The Beady Eye

We’re looking after a neighbour’s chickens at the moment. This one is not impressed by her new custodian. Personally, I don’t blame her. I’m not impressed by me either.

Quote of the Day

A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery. Talking about your ideas with other people is a good way to develop them. But even after doing this, you’ll find you still discover new things when you sit down to write. There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.”

• Paul Graham Link

That’s my experience too. E.M. Forster once said that there are two kinds of writer: those who know what they think and write it down; and those who find out what they think by trying to write it. The former are rare (though I’ve known two of them in my time, and I’ve always envied them). I’m definitely the second kind.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan | Chimes of Freedom

Link

I’ve loved this song for longer than I care to admit.

Long Read of the Day

 What Oppenheimer the film gets wrong about Oppenheimer the man

Very good, sharp essay by Haydn Belfield of CSER. Particularly interesting if you’ve seen the film. Although the movie is based on (or at least informed by) American Prometheus, Kai Bird’s and Martin Sherwin’s exhaustive biography of Oppenheimer, there’s lots that the movie left out, which is why Anthony Lane, in his New Yorker review observed: “I hate to say it, but, if you zip through all six hundred pages of the book before seeing the film, you’ll enjoy the ride more. Much is omitted in the adaptation; there is no whisper, for example, of the fact that Oppenheimer was born into serious wealth.”

Here’s Belfield on the same subject:

One would be tempted to describe J. Robert Oppenheimer as a tragic figure — that’s certainly how Christopher Nolan portrays him in the biopic Oppenheimer. The father of the atomic bomb who spent the rest of his life agonizing over what he had helped birth; the ultimate insider who was humbled and brought low; the hopeful scientist who started the nuclear arms race. But then, tragic figures don’t generally spend their retirement yachting around the Caribbean. Or maybe he was a tragic figure in the mold of Lord Byron — interestingly dark and mystical, remarkably pretty, and rich as Midas.

Oppenheimer grew up in privilege, and remained swaddled in it for his whole life. His father immigrated to New York with nothing, and rose up to become a wealthy textile company executive. His parents spoiled their little genius. When he started a childhood rock collection, it grew to cover every surface in their apartment, which itself covered an entire floor overlooking the Hudson River. The Oppenheimers had a chauffeur, a French governess, three live-in maids and three van Gogh paintings. He corresponded with the New York Mineralogical Club, but when they invited him to speak they were surprised and delighted when he turned out to be only 12. His 16th birthday present was a 28-foot yacht (to go with the family’s 40-foot Lorelei) which he called Trimethy, after a chemical compound. As Oppenheimer remarked when he bought his first holiday home in New Mexico, the state where he would later spearhead the development of the atomic bomb: “hot dog!”

Interesting throughout. Worth your time. Also, makes me wonder about getting the book. Hmmm…

You-couldn’t-make-it-up dept.

When The New York Times reported in April that a contractor had purchased and deployed a spying tool made by NSO, the contentious Israeli hacking firm, for use by the U.S. government, White House officials said they were unaware of the contract and put the F.B.I. in charge of figuring out who might have been using the technology.

After an investigation, the F.B.I. uncovered at least part of the answer: It was the F.B.I.

The deal for the surveillance tool between the contractor, Riva Networks, and NSO was completed in November 2021. Only days before, the Biden administration had put NSO on a Commerce Department blacklist, which effectively banned U.S. firms from doing business with the company. For years, NSO’s spyware had been abused by governments around the world.

Source

Dress Codes

From the FT’s daily newsletter:

”Lately, one of [Derek] Guy’s regular targets is our prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who he insists dresses badly. He’s right. Sunak’s suits reflect the current fashion for slim-fitting attire with short trouser legs. These make two of Sunak’s assets — that he is slim and looks young for his age — into liabilities, because the combined effect is to make him look like a sixth-former who has outgrown his uniform.”

