Wednesday 12 July, 2023

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Le Penseur

Well, not quite what Rodin had in mind, but what the hell.

Quote of the Day

“What makes the war on terror different from other wars is that victory has never been based on achieving a positive outcome; the goal has been to prevent a negative one. In this war, victory doesn’t come when you destroy your adversary’s army or seize its capital. It occurs when something does not happen. How, then, do you declare victory? How do you prove a negative? “

  • Eliot Ackerman, write in Foreign Affairs in his reflections on being a CIA agent.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

MonaLisa Twins | Mercedes Benz | (Janis Joplin Cover)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Demographics drive history

That, at any rate, is my reading of this absorbing essay by Yi Fuxian of Project Syndicate.

The deterioration in US-China relations is ultimately due to the bilateral trade imbalance and to US frustration with Chinese politics. Both can be traced back to China’s one-child policy, which was in place from 1980 to 2016.

When Western leaders welcomed China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, most assumed that they were creating the conditions for eventual democratization. A growing Chinese middle class, they assumed, would demand greater accountability from the government, ultimately creating so much pressure that the autocrats would step aside and allow for a democratic transition. This political fantasy underpinned the Sino-American relationship for decades.

But it wasn’t to be. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has been regressing on all fronts, reasserting more top-down control over the economy and tightening censorship and other forms of social and political control. It has been led down this path by the legacy of the one-child policy, which fundamentally reshaped the country’s demographics and economy…

I learned a lot from this, which is why I think it’s worth your attention. It also helps to explain why we in the West have so often been wrong about China.

The best and worst case scenarios for sea level rise

Bad news for future generations (and indeed some current ones too) in this Guardian ‘explainer’.

Part of the problem is the that even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases immediately – which it will not – sea levels would continue to rise. Even in the best-case scenario, it’s too late to hold back the ocean.

The reason for this is not widely known, outside the science community, but is crucial. The systems causing sea level rise – specifically, the thermal expansion of the ocean and the melting of glaciers and ice sheets due to global heating – have a centuries-long time lag.

My commonplace booklet

Musée des Beaux Arts

WH Auden, 1938.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I’ve always loved this poem. What brought it to mind today was the contrast between Western media’s obsession with the Titan submersible at the same time that they were paying little attention to the sinking of the migrant boat off the coast of Greece.

Errata

Contrary to my claim in Monday’s edition that Ed Fredkin, the great computer scientist, had died at the age of ’1988’, he was in fact a mere 88 years of age. Apologies to all, and thanks to the readers who tactfully pointed this out.

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 ay 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Monday June 10, 2023

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Provence, sans eau

Normally, this fountain provides endless amusement for kids on a hot day. But not at the moment: Provence, like many other places around the world, is short of water.

Quote of the Day

A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.”

  • Kevin Kelly

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Telegraph Road | Dijon 2013

Link

Long Read of the Day

‘Why I might have done what I did’: conversations with Ireland’s most notorious murderer.

Link

Riveting. And see below for a review of the book.

Edward Fredkin, RIP

A remarkable computer scientist has passed away at the age of 88. He had an astonishing life and career which is nicely chronicled in a very good NYT obit. It includes this remarkable photograph of four central figures in the history of computing.

Books, etc.

Killer in a cravat

Nice review by Ruth Dudley Edwards of Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder, a biography of a double murderer who was once at the centre of a political scandal in 1980s Ireland.

‘And so it was that, on the evening of August 4, 1982,’ writes Mark O’Connell halfway through this gripping portrait of double killer Malcolm Macarthur, ‘the Irish government’s most senior legal official had his housekeeper prepare the spare room for his friend, a man who had just days previously murdered two strangers, and who had that very evening botched an armed robbery at the home of an acquaintance.’

The police arrested Macarthur at the flat nine days later. The morning after, the innocent and bewildered attorney general, Patrick Connolly, having cleared it with the police and Charles Haughey, the Taoiseach, set off for a long-planned holiday in New York. The story had broken by the time he arrived. Ireland was in uproar and Connolly was hounded by reporters (the New York Post would run the headline ‘Irish Biggie Flees Here After Slay Scandal’). Haughey summoned him back to Dublin, where he resigned from the tottering government. Haughey described it as ‘a bizarre happening, an unprecedented situation, a grotesque situation, an almost unbelievable mischance’. Haughey’s merciless enemy Conor Cruise O’Brien shuffled his adjectives to create the acronym by which the murders are still known: GUBU.

Hmmm… Interesting. I just might have to buy the book.

If Threads is the final nail in Twitter’s coffin, where will the hacks and politicos go?

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

the hucksters are still staying away. As of February this year, more than half of Twitter’s leading 1,000 advertisers before the acquisition had stopped advertising on the platform. And, according to the New York Times, Twitter’s US advertising revenue for the five weeks from 1 April to the first week of May was $88m, which is 59% lower than a year earlier. All of which makes it tempting to interpret what’s happening to Twitter as the beginning of a death spiral.

