Pictures from an Exhibition

If you’re a photographer, Arles is the place to be in July and August every year.

Quote of the Day

“The key issue that unites all the problems of AI is the choice of objectives that AI pursues, and the question of who controls these objectives. Control of these objectives is determined by control over the resources that are required for building AI — data, computational infrastructure, technical expertise, and energy. I call these resources the means of prediction.”

• Maximilian Kasy, in the foreword of his forthcoming book, The Means of Prediction

This is spot on for the story of what Britain’s Labour government is now trying to do with AI. The original socialist ambition was to gain public control of the means of production. Now Starmer is moving to hand over control of the means of prediction to a small number of US corporations.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Greenshine | Sandy River Belle

Link

Lovely tune, recorded in a bar in Cork, so audio quality suffers a bit. But it has the atmosphere of a live gig. The Big Sandy River marks the border between West Virginia and Kentucky, then flows into the Ohio, so there are hundreds of versions of the tune — in the US and beyond.

Long Read of the Day

 Academia: The Questions Are Big! It’s the Curricula That Got Small

If, like me, you work in Higher Ed and are interested in the current discourses about ‘AI’ in the classroom, then this essay by Timothy Burke is a must-read. It builds on a remarkable draft paper by T.J Kalaitzidis which argues that AI exposes what was already broken about higher education, especially in institutions that claim they’re built around the idea of “liberal arts”. If that is indeed the case (and personally I believe that it is) then any institutional or academic response which assumes that things can continue as they were before the arrival of this technology is doomed to failure.

Most of us force students to quickly commit to the course of study that a discipline offers and then, as [Kalaitzidis]] puts it, “enforce behaviorism”, e.g. to perform the signs of disciplinary commitment in advance of actually being able to reflectively consider or understand that discipline, and those signs turn out to be measurable repetitions of what the discipline knows and does, so that we can prove via tests, grades, metrics and assessments that the discipline has been learned step by step, in measured increments. Kalaitzidis writes, ““Assessments measure retention, reproduction, and formal compliance. Rubrics reward correctness within predefined bounds. Curricula scaffold students towards compliant outcomes, not transformative ones…despite overtures to critical thinking, students find success in stimulating insight, not generating it. Successful students understand the game and play it well.”

They do. Which is why they think ChatGPT and its ilk are terrific.

So many books, so little time

The Economist has a nice essay (behind its paywall) about why Ernest Hemingway “remains the most famous American novelist of his century, judged by mentions in Google’s corpus of books. His Wikipedia page also gets more views than those of his contemporaries, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck. Why?”.

Three factors, according to the Economist:

1. Nobody had written like him before.
2. His heroes attracted famous admirers — including, apparently, JFK.
3. His life had a legendary arc: married four times; drank hard; feuded with rivals; was wounded in the first world war; reported on the Omaha Beach landings in the second; ran with the bulls in Spain; and survived a plane crash in Africa.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Tom Lehrer’s Copenhagen concert

It’s long (50 minutes) and wonderful, but a good way to remember him at his peak. Forget about culture wars and enjoy the satire. Think of it as an hour well spent.

Link

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Blues

Quote of the Day

”The logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle.That is the goal towards which we are already moving, though, of course, we have no intention of getting there; just as a man who drinks a bottle of whisky a day does not actually intend to get cirrhosis of the liver.”

• George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan and the Band | Forever Young

Link

My favourite recording of the song.

Norah Jones also did a lovely cover of it at a memorial event for Steve Jobs.

Long Read of the Day

I’m 53 years old. I’m 36 in my head.

A school friend recommended this essay in The Atlantic. I remembered it when having a convivial lunch with two of my kids and one of my grandsons the other day. A couple of weeks earlier we’d had a family get together to celebrate my birthday and at lunch the kids roared with laughter when they realised that I am actually a year older than I thought I was.

Here’s how the essay opens…

This past Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said.

She is 76.

Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair. Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.”

Yet we seem to have an awfully rough go of locating ourselves in time. A friend, nearing 60, recently told me that whenever he looks in the mirror, he’s not so much unhappy with his appearance as startled by it—“as if there’s been some sort of error” were his exact words. (High-school reunions can have this same confusing effect. You look around at your lined and thickened classmates, wondering how they could have so violently capitulated to age; then you see photographs of yourself from that same event and realize: Oh.) The gulf between how old we are and how old we believe ourselves to be can often be measured in light-years—or at least a goodly number of old-fashioned Earth ones.