Translating Musk-speak into plain English

Recently, Linda Yaccarino, the new CEO of X (neé Twitter) wrote a company-wide memo to the remaining staff of that wretched company. The memo is a masterpiece of corporate cant, so Jon Gruber did us all an heroic favour by providing a running translation on his Daring Fireball blog.

Here’s a sample:

Memo:

At our core, we have an inventor mindset — constantly learning, testing out new approaches, changing to get it right and ultimately succeeding.

Translation: We are hemorrhaging cash and our advertisers are still fleeing.

Memo:

With X, we serve our entire community of users and customers by working tirelessly to preserve free expression and choice, create limitless interactivity, and create a marketplace that enables the economic success of all its participants.

I used to run all advertising for NBCUniversal. Now I’m running an $8/month multi-level marketing scheme where the only users who’ve signed up are men who own a collection of MAGA hats.

Memo:

The best news is we’re well underway.

There is no hope.

Memo:

Everyone should be proud of the pace of innovation over the last nine months — from long form content, to creator monetization, and tremendous advancements in brand safety protections.

Have you seen the ads we’re running these days? Last week we were filling everyone’s timeline with ads for discount chewable boner pills, the punchline of which ads is that you’ll bang your lady so hard she’ll need the aid of a walker afterward. That’s a video we promoted to everyone. This week it’s anime for foot fetishists. That’s what we put in everyone’s feed, every three tweets. Or X’s, or whatever we’re now calling them. I used to book hundred-million-dollar Olympic sponsorship deals with companies like Coca-Cola and Proctor & Gamble. (Thank god for Apple.)

Memo:

Our usage is at an all time high

Our owner is high as a kite.

There’s lots more in this vein. Do check it out.

Linkblog

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

• How to test different A.I. chatbots: try asking them a question to which you know the answer — like Doc Searls (Whom God Preserve) did.

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Closely observed Sweet Peas

Quote of the Day

“An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.”

• F. Scott Fitzgerald

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven | Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major Op. 15: Largo | Daniel Barenboim

Link

Music doesn’t come much better than this.

Long Read of the Day

An ‘Oppenheimer Moment’ for the progenitors Of AI

As regular readers know, I am sceptical of the rhetoric emanating from the tech companies about the ‘existential risk’ posed by AI. Like many other critics, I see it as a ploy to distract public attention from the real and present dangers posed by the rather feeble ‘AI’ we currently have — and about which we should be doing something right now.

But this interesting essay by Nathan Gardels in Noema has opened up an intriguing thought: could there be a plausible existential risk emerging from current AI, but indirectly if it heated up Cold War 2.0 between the US and China? After all, they have weapons which undoubtedly pose an existential threat to humanity, and they have nothing to do with AI.

Here’s the passage in Gardels’s essay that triggered the thought. It’s when he’s discussing

the analogy between Sam Altman and Oppenheimer, who in his later years was persecuted, isolated and denied official security clearance because the McCarthyist fever of the early Cold War cast him as a Communist fellow traveler. His crime: opposing the deployment of a hydrogen bomb and calling for working with other nations, including adversaries, to control the use of nuclear weapons.

In a speech to AI scientists in Beijing in June, Altman similarly called for collaboration on how to govern the use of AI. “China has some of the best AI talents in the world,” he said. Controlling advanced AI systems “requires the best minds from around the world. With the emergence of increasingly powerful AI systems, the stakes for global cooperation have never been higher.”

One wonders, and worries, how long it will be before Altman’s sense of universal scientific responsibility is sucked, like Oppenheimer, into the maw of the present McCarthy-like anti-China hysteria in Washington. No doubt the fervent atmosphere in Beijing poses the mirror risk for any AI scientist with whom he might collaborate on behalf of the whole of humanity instead of for the dominance of one nation.

His essay is interesting throughout. Worth a read. It’s headed by a fabulous illustration by Jonathan Zawada, of which this is a thumbnail.

Go to the essay to see it in all its imaginative majesty.

Will rebranding Twitter give Elon Musk the X factor? I wouldn’t bank on it.

