Happy Birthday, Transistor

The transistor, the building block of the digital age, was invented 75 years ago this month.

Image from the issue of the IEEE Spectrum magazine celebrating the anniversary.

Quote of the Day

”Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.”

• James Thurber

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Humphrey Lyttelton | Bad Penny Blues

Link

With a great intro. Many thanks to John Darch for suggesting it.

Long Read of the Day

 What if failure is the plan?

The inimitable danah boyd on Twitter’s ongoing crisis.

Nearly everyone I talk with is surprised that the actual service of Twitter is mostly still working. What that says to me is that the engineering team was far more solid than I appreciated. Any engineering team worth its salt is going to build redundancy and resilience into the system. Exceptions that are thrown should be caught and managed. But that doesn’t mean that a system can persist indefinitely without maintenance and repair.

Think of it in terms of a house. If you walk away from your home for a while, the pipes will probably keep working fine on their own. Until a big freeze comes. And then, if no one is looking, they’ll burst, flood the house, and trigger failure after failure. The reason for doing maintenance is to minimize the likelihood of this event. And the reason to have contingencies built in is to prevent a problem from rippling across the system.

What happens when Twitter’s code needs to be tweaked to manage an iOS upgrade? Or if a library dependency goes poof? What happens when a security vulnerability isn’t patched?

Interesting and wide-ranging piece by one of the world’s leading experts on social media.

Why you won’t find much ‘free speech’ about China on Musk’s Twitter

Tesla is the only substantial American company to continue in China. Amazon, Google, Best Buy, Uber, LinkedIn, Macy’s and eBAY have all exited with tails between legs. Apple is desperately trying to move production of iPhones to somewhere else. But Tesla stays.

Why? Because the company sells $16 billion-worth of cars a year in the country. And it’s in too deep to pull the plug. Its Shanghai plant, which the FT says can turn out around a million cars a year, is too big to abandon.

In the meantime, the Chinese regime is suspicious about Tesla cars, which are barred from military complexes and other ‘sensitive’ areas due to ‘security’ concerns. And military staff and employees of key state-owned companies are restricted from using Teslas.

All of which means that if Musk allows critical tweeting about Xi Jinping et al on his platform then he can expect trouble.

Being a sensible chap, he will avoid that possibility.

My commonplace booklet

Because of my newspaper column I receive an astonishing number of PR pitches every day. Sometimes, they make me wonder if the people who write them have any idea of the implications of the tech ideas they are pushing.

Yesterday’s email contained a pitch for an outfit called ZHIYUN entitled 9 must-try tips to improve your TikTok videos. One of these tips runs as follows:

Set the tone, mood and atmosphere with lighting

Lighting is an essential aspect of producing a successful video. TikToker Christian Shay mentioned that lighting is very important, so choose what works best for you. Use proper light control and manipulation for texture, the vibrancy of colour, and luminosity of your subjects.

A handy tool to help you out with your lighting is the ZHIYUN FIVERAY F100 light stick, a portable photography tool with six different lighting effects including fire, faulty bulb, and candle, allowing you to create ambiance and illuminate your subject, day or night.

Clearly, the PR flack who sent me this doesn’t know what I think about TikTok. But then, why should s/he?

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Cyclists only

The road on which we cycle in to town has been closed to motor vehicles in a radical experiment. Suddenly, cycling is even more pleasant than before. And quieter. And safer.

Quote of the Day

”It’s not the voting that’s democracy. It’s the counting.”

• Tom Stoppard

That’s Trump’s modus operandi.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tuba Skinny | Jubilee Stomp | Royal Street I

Link

Long Read of the Day

Everyone’s Over Instagram

If you’re not on Instagram and suffering from FOMO, cheer up. There’s good news on the way, and Kate Lindsay is the bearer of it.

Earlier this fall, while riding the subway, I overheard two friends doing some reconnaissance ahead of a party. They were young and cool—intimidatingly so, dressed in the requisite New York all black, with a dash of Y2K revival—and trying to figure out how to find a mutual acquaintance online.

“Does she have Instagram?” one asked, before adding with a laugh: “Does anybody?”

“I don’t even have it on my phone anymore,” the other confessed.

Even just a couple of years ago, it would have been unheard-of for these 20-something New Yorkers to shrug off Instagram—a sanctimonious lifestyle choice people would have regretted starting a conversation about at that party they were headed to. But now it’s not so surprising at all. To scroll through Instagram today is to parse a series of sponsored posts from brands, recommended Reels from people you don’t follow, and the occasional picture from a friend that’s finally surfaced after being posted several days ago. It’s not what it used to be…

Sic transit gloria mundi etc. I joined Instagram when it started, because some of my photography buddies thought I should. I lasted about two weeks before I realised that it was basically an addictive scrolling machine. And I was only following reputable photographers like the Magnum collective. So I quit. Ever since then I regularly receive emails from Instagram saying how they miss me and can even make it easy for me to repent.

It’s interesting to see how it’s become passé, though, which is why this essay is worth your time.

Tacit knowledge (contd.)

The subject of ‘tacit knowledge’ in yesterday’s edition clearly struck a chord with some readers, which is gratifying because I regard it as a radically undervalued phenomenon that is relevant to all aspects of the computerisation of work, and of course to many of the arguments currently going on about so-called ‘AI’.

Anthony Barnett (Whom God Preserve) wrote to say that the concept of tacit knowledge “was first developed as a working concept by Mike Cooley in his book Architect or Bee back in the 70s”. I haven’t read it but Anthony, who wrote the Foreword to the 1987 reissued edition of that book book, obviously knows Cooley’s thinking well.