As one might suspect, there are studies that examine this phenomenon. (There’s a study for everything.) As one might also suspect, most of them are pretty unimaginative…

Lovely essay. Do find time for it. And thanks to Ivan for spotting it.

The machine began to waffle – and then the conductor went in for the kill

Yesterday’s Observer column…

A few weeks ago, when researching a column about the conception of “intelligence” that’s embedded in supposed “AI”, I put the following question to Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude. “Large language model [LLM] machines like you are described as forms of artificial intelligence. What is the implicit definition of intelligence in this description?”

The machine speedily provided an admirably lucid reply. “The implicit definition,” it admitted, “is remarkably narrow and reflects several problematic assumptions,” and it then went on to outline some of those. “LLMs,” it concluded, “represent an implicit belief that intelligence is fundamentally about processing and manipulating symbolic information” and “treat intelligence as pure computation that can happen in isolation from the messy realities of lived experience.”

Impressed by this, I remarked in the column that “I couldn’t have put it better myself”. Upon seeing this admission, an alert reader sniffed confirmation bias and set about conducting an experiment himself with Claude…

Read on

Tom Lehrer R.I.P

The great musical satirist has gone to the Great Cabaret in the sky. There’s a nice obit in the New York Times. But if you want to remember him at his best, just dig out videos of some of his performances. Like this one.

I loved the idea that he always had one foot in academia and the other in a more frivolous world — that of entertainment. And his explanation of why he eventually stopped writing satirical songs: ““Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

May he rest in peace.

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Fading beauty

I love the graceful way roses fade.

Quote of the Day

”An expert is someone who articulates the needs of those in power.” * Henry Kissinger

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Buckets of Rain

Link

Long Read of the Day

Wrecking Balls

For most of my time as a newspaper columnist, Tina Brown has been a ‘media star’. Coming from me, that’s normally not a compliment, but it’s true. So when she finally decided to ‘retire’ from whatever high-profile editorial job she finally had (The Daily Beast?), I felt obliged to subscribe to her Substack. This edition (from last January) which I happened upon yesterday in a search for something else, explains why. It has the kind of energy that few journalists can muster.

In Trump Season Two, deranged masculinity is all the rage. It’s as if the New Orleans truck ramming and the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion were the overture to what comes next. The former decorated Green Beret who chose to blow himself up in one of Elon Musk’s 6,000-pound electric cyber-monsters outside a Trump hotel could not have provided a more fitting pre-credit sequence for the new era. We are all playthings now in Elon’s daily Circus Maximus as he hurls his thunderbolts not just at us, but at the Brits, the Norwegians, and the Germans. “Don’t feed the troll,” warned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is now about to be out on his ass. Ditto Canada’s friendly feminist Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, dubbed by Musk “an insufferable tool,” who jumped yesterday before he was pushed.

The real punch, though, comes further down the piece:

Why are all these male human wrecking balls so driven by the need to be seen and heard in the first place? Social media has made everyone a star in their own mind, but I am tired of the futile inspection of their repetitive homicidal motives on cable news, their broken marriages, their financial failures, their normal if withdrawn interactions with their stunned neighbors. I am tired of the implication of guilt because none of us noticed another killer in our midst about to blow. I am angry that the military doesn’t care enough for the PTSD soldiers decommissioned with the adult equivalent of shaken baby syndrome.

But have any of these sullen, kamikaze psychos ever observed the loneliness and financial desperation of half the women on their street? Their lives of domestic abuse cohabiting with men like them? Women have been used to being ignored since time immemorial and yet, most of the time, they slog on, trying to keep it together for the sake of the kids…

Great stuff. Do read it.

My commonplace booklet

Et. Tu FT?

From Om Malik:

A month ago, I reported that Apple was in the final stages of acquiring the rights for F1 streaming following the success of its movie about the sport. Almost a month later, the Financial Times reported the news. As a matter of principle, I am not linking to the report.