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

So Elon Musk, the world’s richest manchild, has changed the name of his favourite toy. Henceforth, Twitter is to be known as X. Strangely, though, you can still log on to twitter.com and be invited to tweet. This is a missed comic opportunity. Instead of the chancellor being able to say, for example, that he had tweeted his concern about the public sector borrowing requirement to the prime minister, he could be saying that he had “X’d Rishi” on the matter. Sigh.

So what is it about Musk and X? Well, it goes back quite a way – to 1999, when Musk set up X.com as an early online bank. For “early”, read “weird”…

Do read the whole piece.

Later. Just after the piece appeared, I happened to turn to James Fallows’s blog, and found this:

“Months ago, people were abandoning Xitter for Mastodon. Weeks ago, for Bluesky. Days ago, for Threads. None of these alternatives has — so far — recreated the centrality of the old Twitter, for those who viewed it as central. Musk’s destruction of this forum is a dead loss all around. The fact that he has created a gap doesn’t mean that anyone else can fill it.”

Books, etc.

On 26 and 27 June, Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited young adult romance bestseller list was filled with dozens of AI-generated books of nonsense. By Wednesday, Amazon.com had taken them out of the list but they were, apparently, still available for purchase. These were probably produced by people using ChatGPT and were easily detectable as crap.

But there are other outfits out there touting ‘AI’ tools as a way of getting writing done. Sudowrite, for example (Motto:” “Say goodbye to writer’s block”). For $10 a month it will generate 30,000 “AI words”. $25/month gets you 90,000 words. It is, apparently,

”the non-judgmental, always-there-to-read-one-more-draft, never-runs-out-of-ideas-even-at-3am, AI writing partner you always wanted.️”

It enables you to “write a novel from start to finish in a week.” Its ‘Story Engine’ “takes you step-by-step from idea, to outline, to beating out chapters, and then writes 1,000s of words, in your style”.

Elizabeth Minkel is not impressed. The headline of her essay in Wired — “Why Generative AI Won’t Disrupt Books” — communicates the gist of her message.

Here’s hoping.

Linkblog

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

• “How Silicon Valley mind-set begat Hollywood’s strike.” —  Los Angeles Times 

• Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth: the challenge of AI — The New York Times

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Grasses at dusk

Semur-en-Auxoise, Burgundy.

Quote of the Day

”Superintelligence is not required for ai to cause harm. That is already happening. ai is used to violate privacy, create and spread disinformation, compromise cyber-security and build biased decision-making systems. The prospect of military misuse of ai is imminent. Today’s ai systems help repressive regimes to carry out mass surveillance and to exert powerful forms of social control. Containing or reducing these contemporary harms is not only of immediate value, but is also the best bet for easing potential, albeit hypothetical, future x-risk.”

• Blaise Agüera y Arcas and colleagues, writing in the Economist.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dave Brubeck | Take Five

Link

Long Read of the Day

Revisiting the long boom

This examination of what one might call the Silicon Valley ideology (which I would call “Neoliberalism seen through rose-tinted spectacles”) is long-ish. It involves two pieces:

1. The first is by Jason Kottke who dug the 1997 article in Wired which predicted 25 years to prosperity and happiness and progress. Guess what?

2. Then Dave Karpf followed up with a terrific analysis. What drove him was that some of the people who made these Panglossian predictions are still making them. It seems they are unable to learn from their mistakes.

But then, that’s what ideology does to people, I suppose.

I like his summing-up.

The world they are invoking is one where (1) neoliberalism spread everywhere, and works great, (2) its benefits are widely distributed, (3) scientific and technological breakthroughs become easier and faster with time, and (4) on balance, none of those scientific or technological breakthroughs are used for harm. This is… not the world we inhabit today. The neoliberal economic order has not lived up to its billing. Many of our primary political divisions today are either caused or exacerbated by the failings of the neoliberal order. American is not defined by a “new spirit of generosity,” nor have we welcomed increased immigration with open arms. And while we have had plenty of technological advances in the past 25 years, we have also been constantly reminded of Kranzberg’s First Law of Technology: “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

Yep.