Coupled to this is the fact that increasing chaos on the platform has led to an exodus to a range of services such as Mastodon, Reddit, Discord, LinkedIn, Substack’s Notes and the invite-only Bluesky Social, a Twitter-like platform developed by Jack Dorsey (a co-founder of Twitter) – and, from last week, Instagram Threads, courtesy of Meta. It goes without saying that all these alternatives have pros and cons: all have some Twitter-like features, but none of them looks to me like a proper replacement for it. And Meta’s product comes with the company’s usual comprehensive surveillance.

In that respect, the most significant thing about the exodus is that there is one particular class of user who doesn’t seem to have joined it – professional journalists and politicians, for whom Twitter seems to remain an absolutely must-have service…

Do read the entire piece.

Dangerous metaphors

I’m fascinated by metaphors and often use them as a way of introducing unfamiliar ideas to an audience. But they can sometimes be both convincing and dangerously misleading, as this example from the Johnson column in The Economist nicely illustrates.

Some metaphors are more persuasive—and more dangerous. Take the metaphor of a “deal”. Typically, if a deal is rejected, the status quo ante obtains, notes Anand Menon of King’s College London. Brexiteers believe that, to get a better “deal”, Britain should just stay cool and be willing to walk away. “No deal is better than a bad deal,” some claim.

That would be true if Brexit were like buying a second-hand car. You size up the vehicle, hoping not to spend all of the £5,000 in your pocket. But the dealer wants the lot. You walk away; he still has his car, you still have your £5,000. But this is not the case with a no-deal Brexit. Supply lines, trade links and more would be disturbed. You don’t keep the £5,000. You end up with less—and no car. Which, metaphorically speaking, is what has happened to the UK.

My commonplace booklet

On Friday I reported on my jaundiced reaction to Meta’s Twitter-clone, Threads.

Jason Gilbert had a more eloquent reaction. Using Threads was, he said, “Like a $19 turkey sandwich at an airport”.

Warming to the topic, he says…

  • Threads feels like when a local restaurant you enjoy opens a location in an airport.
  • It feels like a Twitter alternative you would order from Brookstone.
  • It feels like if an entire social network was those posts that tell you what successful entrepreneurs do before 6AM.
  • It feels like watching a Powerpoint from the Brand Research team where they tell you that Pop Tarts is crushing it on social.
  • It feels like Casual Friday on LinkedIn.

On the other hand…

My friend Charles Arthur, who’s one of the most perceptive tech critics I know, had a different reaction.

On Wednesday night UK time, working late, I installed the Threads app on my phone, found it had signed in to my personal Instagram account, and went to bed. At 7am on Thursday morning, when the Do Not Disturb setting turned off automatically, my Apple Watch started making occasional BOINGG noises. Usually those mean some sort of news story, so I dozed on. But the noises kept on coming, and eventually I thought something worth investigating must be happening. Turned out that Threads was sending a notification to my Watch every time someone started following me. And they were doing so with a surprising regularity and intensity.

So I opened the app in my befuddled state and took a look at what was going on. And there I saw something that I hadn’t seen for absolutely ages; for years and years, in fact. I scrolled and scrolled, and there was one emotion on show: people were happy. They were making jokes, laughing in text. The screen was full of joy.

His view is that because Instagram has a billion users, and Threads is hooked into that, its arrival means that Twitter is now in terminal trouble.

Here’s how Charles sums it up:

It was like that all over the place. People were delighted to have somewhere new to use where everyone already seemed to be there. Apparently there were 30 million signups within the first few hours, and by the end of its first day there were 95 million posts. That’s a lot of happiness. Because Threads seems, despite its rudimentary state (no bookmarking, strange URL structure, no content search, algorithm-only timeline), to have all the things people want from Twitter, but without, well, being Twitter.

What it comes down to, I suppose, is that some people like social media and some can’t abide it. And I’m in the latter camp.

Linkblog

Some things I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

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 ay 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Friday 7 July, 2023

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Two horses and fancy upholstery

My favourite 2CV adaptation turned up at the Boules court the other day. It’s such a lovely piece of work. Note the wicker picnic-box on the rear.

Quote of the Day

”When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

  • Charles Goodhart

Often called “Goodhart’s Law” ever since he articulated it in 1975.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Violin Concerto No. 2 in E Major, BWV 1042 – III. Allegro

Link

Short but very sweet.

Long Read of the Day

Untangling quantum entanglement

This essay by philosopher Huw Price and physicist Ken Wharton is the most startling thing I’ve read in a while. It’s about one of the strangest aspects of quantum mechanics, the study of the sub-atomic world — in which most of what we have learned in the ‘real’ world of billiard-balls, planets and gravity and Newton’s Laws, doesn’t seem to apply.

And entanglement is at the heart of the weirdness. Wikipedia describes it as

“the phenomenon that occurs when a group of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in a way such that the quantum state of each particle of the group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, including when the particles are separated by a large distance.”

In their essay, Price and Wharton suggest a new way of thinking about it. Here’s how they open the batting:

Almost a century ago, physics produced a problem child, astonishingly successful yet profoundly puzzling. Now, just in time for its 100th birthday, we think we’ve found a simple diagnosis of its central eccentricity.

