analysis of why the Peloponnesian Wars broke out in 431 BC…
They are. And they matter for both Ukraine (and therefore Europe) and Taiwan.
Books, etc.
As a long-term reader of Francis Fukuyama (who even forgave him for his misguided foray into neoconservatism) I’ve been looking forward to — and pre-ordered — this memoir, which comes out tomorrow.
My commonplace booklet
James Dyson, the Brexit enthusiast who locates his factories in places other than the UK, has a new tech solution to a problem you didn’t know you had.
According to a nice piece by Ella Risbridger in the Financial Times,
The Dyson CameraJet™ Electric Toothbrush is “an entirely new way to clean your teeth.” It looks almost exactly like the old way to clean your teeth. It is, of course, a lot more expensive. It has an “integrated 100k-pixel macro lens camera powered by machine learning”. It takes 28 live images per second.
If you brush your teeth for the dentist-recommended twice-daily two minutes, that is 6,720 images a day and 2,452,800 images a year. For context, there are slightly fewer frames than this in Stanley Kubrick’s entire filmography. The proud new owner of the Dyson CameraJet™ Electric Toothbrush will have, by this time next year, created more images than The Shining, Doctor Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey put together. Every one of those images will be of the inside of their own red wet maw.
I know what you’re thinking: no, it wasn’t published on April 1.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- Medieval manuscripts are “biological time capsules” for deadly sheeppox virus
Utterly fascinating. The parchments contains the DNA of pathogens of the diseases affecting the animal from which it was made. Link
Chart of the Day
<img src=”http://memex.naughtons.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-05-at-16.40.22-1024×823.png” alt=”” width=”584″ height=”469″ class=”aligncenter size-large wp-image-42671″ /
A chart from an interesting blog post by Sameer Singh, who thinks that currrent AI is the closing phase of the computing cycle that began with the microchip in the 1970s. I’m sceptical about his ‘personal robotics’ hypothesis, but he’s spot-on about the unsustainable economics of the current approach to massive-compute AI. ‘Inference’ (i.e. what most of us use AI for) is currently a huge loss maker for the companies because of the computing load it involves.
The sustainable future is open-source LLMs running on local hardware. Two years from now, the hardware needed for local inference will be in our pockets.
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