As is the case with establishment media, they almost never credit independents, blogs, or newsletters. It is such a shame. As a loyal FT reader, I think a little less admirably of them.

Me too. He’s right about mainstream media. I’ve been a columnist and an academic all my working life. So I “have a foot in both graves” as Conor Cruise O’Brien, the Editor-in-Chief of the Observer when I was the paper’s TV Critic, once observed. But I’ve also had a blog for a very long time. Most of my journalistic friends were incredulous about my blogging — and about blogs generally. Their view was that anyone who writes without being paid for it was weird.

Linkblog

Weird things one finds on the Internet…

From AP

 A classical drive: Road rumble strips play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in UAE emirate of Fujairah

FUJAIRAH, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The humble road rumble strip, used around the world to alert drifting drivers to potential hazards or lane departures, can play Beethoven on a mountain highway in the far reaches of the United Arab Emirates.

For nearly a kilometer (a half mile) along the E84 highway — also known as the Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Road — motorists in the right-hand lane coming into the city of Fujairah can play Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony where the rubber meets the road.

Wouldn’t work on the roads near me.

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Letting sleeping dog lie

Arles, 2012.

Quote of the Day

”If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.”

• Dorothy Parker

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fleetwood Mac | Never Going Back

Link

Long Read of the Day

Encounters with Reality

This is a thoughtful review essay by Regina Munch on Christine Rosen’s book, The Extinction of Experience: : Reclaiming Our Humanity in a Digital World

When I was fourteen, my family went on a Caribbean cruise. I have always been allergic to the idea of going somewhere for the explicit purpose of “having a good time.” But that’s exactly what a cruise—at least this particular kind of cruise—is: a never-ending parade of convenient entertainment and diversion. Gorge yourself at breakfast; use the coupon in your welcome bag for a mid-morning massage; have lunch brought to your table at the pool; shop luxury brands on the promenade in the afternoon; go to a fancy dinner and a comedy show and max out that bar access card. On the days you actually alight on land, you’re met with a theme park version of Cozumel or San Juan, rigorously patrolled tourist markets selling souvenirs or even the cruise line’s private island devoted entirely to passengers’ seamless pleasure. (Royal Caribbean’s is called Perfect Day at CocoCay. To me, that feels like a threat—have a perfect day, or else.)

It’s all too easy, I remember thinking as I downed yet one more Shirley Temple. I couldn’t define it at the time, but I had the persistent feeling that I was being lied to. Surely such a quantity and variety of food doesn’t materialize from nothing; it’s prepared and served by people whose labor is carefully hidden from me, presumably because it would bum me out if it weren’t. One day, we disembarked in Mexico and saw police officers with machine guns guarding the limits of the tourist area. Something was being kept out—or in.

I was brought back to that week as I read Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, which evaluates the effects that apps, algorithms, social media, devices and other technologies have had on the way we encounter the world and relate to each other. Rosen claims that we have replaced true experiences—real encounters with the world—with simulations and cheap imitations (which I’ll refer to here as “experiences” for ease)…

I was drawn to this because of an aphorism that’s been running round my head for decades — “Technology is the art of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” For years I wrongly attributed it to the philosopher Martin Heidegger until Seb Schmoller (Whom God Preserve) pointed out that it came from Max Frisch in his book Homo Faber.

Munch doesn’t entirely buy Rosen’s argument, which makes the essay more interesting than an ordinary book review.

Hope you enjoy it.

So many books, so little time

David Cleevely is an entrepreneur whom I know and admire but until now I never thought of him as an author. And then, just when we were away in France, he springs this on us: a really interesting book about the accidental encounters out of which great ideas and innovations come. By definition these accidents cannot be planned or anticipated, but that doesn’t mean that we simply have to sit around and hope that they will happen. David’s big idea — that it is possible to design spaces where such encounters can happen, and environments which increase the chances that, when they do, they lead to meaningful outcomes.

I’ve watched him in action for many years, during which he has done more than anyone else I know to create those kinds of environments in and around Cambridge. (He’s the founder of, among other things, the Cambridge Network and the Centre for Science and Policy in the University.) His book is essentially a distillation of what he’s learned over those decades.

Reading it is a bit of a revelation. I’ve always known that he can “talk the hind legs off a donkey” (as we say in Ireland); but nobody told me that he also writes well.