This weird wunderkind was ‘quantum mechanics’ (QM), a new theory of how matter and light behave at the submicroscopic level. Through the 1920s, QM’s components were assembled by physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Alongside Albert Einstein’s relativity theory, it became one of the two great pillars of modern physics.

The pioneers of QM realised that the new world they had discovered was very strange indeed, compared with the classical (pre-quantum) physics they had all learned at school. These days, this strangeness is familiar to physicists, and increasingly useful for technologies such as quantum computing.

The strangeness has a name – it’s called entanglement – but it is still poorly understood. Why does the quantum world behave this strange way? We think we’ve solved a central piece of this puzzle.

Read on and wonder.

Fintan O’Toole on RTE’s slow-rolling crisis.

RTE is Ireland’s national broadcaster and it’s now embroiled in an epic crisis because of revelations about its chaotic management, casual ethics and undercover payments to a leading broadcasting celebrity named Ryan Tubridy. The trigger point for the crisis was the discovery of undercover payments made to Tubridy during the Covid lockdown to compensate him for reductions in his non-broadcasting income caused by the pandemic.

Since public money is involved, the Republic’s legislators opened hearings on the matter, which meant that from Day One my fellow-citizens have been enthralled (and increasingly enraged) by daily revelations about the managerial chaos, ineptitude and arrogance that prevailed in the country’s leading media organisation.

From the outset, though, Tubridy maintained an air of high-minded detachment. All of those non-disclosed payments had been negotiated by his agent, Noel Kelly, disclosed to the revenue authorities, and the tax due on them had been duly paid. “Nothing to see here: any questions see my agent” was the general tenor of his responses.

This pose has exasperated Fintan O’Toole, Ireland’s leading opinion columnist, and he penned a terrific column about it the other day. Like most of his stuff it is hidden behind the Irish Times’s paywall, but since I pay through the nose for a subscription I think it’s time some of his high-octane indignation got a wider airing. So here goes…

He starts with a story about Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s greatest poet since Yeats.

In 1981, Seamus Heaney wrote to his American agent, Selma Warner, about the fees she was demanding for readings by him on US campuses. He was angry because they were too high.

Heaney was not yet quite as famous as he would become, but his reputation was already very considerable and he was a mesmerising performer of his own work. Warner had started to ask for $1,000 for a reading – the equivalent of about $3,300 today.

Heaney’s complaint was that this was too much money: “I do not wish to be a $1,000 speaker. Apart from my moral scruples about whether any speaker or reader is worth anything like that, I do not wish to become a freak among my poet friends, or to press the budgets of departments of literature at a time when the money for education is drying up in the United States.”

Which later brings him to Tubridy:

Let’s not succumb to “my agent made me do it” stories. Agents, however colourful and assertive, are intermediaries: these deals were done between RTÉ and Tubridy.

It was Tubridy’s job to have the “moral scruples”. Kelly is not his Father Confessor – he’s his attack dog. It is always up to the conscience of the client as to whether the dog should be called off before he bites off any particular pound of flesh.

I was the Observer’s TV Critic for nine years, and in that time got to know the British TV industry quite well. I wasn’t much impressed by it. It was fantastically complacent, male-dominated, over-compensated, sexist and unbelievably indulgent to its senior (male) executives. The stories coming out of RTE at the moment bring back memories of those stirring times.

Books, etc.

Revenge of the Librarians

This came as a surprise present from a dear friend the other day. Tom Gauld is a cartoonist and illustrator whose work is regularly published in the The Guardian, The New Yorker and New Scientist. What’s lovely about it is that he has a penetratingly wry insight into the world of writers and would-be writers, e.g.

My commonplace booklet

  • Fiat tries to compete with the Vespa Fiat has launched a tiny new EV that supposedly can be driven by 14-year-olds — in Italy at least according to this link. That’s because it has a top speed of only 28mph. It has a small 5.4kWh battery and a range of 47 miles. Neat idea, but somehow I can’t see many teenagers thinking it’d be as cool as a Vespa. Especially if the said scooter were an EV too.
  • Meta launches Threads — its supposed alternative to Twitter. On the grounds that columnists should do these things so others don’t have to suffer, I downloaded the app when it first appeared on Thursday morning. Then discovered that in order to access it I needed to open Instagram, which I’ve only used a few times years ago and for which I’d mislaid my password. So went through the usual reset-my-password nonsense and discovered that Instagram is just as nauseating as I remembered, but eventually got through to Threads. It’s kind-of like Twitter, but has the usual Facebook/Meta surveillance practices, and so, after a cursory inspection of naff Threads postings, deleted it. I enjoyed the subliminal wit in Jack Dorsey’s comment on it, though: “All your Threads are belong to us”!

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 ay 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Wednesday 5 July, 2023

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On the beach

Benedict Evans (see Long Read below) used Midjourney to create this image in response to the prompt “A photograph of advertising people discussing creativity on stage in a panel on a beach at Cannes Lions.”

Reflecting on it, Ben observes:

It’s matched the pattern almost perfectly – that looks like the beach at Cannes, these people are dressed like advertising people, and they even have the right haircuts. But it doesn’t know anything, and so it doesn’t know that people never have three legs, only that it’s unlikely. This isn’t ‘lying’ or ‘making things up’ – it’s matching a pattern, imperfectly.