GPT-4 may be just an AI language parrot, but it’s no birdbrain

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

In 2017, researchers at the British AI company DeepMind (now Google DeepMind) published an extraordinary paper describing how their new algorithm, AlphaZero, had taught itself to play a number of games to superhuman standards without any instruction. The machine could, they wrote, “achieve, tabula rasa, superhuman performance in many challenging domains. Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi (Japanese chess) as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case.”

Speaking afterwards at a big machine-learning conference, DeepMind’s chief executive, Demis Hassabis (himself a world-class chess player), observed that the program often made moves that would seem unthinkable to a human chess player. “It doesn’t play like a human,” he said, “and it doesn’t play like a program. It plays in a third, almost alien, way.” It would be an overstatement to say that AlphaZero’s capabilities spooked those who built it, but it clearly surprised some of them. It was, one (privately) noted later, a bit like putting your baby daughter to sleep one evening and finding her solving equations in the morning.

That was six years ago. Spool forward to now, when a friend of mine is experimenting with GPT-4, OpenAI’s most powerful large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, outputting text) – the version to which you can get access for $20 (about £16) a month….

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Harry Frankfurt RIP

Nice memoir of him by Kieran Setiya

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt died this week. He was unexpectedly famous for a bestselling book, On Bullshit, that originated as a playful academic essay only to find a second life as an editor’s marketing dream—a mischievous gift-book for the pseudo-intellectual in your life. It earned Harry an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and a lot of money.

I particularly enjoyed Setiya’s parting shot:

I think his reply to an audience member at the lectures that became The Reasons of Love could be his epitaph.

Audience member: “What I don’t understand is how, on your view, I have any assurance that my wife will continue to love me.”

Harry: “I’m sorry, sir, I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.”

On Bullshit is lovely.

Linkblog

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

• Larry Summers thinks that Ivy League colleges need radical change. His list of reforms that places like Harvard (of which he was once President, and where he still is a professor) need to make: banning ‘legacy’ admissions (i.e. of children of alumni), eliminating “aristocratic sports” like rowing and fencing, and training college admissions staff to detect when something in an application is ‘inauthentic’. Interesting throughout. Link

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Where we get our strawberries

From Hacker’s Fruit Farm, of course.

Quote of the Day

“When Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.”

• Ted Chiang

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Pinetop Perkins | “Pinetop’s Blues”

Link

Wonderful. And he had great taste in hats, too.

Long Read of the Day

Why they’re smearing Lina Khan

Terrific, no-holds-barred polemic by Cory Doctorow.

My god, they sure hate Lina Khan. This once-in-a-generation, groundbreaking, brilliant legal scholar and fighter for the public interest, the slayer of Reaganomics, has attracted more vitriol, mockery, and dismissal than any of her predecessors in living memory.

She sure must be doing something right, huh?

A quick refresher. In 2017, Khan – then a law student – published Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox in the Yale Law Journal. It was a brilliant, blistering analysis showing how the Reagan-era theory of antitrust (which celebrates monopolies as “efficient”) had failed on its own terms, using Amazon as Exhibit A of the ways in which post-Reagan antitrust had left Americans vulnerable to corporate abuse:

The paper sent seismic shocks through both legal and economic circles, and goosed the neo-Brandeisian movement (sneeringly dismissed as “hipster antitrust”). This movement is a rebuke to Reaganomics, with its celebration of monopolies, trickle-down, offshoring, corporate dark money, revolving-door regulatory capture, and companies that are simultaneously too big to fail and too big to jail.

This movement has many proponents, of course – not just Khan – but Khan’s careful scholarship, combined with her encyclopedic knowledge of the long-dormant statutory powers that federal agencies had to make change, and a strategy for reviving those powers to protect Americans from corporate predators made her a powerful, inspirational figure…

Great piece. Khan is a remarkable figure.