My commonplace booklet

“We say that we ‘conduct’ a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus a genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall into conversation, or even that we become involved in it. The way one word follows another, with the conversation taking its own twists and reaching its own conclusion, may well be conducted in some way, but the partners conversing are far less the leaders of it than the led. No one knows in advance what will “come out” of a conversation… it allows something to ‘emerge’ which henceforth exists.”

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall.

Which is why face-to-face conversations are so important.

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Cloistered

Somewhere in France (possibly Cluny), 2012

Quote of the Day

”I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Christine McVie | Songbird

Link

Long Read of the Day

Trump’s Gilded Design Style May Be Gaudy, But Don’t Call it ‘Rococo’

Nice Bloomberg column by Feargus O’Sullivan trying to set the artistic record straight.

When President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, he wasted little time redecorating. The design style of his opulent Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, was ported to the Oval Office: Gilded figurines, plump cherubs and decorative appliques were liberally applied to walls and other surfaces in the presidential workspace.

As with the tariffs and travel bans, the renovations of the second term have been more aggressive than those seen during the first. One term used repeatedly to describe this excess of gilt and glitter is Rococo — an elaborate design style associated with pre-revolutionary France. In the New York Times, Emily Keegin called the new Oval Office a “gilded rococo hellscape,” while Kate Wagner of the blog McMansion Hell dubbed the presidential look “Regional Car Dealership Rococo.” The R word — sometimes uppercased, sometimes not — has also been invoked to describe Trumpian decor in the Washington Post, the LA Times and Vanity Fair.

O’Sullivan is (rightly) pissed off by the way a president with a taste for gold-painted home furnishings prompts clueless media to “malign the good name” of a sophisticated, exuberant and frequently misunderstood European design style.

I particularly liked his comment about the new-look Oval Office “where the row of gold urns along the mantel looks less like a trove of priceless antiques than a set of beauty pageant trophies lined up for sale on eBay.”

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

An AI tool that’s genuinely useful

Yesterday’s Observer column on operating in a world where information is not just overabundant but scattered, disorganised and contextually disconnected.

I am writing this column in a text editor on my laptop. I also have a browser (Firefox) running that has – pauses to count – 18 tabs open. Each one represents a webpage containing information that I searched for when planning the column: websites, YouTube videos, a list of relevant podcasts to which I should have listened, pdfs of relevant reports, notes that I’ve made when reading through the sources I’ve consulted, lists of links that are conceivably relevant – etc, etc.

And, somehow, I have to weave a coherent narrative from all the stuff in those tabs. Cue violins?

Save your sympathy: I’m just an ordinary Joe facing what confronts millions of “knowledge workers” every day. As Steven Johnson, one of the world’s best science writers, puts it: “You find yourself in these situations where the job you were trying to do involves synthesising information that is scattered across 15 open tabs and a bunch of documents sitting on your drive, and, you know, wherever that is, all over the place.

We’re long past “information overload” and have moved onto something much worse: a phase of cognitive fragmentation, when information is overabundant — and also scattered, disorganised and disconnected, making it difficult to make sense of what’s happening.

Read on

Chart of the Day

Sobering, ne c’est pas? Helps to explain US isolationism, maybe. Link

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  How India became a french fry superpower And no, I did not make that up. Link

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Deadwood

On the Wimpole Estate in Cambridgeshire with the spectacular folly in the distance.

Quote of the Day

“While money can’t buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart| Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622: I. Allegro (Live)

Link

One of the first LPs I bought as a student.

Long Read of the Day

 Guest, Host, Ghost: A Dinner Party in Kyiv

Memorable meditation by Timothy Snyder on what the war in Ukraine means (or should be understood to mean) for the rest of us.

Excerpt:

The overloaded table was lit by candles. As the flames moved this way and that, I discerned, one at a time, the unframed canvases that climbed the high walls of the small room. My hostess was wearing a dress that resembled one in a portrait; my host was in uniform. The labor of war brings together people who would otherwise never meet. The apartment was full of a love that was both risky and mature. In candlelight the lip-reading that accompanies conversation in another language is harder. We had started in English and switched to Ukrainian, in part so that I could hear from a soldier back from the front.