Quote of the Day

”Cemeteries are full of indispensable men.”

  • Charles de Gaulle

They sure are.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” with Prince, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Steve Winwood

Link

Thanks to Keith Devlin (Whom God Preserve) for suggesting it.

Long Read of the Day

 AI and the automation of work

Benedict Evans’s characteristically perceptive reflections on how ‘Generative AI’ will change the employment landscape over the longer term. What I love about his essays is his knack for finding images and metaphors which elegantly illuminate a particular point.

At one stage in the essay, for example, he’s making a point that I’ve often tried to make myself in lectures about how revolutionary spreadsheet software was when it first appeared in the late 1970s. But he does it with a still from a 1960 film The Apartment. It shows Jack Lemmon (though Ben calls him ‘Lemon’) as an insurance clerk using a mechanical calculating machine in a huge open-plan office populated by other clerks doing exactly the same thing. Here’s Ben’s payoff:

Everyone in that shot is a cell in a spreadsheet, and the whole building is a spreadsheet. Once a week someone on the top floor presses F9 and they recalculate. But they already had computers, and in 1965 or 1970 they bought a mainframe, and scrapped all the adding machines. Did white collar employment collapse? Or, as IBM advertised, did a computer give you 150 extra engineers? 25 years later, what did the PC revolution, and the accounting department in a box, do to accounting?

Enjoyable, informative and worth reading. Go to it.

Doc Searls: Moving on 

Many moons ago Doc Searls and Dave Winer, two of the Wise Elders of the Net, were Berkman Fellows at Harvard, and one of the innovative things they did was to persuade the Center to host blogs. Doc moved his blog onto the server. I think that Dave continued to use his own Scripting.com, but he may also have blogged on the Berkman site for a while. Now, though, Harvard is shutting down the server and this was Doc’s final post on it. I’m looking forward to seeing where he’ll host it from now on.

The tale of two ships

Titan and the Adriana

One of the more nauseating aspects of mainstream media in the last few weeks has been the contrast between the obsessive interest in the fate of a five-person submersible containing five people with more money than sense, and the relative lack of interest in a boat criminally overloaded with migrants which, despite being overseen by a Greek coastguard ship, capsized with the loss of 600 people. One conventional apologia for the twisted news-values involved is that the Titan story had a ticking-time-bomb aspect (when would they run out of oxygen?), whereas the Greek tragedy was ‘just one of those disasters that had already happened’.

But had it not also embodied an implicit valuation that one super-rich life is effectively equivalent to 120 migrant lives?

My commonplace booklet

On December 5, 2022, Tortoise Media (of which I am a proud member) published a podcast by Paul Caruana Galizia setting out claims of serious sexual misconduct by Crispin Odey, founder and owner of one of the UK’s most successful hedge funds. The response? Zilch. A few weeks later Odey was lauded at a hedge-fund knees-up during which his company was named the best-performing fund of the year (with gains of 101% over the year). In other words, if you had invested your fortune in his fund, then he had doubled it for you in a year.

But then Mr Galizia teamed up with two remarkable investigative reporters on the Financial Times (Madison Marriage and Antonia Cundy) and the trio did more serious digging, eventually coming up with a story published in the FT on 8 June – “How Crispin Odey evaded sexual assault allegations for decades”. The reporters had found thirteen women who had experienced harassment and abuse at the hands of the founder and 75% owner of the hedge fund.

Only then did the Odey empire start to unravel. Three big banks announced that they would no longer co-operate with the fund, investors stampeded to get their money back and in the end the remaining partners expelled Odey from his creature.

On the face of it, this looks gratifying: evil is detected, exposed and punished. But an awkward question remains: given that Odey’s predilections were well known both inside and outside his company, and he had faced — and been acquitted after — a criminal case about his behaviour some time earlier, why did nothing happen even after Tortoise broke the story in the first place?

This is the question that Paul Caruna Galizia has now told in a fascinating podcast the other day. It’s basically a story of how serious money, polite society and the law enabled one of the UK’s most successful and powerful hedge funders, amid mounting allegations of sexual harassment and assault over many decades, to prosper for years. The only heroines in the story are the women he abused — and the journalists who did the digging needed to make it impossible for the establishment to ignore.

 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 ay 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Monday July 3, 2023

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The Conversation

Quote of the Day

“The war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.”

  • Roland Barthes

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tuba Skinny | Jubilee Stomp | Royal Street

Link

Long Read of the Day

How to interact intelligently with a Large Language Model

As recounted by Terence Tao on his blog.

Terence Tao is a world-class mathematician. (He won the Fields medal — math’s equivalent of a Nobel prize — in 2006. He also serves on the US President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology.) This blog post is a fascinating example of how one might make good use of a resource like CPT-4.

Here’s the process he followed.

  1. First he asked GPT-4 to answer the questions of how might AI technology and its successors contribute to human flourishing, and how might we as society best guide the technology to achieve maximal benefits for humanity – and then to generate an essay that he might write on this topic.
  2. While the machine was thinking, he wrote the first draft of the article himself.
  3. Then he gave GPT-4 his essay and asked it to rewrite it to more closely resemble his personal style.
  4. Finally, he asked the model to directly improve the writing of his own article to make it more effective.