Books, etc.

One of my Malaysian Press Fellows gave me this, possibly because he knew I had once shaken hands with one of the key figures in the scam. (He was the Prime Minister of Malaysia at the time.) In my defence, the Mayor of London and the UK Home Secretary also shook hands with him that evening.

As for the book: it’s a riveting tale, skilfully told. Recommended as beach or poolside reading.

My commonplace booklet

• “I knew Robert F. Kennedy, and you’re no Robert F. Kennedy.” Robert Reich on the ”dangerous nutcase” currently trading under the famous name.

• A novel way of easing global warming — really white paint. Link

Linkblog

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

• Why would you build a cloud DC in America’s hottest city? Why indeed? From The Register.

• TikTok Extends the Wasteland The Hedgehog Review Link

Errata

The other day I attributed a quote to the New Yorker writer Bill McKibben. Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) smelt a rat and referred me to Quote Inspector, which ruled as follows:

Dear Quote Investigator: The following quotation has been attributed to the writer and political commentator Gore Vidal:

“The four most beautiful words in the English language are “I told you so.”

Was this statement crafted by Vidal?

Quote Investigator: Gore Vidal did employ versions of this saying on multiple occasions. But the earliest strongly matching instance located by QI was spoken in the British House of Lords in 1953 by Lord Mancroft (Stormont Mancroft). Boldface has been added to excerpts:

”I should like to begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, for having given us the opportunity of discussing this matter this afternoon and also for the moderate and reasonable way in which he has put his point of view forward. Indeed, I should like to congratulate the noble Lord, also, on having successfully resisted the temptation to utter those happiest words in the English language, “I told you so.”

Mancroft used the adjective “happiest” instead of “most beautiful”, and he did not count the words, but the notion he expressed was very similar.

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Orwell: Politics and the French Language

Arles, 2010

Quote of the Day

”’I told you so’ are the four least satisfying words in the English language.”

• Bill McKibben

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Wagner | Tristan und Isolde, Prelude

Link

‘Haunting’ is one word for it. ‘Beautiful’, another.

Long Read of the Day

 The New Media Goliaths

Interesting essay by the formidable Renée Diresta on how our media ecosystem has radically changed, how Chomsky’s ideas about ‘manufacturing consent’ need updating and why there is no such thing any more as ‘public opinion’ (singular)/

It’s the kind of essay that Neil Postman would have enjoyed (and about which he would have had views).

Books, etc.

Milan Kundera RIP: The Nobel Prize for Literature Winner We Never Had

The celebrated Czech novelist has died at the age of 94. Kate Webb had a nice obit of him in the Guardian. And Robin Ashenden in Quillette has a rounded assessment of him which ponders the question of why Kundera’s reputation had faded in recent decades. “You get the sense,” he writes,

that Kundera, whose novels for so long were required reading for anyone drawn to world literature, was being pushed firmly to the margins. Some of it surely was his writing on sex, which since the #MeToo movement was jarringly out of fashion. Kundera was avid about it in ways that, to the squeamish, now seemed less ground-breaking than a bit creepy, with lip-smacking descriptions of the female body and sundry deviant sex acts. But sex—which we’re no longer supposed to think or care about—represented a fraction of his themes and was arguably a legacy of the communist period, one of the few ways individuals could assert their liberty in a repressive state.

Or was it just that Kundera had become

a teller of truths inconvenient to the modern age, that his ruthless analysis of male-female relationships, his omniscient male voice and his dissection of sheep-like political movements were simply too close to the bone. More than almost any other writer, he seemed in his early work to foresee our own times: an atmosphere of growing intolerance and Rhinoceros-like groupthink that increasingly resembles the Soviet world we thought we’d left behind.

I particularly liked his Unbearable Lightness of Being and Philip Kaufman’s film of it.

My commonplace booklet

Was Napoleon Hot?