I will call him Serhyi, since that was his name. He had been on active duty since the first Russian invasion, in 2014. He had been in the Donetsk airport and in Debaltsevo, two of the most desperate battles of that initial stage of the war. Since the full-scale invasion of 2022, he had led special operations, including rescue missions. My host asked him to answer my questions. Serhyi spoke matter-of-factly, in an even tone, about acts of stunning physical courage, about the center of the largest war the world has seen since 1945. He was modest. He was doing the things he had to do, and that night one of those things was to talk to me…

Sergei was killed the following week.

Serhyi was married and had children. He had comrades and friends. This is their loss. He had a country that he served. This is Ukraine’s loss. In another sense, though, his death is a loss for those of us who do not notice. By resisting, Ukrainians have helped to make the world safer. They have held off a larger war in Europe. They have deterred China from adventures in the Pacific. They have made it less likely that other countries will develop nuclear weapons. They have defended what remains of a world order based upon law…

Do read it.

My commonplace booklet

The truth about Tesla

Tesla makes money by making and selling cars, right? A splendid piece of investigative journalism by Sky News tells a more nuanced story. Turns out that,

Revenue from state subsidies accounted for at least 38% of Tesla’s profits of $7.1bn in 2024 as the company banked $2.8bn from trading “regulatory credits”, a state-level subsidy paid to encourage production of electric vehicles.

Accounts for the first quarter of this year show Tesla earned $595m from regulatory credits – almost 50% more than its net earnings of $409m – suggesting that without the subsidy Tesla would be operating in the red.

Where do these ‘regulatory credits’ come from?

In America, regulatory credits are an incentive intended to encourage car manufacturers to meet targets for EV production.

Several states, led by California, use them to enforce a “zero-emission vehicles mandate”, under which manufacturers are required to produce a certain proportion of EVs as part of their overall output.

Because Tesla only makes electric vehicles, it earns credits at no cost and profits from selling them to manufacturers producing petrol and diesel vehicles, which need them to meet any shortfall against state targets. 

Tesla’s total revenues in 2024 were $98bn, of which automotive sales made up $72bn.

And of course half of those cars were made in China. Wonder how that plays with Trump’s tariff obsessions.

Feedback

My puzzlement about the young woman in Wednesday’s photograph prompted some readers to rescue me from my ignorance. Diane Coyle, from whom nothing is hidden, was first off the blocks: “My guess,” she wrote, “would be the girl was recreating a scene from a manga or anime!”

And then, hot on her heels, came Marco Pagni.

“No doubt this is Frieren!”, he wrote. “This lovely manga currently on Netflix features a pretty innovative scenario about friendships and the passage of time. Worth watching…”

So of course, I dug it out. And now I wished I had stopped and spoken to the young woman and her friend. Sigh.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Tourism, Instagram-style

Spotted outside Trinity College, Cambridge, yesterday. The young woman had just been photographed against the background of Newton’s tree and the windows of his room. God knows why. I wasn’t quick enough to grab that shot, but here she is inspecting the results on her partner’s phone.

Quote of the Day

”It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.”

• Henry Kissinger

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chuck Berry | Maybellene

Link

Alex Abramovich has a nice essay about it on the LRB blog.

Long Read of the Day

 The enshittification of American hegemony

Regular readers will know that I have a lot of time for Henry Farrell who is one of the sharpest observers of what’s going on in the world that I am paid to monitor. This essay came out yesterday and I was immediately struck by its title, as I hope you will be.

Here’s the core argument:

Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the … platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too. People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. … For decades, America’s allies accepted US control of these systems, because they believed in the American commitment to a “rules-based international order.” They can’t persuade themselves of that any longer. … So what is an ally to do? Like the individual consumers who are trapped by Google Search or Facebook as the core product deteriorates, many are still learning just how hard it is to exit the network…

Musk’s chatbot praises Hitler and then admits it’s been hoaxed

My Observer comment piece from Sunday’s edition.

The deaths by drowning on 4 July of 27 attendees at an all-girls Christian summer camp in Texas gave rise to a mysterious spat on X. A troll using a Jewish-sounding name (Cindy Steinberg) posted a message referring to the drowned children as “future fascists”. To this Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot responded, describing the troll as “a radical leftist … gleefully celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids”, and going on to pose a rhetorical question: “How to deal with such vile anti-white hate? Answer: Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every time.”