The post reproduces all the essays involved in this interaction.

I found it fascinating. Hope you do too.

Chatbots: social media on steroids

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

The other thing about chatbots is they enable the effortless creation of massive quantities of “content” on an extraordinary scale. As James Vincent of the Verge puts it, “Given money and compute, AI systems – particularly the generative models currently in vogue – scale effortlessly. They produce text and images in abundance, and soon, music and video, too. Their output can potentially overrun or outcompete the platforms we rely on for news, information and entertainment. But the quality of these systems is often poor, and they’re built in a way that is parasitical on the web today. These models are trained on strata of data laid down during the last web age, which they recreate imperfectly.”

Soon, though, the web might consist not only of what was there in the pre-AI era, but all the stuff created by current and future chatbots. Which raises the intriguing possibility of an online world populated by bots inhaling the textual exhaust of their mechanical peers, and a consequent spiral into the infinite recursion that programmers call “stack overflow”!

In such circumstances, what should truth-seeking institutions do? Answer: look at what they are doing at Wikipedia…

Do read the entire piece

Moral depravity, UK style

From the morning edition of the FT newsletter the other day.

The British government’s Rwanda policy continues to be a great piece of statecraft: by Paul Kagame, that is. He has essentially bought the government’s Africa policy with £120mn of the UK’s own money — paid by the British government to the Rwandan one — before a single deportation flight has left the UK for the African nation. He can look forward to much more money if — though it is a very big “if” — the UK government ever manages to implement the policy. It will seek permission to appeal against the Court of Appeal’s latest ruling at the Supreme Court.

Last week the US and the EU called on Rwanda to cease its alleged support for M23, the militia that re-emerged in 2021 to wage an offensive in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The US, EU and the DRC all say the group is backed by Kagame’s government. … But, because of the deal struck with Kigali, the UK has said nothing at all.

Last week the UK Court of Appeals ruled that the government’s scheme to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda is unlawful, on the grounds that Rwanda is not a safe third country.

Which it isn’t.

My commonplace booklet

End of the (paper) Line

This is the front page of the Wiener Zeitung on Friday, the last day it appeared as a printed newspaper. In it the Editor penned a farewell letter (in German) which Google Translate rendered thus:

Dear readers, as I say goodbye, I would like to invite you to attend my last journey, which finally brought me to you in printed form. Delivered for the last time because even a newspaper owned by the Republic of Austria has to admit that from time to time you are at the mercy of politicians who have decided to only publish me digitally in the future. Robbed of my outfit, from tomorrow the haptics will no longer be determined by paper, but exclusively by swiping on the smartphone and clicking on the screen with the mouse. My future inner values, i.e. the content that the largely newly composed editorial team will only deliver digitally from tomorrow? You will see it if you want. I don’t know it.”

Linkblog

Some things I noticed while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

  • Embracing change and resetting expectations. Those of us who work with computers grew up taking as an article of faith that every instruction we gave to a machine had to be precise in every pedantic detail. The advent of tools like LLMs, argues Terence Tao, means that these assumptions will need to be recalibrated, if not abandoned entirely.
  • Carriers plan to rescue a few more unused smartphones • The Register. The GSM Association reckons that five billion mobile phones are “currently sitting unused in desk drawers around the globe”. Their innards contain 50,000 tonnes of copper, 500 tonnes of silver and 100 tonnes of gold. There’s also enough cobalt to build batteries for ten million electric vehicles. The Register’s correspondent is “puzzled by this talk of desk drawers”. His dead mobiles are scattered among “a rather nice wicker picnic basket, a filing cabinet, and That Box Full Of Old Tech I Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case”. Me too.

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 ay 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Moral depravity, UK style

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From this morning’s FT newsletter, written by Stephen Bush:

The British government’s Rwanda policy continues to be a great piece of statecraft: by Paul Kagame, that is. He has essentially bought the government’s Africa policy with £120mn of the UK’s own money — paid by the British government to the Rwandan one — before a single deportation flight has left the UK for the African nation. He can look forward to much more money if — though it is a very big “if” — the UK government ever manages to implement the policy. It will seek permission to appeal against the Court of Appeal’s latest ruling at the Supreme Court.

Last week the US and the EU called on Rwanda to cease its alleged support for M23, the militia that re-emerged in 2021 to wage an offensive in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The US, EU and the DRC all say the group is backed by Kagame’s government. (The FT’s East and Central Africa bureau chief Andres Schipani reports from Nairobi on all that here.) But, because of the deal struck with Kigali, the UK has said nothing at all.

The scheme to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda is working rather less well for Rishi Sunak. The number of people coming to the UK via small boats isn’t being eased, and now the Court of Appeal has ruled that the scheme is unlawful, on the grounds that Rwanda is not a safe third country.

How could it be otherwise? How can a country that is accused of waging a proxy war via a militia, of arresting opposition politicians on false pretexts, and of assassinating its opponents on foreign soil be anything other than unsafe?

Friday 30 June, 2023

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The White House

Dusk on a Summer’s evening in northern Burgundy.