That’s the question asked by Luke Winkie in a piece in Slate triggered by the launch of the trailer for Ridley Scott’s forthcoming biopic of Boney.

Let’s get this out of the way up front: Napoleon Bonaparte was not short. Most contemporary sources put him at about 5-foot-6, typical of the average 19th-century Frenchman. He earned that apocryphal diminutive reputation from an English newspaper cartoonist named James Gillray at the dawn of the Napoleonic Wars. Gillray portrayed the emperor as a stormy, teensy-tiny toddler—flipping tables, stomping his feet—a likeness that swiftly became canonized across the world.

All of this is to say that the dimensions of Joaquin Phoenix (5-foot-8) fit neatly into a historically authentic Bonapartian silhouette, which is surely why Ridley Scott tapped him to play the leading man in the forthcoming epic Napoleon. What is less clear is whether or not Napoleon possessed the striking movie-star good looks—and almost uncanny facial symmetry—of someone like Phoenix. Scott certainly seems intent on making us think so. The first trailer for the film was released on Monday, giving us an initial taste of Joaquin in full Grande Armée regalia. I watched it over and over again, stuck on the same burning question. “Wait a minute, am I supposed to think that Napoleon was hot?”

As it happens I have a dog in this fight: I’m 5’6” and definitely not hot.

Was Boris Johnson undemocratically removed from Parliament?

In a word (well, a splendid blog post by Mark Elliott, a distinguished public law scholar), No.

Although Johnson chose to avail himself of no part of it, there is a clear and carefully constructed system for dealing with situations in which MPs are found to have engaged in certain forms of misconduct that sound either in criminal conviction or suspension from the House of Commons for a period that signals the seriousness of the wrongdoing that has been established. We can also see that this system is not undemocratic. That is so for two reasons. First, the system is rooted in both the processes of the House of Commons and in legislation enacted by Parliament, and which therefore necessarily enjoys a democratic imprimatur. Second, not only is the system underpinnedby arrangements that were put in place democratically; the system also exhibits several democratic characteristics: the Committee cannot suspend, let alone remove, an MP; suspension can occur only if supported by a majority of MPs in the House of Commons; a recall petition is subject to the requirement of the support of 10 per of voters in the MP’s constituency; and the MP is free to stand in the resulting by-election should the recall petition succeed.

That Johnson was not undemocratically or otherwise improperly ‘forced out’ of Parliament is thus an argument that can be made out quite straightforwardly and without taking any position on the egregiousness or otherwise of Johnson’s conduct — whether in terms of the acknowledged rule-breaking at the heart of Partygate or his subsequent statements to the House of Commons and the Committee of Privileges. The contrary narrative, according to which Johnson was undemocratically ejected from Parliament, is both deeply flawed and highly corrosive. Indeed, its post-truth character means that it can be described as Trumpian without any risk of hyperbole.

Yep.

Thanks to Quentin for alerting me to it.

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A rose by any other name…

… would smell as sweet.

Quote of the Day

”While Twitter felt like a rowdy pub at chucking-out time, Threads feels like a corporate box at a concert.”

• Helen Lewis, writing about her social media experiences.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fats Domino | Red sails in the sunset

Link

Famous song with an interesting history. It was written by the Northern Irish songwriter Jimmy Kennedy. According to the FT’s ‘Life of a Song’ column, it came about because one evening in the mid-1930s Kennedy saw the sloop, Kitty of Coleraine, sailing off the resort of Portstewart during a magnificent sunset. As he watched, he saw the boat’s white sails take on the colour of the setting sun. The rest, as they say, is history. It was the biggest hit of the 2,000 songs Kennedy wrote during his career.

Long Read of the Day

Talking about a ‘schism’ is ahistorical

Terrific essay by Emily Bender on the way the current discourse on the supposed ‘existential risk’ posed by ‘AI’ manages to avoid the really important questions — and ignores everything we already know about existing harms of the technology.