How did a chatbot wander into such strange territory? As it happens, Grok has been there for a while – expressing praise for Hitler, for example, and even referring to itself as “MechaHitler”; calling the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk a “fucking traitor”, and obsessing over “white genocide in South Africa”.

What’s distinctive about Grok? Two things: it’s owned by Elon Musk; and it’s the only large language model (LLM) with its own social media account – which means that its aberrant behaviour is more widely noticed than the foibles of Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Deepseek et al…

Do read the whole piece

My commonplace booklet

Kerb charging

Having an EV is all very well if you are able to charge it at home. But many city-dwellers don’t have that option, and street-charging stations are clumsy and create obstacles for pedestrians.

So this German idea by Rheinmetall GMBH is neat: the charger becomes part of the kerb.

One panel is a basic interface with digital display, LED lights and a wireless NFC interface. A charging socket is concealed under a round stainless steel cap.

That cap unlocks once an EV owner is logged in via a QR code, allowing them to attach their car using a short cable to the waterproof plug. The charger is waterproof, space-saving – and modular for easy repair. And it is proving hugely popular.

Link

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Monday 14 July, 2025

Jeep lite

If you’re a recovering petrolhead (like me) one of the (many) pleasures of being in France is the number of beautifully-restored iconic vehicles one comes across. We found this one outside a petrol station in the Rhone alps on our way homewards from Provence.

It’s reminiscent of the 2CV generation of minimalist vehicles with no frills and easy repairability which were cheap to run and mostly designed for the warm and Sunny south.

Absolutely minimal interior. Such vehicles would, I guess, be illegal today; but they are a reminder of more innocent days.

Quote of the Day

”If, at the close of business each evening, I myself can understand what I’ve written, I feel the day hasn’t been totally wasted.”

• S.J. Perelman Me too.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart| Trio in E-flat major for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano, K. 498, “Kegelstatt”, 1. Andante

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The law of unintended consequences strikes again

The economist Tim Harford is one of my favourite FT writers, and this week’s column (Gift article) by him about how hard it seems to be for governments to do joined-up thinking is a pleasurable must-read.

Here’s how it begins:

Economists love to tell each other stories about perverse incentives. The “cobra effect” is a favourite. It describes an attempt by the British Raj to rid Delhi of its cobras by paying a bounty for each cobra skin, thus encouraging a thriving cobra-farming industry. The cobra story is probably an urban myth — or a policy wonk’s version of one — but there is more evidence of a very similar scheme for Hanoi’s rats in the early 1900s. Rat tails brought a bounty from the colonial government, and soon enough the city was crawling with tailless rats who had had their valuable tails clipped before being released to breed.

It’s easy to dismiss such policy blunders as a thing of the past, but the Straits Times and Climate Home News recently reported on a striking scheme in Melaka, Malaysia, where locals were selling cooking oil that would eventually be used to supply European producers of aviation fuel. The underlying idea of turning a waste product, used cooking oil, into something that can be blended into aviation fuel seems as appealing as getting the cobras out of Delhi. Cooking oil starts tasting bad after being used for frying three to five times, but as an input to aviation fuel, used oil is perfectly good.

At this point two intriguing forces intersect: European governments are demanding that airlines use more biofuels from sustainable sources — used cooking oil being one — while the Malaysian government subsidises cooking oil…

You can perhaps guess what comes next. Read on to check!

Cloudflare to AI web crawlers: pay for content or be blocked

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The big news of the month is that a large tech company has declared war on the AI industry. On 1 July, Cloudflare, a leading cybersecurity and content delivery network (CDN) provider, through whose servers about a fifth of all internet traffic passes, declared “content independence day”. From that day onwards, AI web crawlers – the bots that tech companies use to scrape online content – will not be able to access sites running on Cloudflare’s servers without paying compensation to the owners of those sites.

Why is this a big deal? Several reasons…

Read on

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The Reader

I love the way this chap was able to block out the chaos and bustle of a busy railway station.

Quote of the Day

”Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.”

• Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ludovico Einaudi | Maria Callas

Link

Long Read of the Day

Attention is All You Need

As someone who wishes that Neal Postman were still around and writing about what social media is doing to society, I was thrilled to see that Kevin Munger has taken a Postman-like approach to analysing the significance of the decline in reading in younger generations. What I like about the essay is the way it tries to break away from the ‘sociology of the last five minutes’ that characterises much of the public discourse of this question.

Sample:

We need to appreciate that we don’t have any ground to stand on when it comes to understanding humanity and our relationship to media technology. This is Flusser’s idea of groundlessness, the fact that we are no longer grounded as a civilization because of our changing media technology. We have no stable point from which to evaluate how we experience the world and how other humans in different societies with different mixtures of media technologies appreciate the world.

This means that it’s impossible to make evaluations of whether a change in media technology (or, if you like, progress in media technology) is going to have good or bad effects on us. What we can say is that it will change us. It will change who and what we are. Lacking a stable point to evaluate this from either a positivist descriptive angle or through a normative angle of how humans should be, we don’t have any ability to evaluate whether a given change is good or bad. It is simply a change. It re-writes the rules of good and bad…

Worth your time.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  Archaeologists Just Pulled Pieces Of The Lighthouse Of Alexandria Out Of The Mediterranean Sea Link

The Lighthouse of Alexandria, considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was built during the third century B.C.E. in the early years of the reign of Ptolemy I of Egypt, after he declared himself pharaoh.

Sitting on the island of Pharos near Alexandria’s harbor on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, the lighthouse was one of the tallest man-made structures on Earth, standing at over 300 feet tall. Considered a technological marvel at the time of its construction, the lighthouse proceeded to stand tall for the next 1,600 years.

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On reflection…

Seen yesterday in a small town in Burgundy.

______________________________ 

Quote of the Day

”That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.”

• Dorothy Parker

__________________ 

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Chorus Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme from Cantata BWV 140

Link

“Wake up, the voice calls us”. I keep wanting to say this to Keir Starmer.

_____________________ 

Long Read of the Day

Emerson, AI, and The Force

I’ve been reading Neal Stephenson ever since, many years ago, I came on “In the Beginning was the Command Line”, his wonderful essay on computer operating systems. Recently he was invited to give a talk at a conference organised by the Laude Institute in San Francisco, and afterwards tidied up his script into this thoughtful essay on AI and education.

Here’s how it opens:

The most relevant aspect of my work to the theme of this meeting was my novel The Diamond Age, which was published about thirty years ago. At the beginning of this book we see a conversation between Lord Finkle-McGraw, who is an Equity Lord in a futuristic neo-Victorian society, and John Hackworth, an engineer who works in one of his companies.

Finkle-McGraw is a classic founder. He didn’t come from a privileged background, except insofar as having a stable family and a decent basic education confers privilege. But when he was young he was brilliant, ambitious, hard-working, and had a vision. He built that into something valuable and as a result became rich and powerful. As so often happens, he used his money to make life good for his children by sending them to the right schools, connecting them to the right people, and so on.

He wasn’t entirely happy with the results. His kids didn’t end up having the traits that had made him successful. He suspects it’s because they didn’t have to work hard and overcome obstacles. Now he has a granddaughter. He knows that the parents are going to raise this girl in the same way, with the same results. He can’t interfere in a heavy-handed way. But the parents can’t possibly object if he gives his granddaughter an educational book. So he commissions Hackworth to make the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, an interactive book that will adapt as the user grows and learns. This book is powered by molecular nanotechnology, but any present-day reader will immediately recognize it as an AI system.

As the plot unfolds, three copies of the Primer are made and bestowed on girls from very different backgrounds. In two cases the result is a sort of fizzle. The Primer works as it’s supposed to for a while, but these girls lose interest and set it aside. The third copy falls into the hands of a girl from an abusive and underprivileged background, and it ends up giving her close to superhuman abilities.

Thirty years on, I think I have enough distance on this to grade my performance…

Do read on. It’s worth it. And if you’re tempted to open ‘In the Beginning was the Command line’, then set aside some time because you’ll be hooked. And if you’re really pushed for time, go to the section of the Hole Hawg. You’ll find it on page 36 onwards.

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