Quote of the Day

“First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”

  • F. Scott Fitzgerald

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Cello Suite No.1 in G Major Yo-Yo Ma

Link

Eighteen minutes of pure bliss. The kind of thing you can enjoy when you’re on holiday.

Long Read of the Day

Marc Andreessen Is (Mostly) Wrong This Time

You may remember Wednesday’s Long Read — Dr Pangloss’s take on ‘AI’ and how it’s going to save the world.

Well, Gideon Lichfield, the current Editor of Wired, is gratifyingly unimpressed and provides an enjoyable critique of Andreessen’s boosterism.

Andreessen begins, he writes,

”with a 7,000-word screed, another stab at framing the narrative; this time, the story is that “AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it.” Much of it is devoted to debunking AI doom scenarios, and the rest to touting AI as little short of a civilizational savior.

This is of course predictable. Andreessen invests in technological revolutions, so he has little incentive to do anything but hype them up. His post does have value, though, in two ways. First, its obvious blind spots are a useful guide to the thinking of the biggest AI hypesters and where they go astray. Second, its takedown of some of the more hysterical AI fears is actually (somewhat) on target…

One of my complaints about Andreessen’s panglossian credulity is picked up by Lichfield. For example:

He argues that when technology makes companies more productive, they pass the savings on to their customers in the form of lower prices, which leaves people with more money to buy more things, which increases demand, which increases production, in a beautiful self-sustaining virtuous cycle of growth. Better still, because technology makes workers more productive, their employers pay them more, so they have even more to spend, so growth gets double-juiced.

There are many things wrong with this argument. When companies become more productive, they don’t pass savings on to customers unless they’re forced to by competition or regulation. Competition and regulation are weak in many places and many industries, especially where companies are growing larger and more dominant—think big-box stores in towns where local stores are shutting down…

And so on. Andreessen is undoubtedly clever — and rich. But sometimes he affects a childlike innocence about the world.

Chart of the day

FTX’s finances.

One of Molly White’s comments on the Interim CEO’s most recent report;

Interim CEO John J. Ray III filed the second interim report in the FTX bankruptcy, which follows the first one that was published in April. If SBF writing “We sometimes find $50m of assets lying around that we lost track of; such is life” rings a bell, that came from report number one.

John Goodenough RIP

From The Register…

One of the people who made our current lifestyles possible has died at the age of 100. John Goodenough shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (with Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino) for the invention of the lithium-ion battery. In 1980, when he was Head of the Inorganic Chemistry Department at Oxford, he and three colleagues identified the cathode material (cobalt oxide — which, at a molecular level, has spaces that can house lithium ions) thereby enabling development of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

My commonplace booklet

A couple of questions that have been bothering me.

  • How did Richard Wagner come to be mixed up with a brigade of Russian mercenary thugs? Answer (according to the NYT) the group took its name from the nom de guerre of its leader, Dmitry Utkin, a retired Russian military officer who is said to have chosen Wagner to honour Hitler’s favourite composer. As Thomas Beecham might have said, I don’t much like his music, but I sometimes admire the noise it makes.
  • Why are Western mainstream media continually underestimating Joe Biden? It’s really exasperating when you see what Biden has been achieving in the face of a Republican Party that has given up on democracy. His misnamed Inflation Reduction Act is an inspired act of industrial revival almost on an FDR scale (and if you doubt that just look at how freaked other Western democracies are by it). Biden’s support for Ukraine is the main reason why Putin’s invasion has stalled and may even now be going into reverse. And he has formulated a strategy for containing Chinese expansionism, especially in technology. To me he looks like (whisper it) a much more effective (if less photogenic) President than Obama. Is media reluctance to take him seriously actually an act of unconscious (or covert) ageism? Just askin’.

Linkblog

Some things I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose, which might be of interest.

  • The Guardian’s approach to generative AI – like most media outfits the Guardian now has a policy on it. I can’t see what the panic is about. It’s like having free, hardworking but inexperienced interns who sometimes make things up. So you never let their work reach the public before it has passed through an editorial brain.
  •  Victims speak out over ‘tsunami’ of fraud on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. This is news???
  • Robert Reich on why he’s not running for President . Really insightful piece. He lists three reasons: (i) he’s not narcissistic enough; (ii) you need to be wildly extroverted and he’s not; and (iii) you need to be a method actor — someone who is able to will yourself into feeling whatever a situation demands, so you come off as authentic. As they say, if you can fake authenticity, you’ve got it made.

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 ay 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Wednesday 28 June, 2023

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A volcanic legacy

This castle on a volcanic plug is one of the most striking sights on our long drive down to the South of France. It’s a few km before Puy-en-Velay, at the heart of what was once a region of active volcanoes.

Citation du jour

Seen on the wall of a Provencal cafe:

”On m’a demandé ma situation amoureuse, célibataine ou marié? Je respondu Bénévole!”

Rough translation:

”I was asked about my relationship status, single or married? I answered Volunteer!”

My hunch. ‘Volunteer’ should be ‘Make me an offer’!