The problem with the ‘schism’ framing is that to talk about a ‘schism’ is to talk about something that once was a whole and now is broken apart — authors that use this metaphor thus imply that such a whole once existed. But this is emphatically not a story of a community that once shared concerns and now is broken into disagreeing camps. Rather, there are two separate threads — only one of which can properly be called a body of scholarship — that are being held up as in conversation or in competition with each other. I think this forced pairing comes in part from the media trying to fit the recent AI doomer PR pushes into a broader narrative and in part from the fact that there is competition for a limited resource: policymaker attention…

This is an important and perceptive essay by one of the sharpest minds around. And it provides a welcome antidote against the fake dichotomies about ‘AI’ currently being peddled by mainstream media and the tech industry.

Howard Jacobson has a blog

He’s a very good writer but an online virgin, and is therefore new to this game.

I haven’t jumped out of an aeroplane but I doubt it would be as frightening as this.

Until today I have never digitally posted anything. I have never blogged. I have never tweeted. I have never cyber-liked or cyber-disliked or sent an emoji, though I did once try to send one back. I am a stranger to WhatsApp and neither chat nor date.

In his first post, he decided that maybe he should become a flaneur like Baudelaire, and walk the streets of the city where he lives – in his case, London:

Last week, in this spirit of being simultaneously inside myself and out of it, I took to the streets. Does that sound revolutionary? Well for me it was. ‘Stay out of your head,’ I chided myself in advance. ‘Pretend this is the party you would never go to as a boy.’ And lo, as though by miracle, as I crossed from Mortimer Street into Great Portland Street the life I had come in search of, came in search of me – a very small woman, dressed in a miniature leather jacket and flimsy polka-dot shorts, pushing a very big pram. I remembered that Dickens had noted a similar sight on one of his perambulations across London, then I reprimanded myself for letting literature nudge out life. ‘Look at the mother,’ I said. ‘Let yourself be touched by the arduousness of her life – a child to look after and she scarcely bigger than a child herself.’ Why, even at first glance, was she so affecting? And then she stopped to lean into the pram and soothe the crying baby. ‘Any more of that and I’ll be taking you home,’ she said, firmly but not without kindness. And as, with tremendous effort, she lifted the baby out to make it more comfortable, I saw that she was not a mother but a little girl, no more than eight or nine years old herself. The sister of the child? Who knew? A host of questions: was she walking the baby to give the actual mother an hour off; had the actual mother died or run away leaving this little girl with a baby to look after for the rest of her childhood; was her tiny body strong enough for the task of caring for a child; was she resentful or was she consumed with love for the occupant of the pram and delighted to be trusted with it; was this a sorrowful tale or a happy one?

Once a writer, always a writer.

My commonplace booklet

• In Friday’s edition I mused about how long it would take for someone to upload the entire Old Testament corpus into an LLM. Thanks to Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve), I now know that Meta has already done it for the New Testament!
• Gadgets and Gizmos That Inspired Adam Smith — Link. Hmmm…. I’m a gadget freak and no sooner had I read this than I turned out to the contents of my trouser pocket, which consisted of a tiny fountain pen, and a mechanical pencil, both of which go everywhere with me and don’t require me to wear shirts with pockets! So I’m in no position to patronise Adam Smith’s contemporaries.

Linkblog

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

• The Fasinatng… Fascinating History of Autocorrect Link

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Cool dude & lady friend

Arles, June 25th.

Quote of the Day

“It is not that the Englishman can’t feel — it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks — his pipe might fall out if he did.”

• E.M. Forster

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Don Giovanni | ‘Là ci darem la mano’

Link

In Mozart, as in life, the devil generally gets the best tunes.

Long Read of the Day

Elite US universities are reputation-laundering machines

That, at any rate, is the takeaway I found in this marvellous essay by Scott Alexander. As someone who thinks of Harvard as a hedge-fund with a nice university attached it was music to my ears. Here’s a sample that sets the tone:

Suppose you own a very successful family business. You can leave your son your fortune, you can leave him the business, you can leave him your mansion, but you can’t (directly) leave him an aura of having deserved all these things. What you can do is make a $10 million donation to Harvard in exchange for them accepting your son. Your son gets a Harvard degree, a universally-recognized sign of being a highly meritorious person. Then when you leave him the business, everyone will agree he deserves it. Who said anything about nepotism? Leaving a Harvard graduate in control of your business is an excellent decision!

This happens a little, but I think it mostly isn’t this obvious. More often the transactions are for abstract goods: prestige, associations, favors. The Maharaja of Whereverstan sends his daughter to Harvard so that she appears meritorious. In exchange, Harvard gets the credibility boost of being the place the Maharaja of Whereverstan sent his daughter. And Harvard’s other students get the advantage of networking with the Princess Of Whereverstan. Twenty years later, when one of them is an oil executive and Whereverstan is handing out oil contracts, she puts in a word with her old college buddy the Princess and gets the deal. It’s obvious what the oil executive has gotten out of this, but what does the Princess get? I think she gets the right to say she went to Harvard, an honor which is known to go mostly to the meritorious.

People ask why Harvard admissions can still be bribed or influenced by the rich or well-connected. This is the wrong question: the right question is why they ever give spots based on merit at all. The answer is: otherwise the scheme wouldn’t work. The point of a money-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty money, then mix them together so thoroughly that nobody can tell which is which. Likewise, the point of a privilege-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty privilege, then stamp both with a Harvard degree. “Fairly-earned privilege” means all the brilliant talented ambitious youngsters admitted on the basis of their SAT scores and grades and impressive accomplishments; “dirty privilege” means the kids of various old-money aristocrats, foreign potentates, and ordinary super-rich people. Colleges mix them together, with advantages for both groups.

Do read it. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Important appointments

Free Speech Tsar

Wonderful blog post by Kieran Healy.

The news that Arif Ahmed is to be appointed the UK’s first ‘Free Speech Tsar’ — a position that apparently comes with “the power to investigate universities and student unions in England and Wales that wrongly restrict debate” and to “advise the sector regulator on imposing fines for free speech breaches” — is disappointing for various reasons. One of them (not the most important one) is that it suggests Britain’s capacity to name things continues to decline. To see this once-great country reach for a foreign title that not only originates with one second-rate empire trying to recall the glory of the Romans but that was first popularized as a job-title within the administrative apparatus of another is really quite sad, given that England has so many equally preposterous but largely home-grown (or at least Norman French) titles available right on its own doorstep. It’s a scandal, really. A kind of Tsargate, if you will.

Here I present a few alternatives of my own…

They’re wonderful. I particularly liked:

• The Duke of Discourse.
• Warden of All Chit-Chat.
• Gold Stick To The Point.
• The Earl of Axiom.
• The Keeper of the King’s Premises.

Britain, remember, has a member of the Royal Household called “Silver Stick in Waiting”. And no, I did not make that up. And he’s the deputy to — yes, you guessed it — Gold Stick in Waiting. (Who is currently Princess Anne.)

Chart of the Day

The context windows of LLMs – the amounts of text that models can process and respond to – are growing rapidly. In Q2, Anthropic released a new, 100k-token version of its model Claude. Thanks to its massive context window, Claude can process the entirety of The Great Gatsby and answer questions about it in 30 seconds.

This is really interesting. The capacity (and therefore usefulness) of LLMs seems to be increasing very quickly. No doubt someone already has a plan to upload the whole of the Old Testament into Claude!

Source: Azeem Azhar’s newsletter.

My commonplace booklet

I hate to say this but I found this piece about John le Carré, published in The Mail Online in 2011, fascinating. I think it was timed to coincide with the release of the film version os his Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy novel. Which reminds me, I need to see the film, if only to compare it with the TV series that starred Alec Guinness as George Smiley.

Linkblog

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

• Evernote, the memory app people forgot about, lays off its entire US staff — Ars Technica. I used it for years, until better stuff came along.

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!