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Edith Piaf | Non, Je ne regrette rien

Link

Long Read of the Day

Dr Pangloss’s view of ‘AI’

Marc Andreessen’s latest paean to ‘progress’, i.e. “Why AI Will Save The World”.

The era of Artificial Intelligence is here, and boy are people freaking out.

Fortunately, I am here to bring the good news: AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it.

In our new era of ‘AI’, it seems,

Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love.

Every person will have an AI assistant/coach/mentor/trainer/advisor/therapist that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful. The AI assistant will be present through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcomes.

Every scientist will have an AI assistant/collaborator/partner that will greatly expand their scope of scientific research and achievement. Every artist, every engineer, every businessperson, every doctor, every caregiver will have the same in their worlds.

Etc., etc.

Andreessen is smart, interesting and very, very rich. He’s also a romantic about technology, which is ok. So am I. But he seems totally oblivious to the distributional aspects of tech progress. In that sense he’s clearly unfamiliar with the history of ‘progress’ as chronicled by, say, Acemoglu and Simon.

Still, his paean makes an interesting read.

But you have to take him with (a) a barrowload of salt, and (b) remembering that his venture capital firm, Andreessen-Horowitz (aka a16z) has a lot of skin in the game. They’ve been investing in crypto for years, for example, which is why their “2023 State of Crypto” report is, as Molly White’s elaborate demolition of it, shows, flaky.

Actually, you can see that just by reading the disclaimer printed in very small type. Here’s how it opens:

”Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representation of the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.”

Footnote: Dr Pangloss was the relentlessly optimistic tutor of Candide, the protagonist in Voltaire’s eponymous novel. Some people think he was a caricature of Leibniz. Andreessen is definitely clever (he was, after all, the kid who — with Eric Bina — in 1993 created Mosaic, the first modern web browser, and in that sense kicked off the first Internet boom.) But he’s no Leibniz.

My commonplace booklet

 Decades-long bet on consciousness ends — and it’s philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0.

The neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now. Chalmers won the case of wine. Link

Linkblog

Some things I noticed, when drinking from the Internet firehose, which might be of interest.

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 ay 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Monday 26 June, 2023

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On reflection…

…it’s rather nice being in Burgundy on a Summer evening

Quote of the Day

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

  • Ben Franklin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young | Our House

Link

Long Read of the Day

’AI’ creates lots of jobs. But they’re not the kind of jobs you know about, or would want to do.

Terrific report by Josh Dzieza on the dark underbelly of the technology. . This a long, long essay, but worth your time, especially if you think that the tech industry is a uniquely ‘clean’ one.

Dzieza’s report starts with a Kenyan college graduate named Joe.

It was a job in a place where jobs were scarce (Nairobi), and Joe turned out hundreds of graduates. After boot camp, they went home to work alone in their bedrooms and kitchens, forbidden from telling anyone what they were working on, which wasn’t really a problem because they rarely knew themselves. Labeling objects for self-driving cars was obvious, but what about categorizing whether snippets of distorted dialogue were spoken by a robot or a human? Uploading photos of yourself staring into a webcam with a blank expression, then with a grin, then wearing a motorcycle helmet? Each project was such a small component of some larger process that it was difficult to say what they were actually training AI to do. Nor did the names of the projects offer any clues: Crab Generation, Whale Segment, Woodland Gyro, and Pillbox Bratwurst. They were non sequitur code names for non sequitur work.

As for the company employing them, most knew it only as Remotasks, a website offering work to anyone fluent in English. Like most of the annotators I spoke with, Joe was unaware until I told him that Remotasks is the worker-facing subsidiary of a company called Scale AI, a multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley data vendor that counts OpenAI and the U.S. military among its customers. Neither Remotasks’ or Scale’s website mentions the other.

Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping…

It’s much the same story as it was/is with social media: the way the technology’s output is kept clean for tender Western eyes, it provides thousands and thousands of variants of what the late David Graeber used to call “bullshit jobs” — often done by people of colour in the global South.

You think the internet is a clown show now? You ain’t seen nothing yet…

Yesterday’s Observer column.

Like most conspiracists, Junior was big on social media, but then in 2021 his Instagram account was removed for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines”, and in August last year his anti-vaccination Children’s Health Defense group was removed by Facebook and Instagram on the grounds that it had repeatedly violated Meta’s medical-misinformation policies.

But guess what? On 4 June, Instagram rescinded Junior’s suspension, enabling him to continue beaming his baloney, without let or hindrance, to his 867,000 followers. How come? Because he announced that he’s running against Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination and Meta, Instagram’s parent, has a policy that users should be able to engage with posts from “political leaders”. “As he is now an active candidate for president of the United States,” it said, “we have restored access to Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Instagram account.”

Which naturally is also why the company allowed Donald Trump back on to its platform.

Do read the whole thing.

Henry Petroski RIP

One of my favourite authors has passed away. The NYT has a nice obit:

Henry Petroski, who demystified engineering with literary examinations of the designs and failures of large structures like buildings and bridges, as well as everyday items like the pencil and the toothpick, died on June 14 in hospice care in Durham, N.C. He was 81.

He wrote a series of 20 lovely books about the art and craft (and science) of engineering. My favourites are:

  • To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1985)
  • The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990)
  • Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design. (2006)

My favourite is his book on the pencil, which — according to the NYT obit — was

Spurred on partly by the inferior quality of the pencils he was given at Duke, he used engineering equations in a 1987 paper in the Journal of Applied Mechanics to describe why pencil points break.

“By asking why and how a pencil point breaks in the way it does,” he concluded, “we are not only led to a better understanding of the tools of stress analysis and their limitations, but we are also led to a fuller appreciation of the wonders of technology when we analyze the aptness of such a manufactured product as the common pencil.”

May he rest in peace.

My commonplace booklet

Content alert: for serious petrolheads only

A Jaguar Mk IX spotted in the car park of an hotel in Thiers the other day. When I was a kid a wealthy landowner who lived nearby (in some style) had one, and I remember thinking that if I ever got rich I would have one too. In the end, I only managed to get a 3.8-litre Mark II which I ran until the quadrupling of the oil price after the Yom Kippur war made it a grotesquely unaffordable luxury.

According to Wikipedia, the Mark IX was popular with governments and Heads of State.

The Mark IX was popular as a state car. When Charles de Gaulle paid a state visit to Canada in 1960, the official cars for the motorcade were Mark IX Jaguars. The British Queen Mother had a Jaguar Mark VII, which was progressively upgraded to be externally identical to the later Mark IX. The Nigerian government bought forty Mark IXs, painted in state colours of green and white. The large Jaguars of the 1950s were sufficiently popular in western Africa that “Jagwah” survives as a colloquialism for “smart man-about-town”.

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 ay 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Friday 23 June, 2023

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Street Art UK-style

The UK has, for some reason (possibly connected with Brexit) become the world capital of potholes. Some streets in Cambridge look as though they had been intensively bombed by small mortar rounds. Periodically, chaps from the local council come round with spray cans to mark the most dangerous holes and then a few days later a team arrives and fills it hastily. Often, though, it turns out to be only a temporary repair. Some in our village have been ‘repaired’ three times.

So you can perhaps understand why one is not entirely convinced by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak when he talks about making Britain “a world-leading tech power”. Fixing the country’s roads would be a good start on that ambitious journey.

Quote of the Day

“Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”

  • Gustave Flaubert

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Holst | The Planets – II. Venus, The Bringer of Peace

Link

Eerie and beautiful.

Long Read of the Day

 The Casual Ignominy of the Book Tours of Yore

Wonderful memoir by John Banville.

Sample:

One day in 1990, I was flown first class from Dublin to Phoenix, Arizona, to read at the Irish Cultural Centre there. Five people turned up to listen to me. None of them had read my books, and it was clear that none of them had the slightest intention of doing so. They were the sons and daughter of Irish immigrants, and were there simply to see a real, live son the Oul Sod.

That was the beginning of a tour that would take me to ten cities in nine days. Here are some of the highlights, or lowlights, of that jaunt and others like it.

Chicago, the Windy City, was extremely windy that raw autumn evening as I walked from my hotel to the nearby branch of the now defunct Borders bookshops. I was greeted by the store’s beaming and breathtakingly beautiful Chinese-American manager. She led me to a far corner, past the Self-Help section and next to the Occult shelves, where there waited for me a brave little band of readers in overcoats and mufflers, shuffling their frozen feet and blowing into their fists. Twenty-odd, say, a few of whom were distinctly odd, as usual —every reading, as every writer will tell you, attracts at least a couple of maniacs.

Lovely stuff. Do read it all.

What is it with Trump and ‘his’ boxes?

Maureen Dowd’s column on Trump’s box-obsession:

During his presidency, The Times reported, “his aides began to refer to the boxes full of papers and odds and ends he carted around with him almost everywhere as the ‘beautiful mind’ material. It was a reference to the title of a book and movie depicting the life of John F. Nash Jr., the mathematician with schizophrenia played in the film by Russell Crowe, who covered his office with newspaper clippings, believing they held a Russian code he needed to crack.”

The aides used the phrase — which turned up in the indictment — as shorthand for Trump’s organized chaos, how he somehow kept track of what was in the boxes, which he held close as a security blanket. During the 2016 campaign, some reporters said, he traveled with cardboard boxes full of real estate contracts, newspaper clippings and schedules, as though he were carrying his world around with him.

The guy likes paper. And, like Louis XIV, he believes “L’État, c’est moi.” His favorite words are personal pronouns and possessive adjectives. Kevin McCarthy is “my Kevin.” Army officers were “my generals.” Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was “my favorite dictator.” In the indictment, a Trump lawyer quotes Trump as warning, “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes.”

Is he so addled by narcissism that he sees no distinction between highly sensitive documents belonging to the government and papers he wants to keep? He treats classified maps and nuclear secrets and a Pentagon war plan for Iran like pelts, hunting trophies, or family scrapbook items.

Answer: Yes, he is addled by narcissism. Boris Johnson is the same.

En passant: one of the thoughts triggered by the photographs of the shower-room in which he stashed some of those state papers is how naff the decor of Mar-a-Lago is.

My commonplace booklet

 Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit

Wow! What a spreadsheet. Simple, yet powerful, tools.

  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 ay 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!