I suppose that the qualification “working concept” may make Anthony’s claim for Cooley accurate, but “tacit knowing” — the idea that there is knowledge that cannot be adequately articulated by verbal means — is usually attributed to Michael Polyani’s 1968 book, Personal Knowledge, and some people have argued that it even goes back to a paper that the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle read in 1945 to the Aristotelian Society in London.

Simon Roberts, who used to work for the semiconductor giant Intel, wrote to say that

“your point about tacit knowledge in chip making made me think of my time at Intel in Leixlip where the relocation teams spent the lion’s share of their time moving large numbers of Fab [i.e. fabrication']engineers from location to location to ‘enskill’ local teams in a new Fab process. At any one point they were re-settling 50 odd people (and their families) from Israel to Leixlip, and then in time moving the Leixlip team to Arizona or Portland to bring the next team up to speed. They could ‘copy exactly’ the fabs but it was the people they needed to make the new equipment faultlessly churn out the wafers.”

Which supports the arguments made both by Harry Collins in his study of TEA-lasers, and by Chris Miller in his book on the politics of semiconductor manufacture.

Some readers were understandably puzzled by the idea that two companies of which they had never heard — ASML and TSMC — should somehow be the choke-points of the modern world. This is conventional wisdom for those of us who follow the tech industry, but it was remiss of me not to remember that most people have better things to do than follow this stuff.

For them, here’s a quick briefing.

ASML — Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography — is a Dutch company founded in 1984 which develops and makes the photolithography machines that are used to etch the most advanced silicon ships at the heart of all our computing devices. As Wikipedia puts it,

In these machines, patterns are optically imaged onto a silicon wafer that is covered with a film of light-sensitive material (photoresist). This procedure is repeated dozens of times on a single wafer. The photoresist is then further processed to create the actual electronic circuits on the silicon. The optical imaging that ASML’s machines deal with is used in the fabrication of nearly all integrated circuits and, as of 2011, ASML had 67 percent of the worldwide sales of lithography machines.

ASML is the most valuable company in Europe, with a stock-market valuation of around $200 billion.

TSMC is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and the world’s leading ‘silicon foundry’. According to Wikipedia,

TSMC is the first foundry to provide 7-nanometre and 5-nanometre (used by the 2020 Apple A14 and M1 SoC, as well as the MediaTek Dimensity 8100) production capabilities, and the first to commercialize extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology in high volume.

The idea of an iron-age concept like ‘foundry’ being applied to this extraordinary firm sounds quaint. But in a way it’s metaphorically accurate. Most advanced semiconductors (CPUs, graphics cards, etc.) are designed by companies like Apple in their Western redoubts. But they do not actually make the chips which embody their designs. Instead, they outsource the formidably demanding task of manufacturing them to foundries, of which TSMC is the pre-eminent one. The fact that TSMC is physically based in Taiwan — which the Chinese Communist Party regards as rightfully being a part of mainland China — is a matter of extreme concern to the West world. If the company’s fabrication facilities were to be destroyed in a Chinese invasion of the island, then the entire world would rapidly feel the effects on its IT infrastructure and development.

My commonplace booklet

Yesterday’s photograph of the front gate of Christ’s College reminded Andrew Ingram of a photograph of the same gate taken in 1979 with an interesting sign attached. The image is a bit blurry, but you get the message. There’s no knowing what students will get up to.

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The Golden Gate

Christ’s, Cambridge. Charles Darwin’s and John Milton’s college.

Quote of the Day

”Last week, in a series of interviews following the collapse of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and now-former chief executive officer of the Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange, attempted to engender sympathy and compassion in explaining why his company so spectacularly flamed out in November. Bankman-Fried’s public and seemingly calculated self-flagellation had all the hallmarks of the classic corporate apology: repeated mea culpas, dour-looking expressions, and, as has become too common in the tech world, dense and indecipherable industry jargon.

• Bloomberg’s Austin Carr, on Bankman-Fried’s apology tour, conducted from a $30m penthouse in the Bahamas. Fortunately, the US has an extradition treaty with the Bahamas, a tax-haven with some nice beaches attached.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

César Franck | Panis Angelicus / Patricia Janečková – sopráno

Link

There are so many recordings of this. The most eccentric one I found has Pavarotti and Sting. And the most OTT version is André Rieu’s (together with what looks like the massed bands of the Netherlands). Great tune, though.

Long Read of the Day

Tacit Knowledge

In her brief but enlightening review of Chris Miller’s Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, Diane Coyle (Whom God Preserve) notes that Miller provides

lots of great examples of the difficulty of copying advanced chip technology because of the necessary tacit knowledge: for instance, every AMSL photolithography machine comes with a lifetime supply of AMSL technicians to tend to it. This is either hopeful – China will find it hard to catch up fully – or not – the US or EU will not be able to catch up with TSMC because of the latter’s vast embedded know-how.

My guess is that many people who write about the geopolitics of chip production haven’t done too much thinking about the importance of tacit knowledge in technological (and scientific) progress. They think it’s all about building facilities, putting in the requisite capital investment, etc. And of course about the geopolitics of where chip fabrication facilities are located.

At the moment one of the two great chokepoints of the silicon chip supply chain — AMSL — is located in the Netherlands. The other — TSMC — is in Taiwan, which is of course a cause of increasing concern to Western countries. But location is only a part of the story. The other is the knowhow locked up in the heads of the people who work in these firms.

Diane’s reference to tacit knowledge made me think about the Masters thesis of the philosopher Harry Collins, in which he investigated how a particular technology, the TEA-laser, spread from physics lab to physics lab.

He talked about this in an interesting interview with Physics Today in 2021.

At the end of my master’s degree in sociology, I had to choose a topic for my dissertation, and I thought it would be interesting to go back into science labs. After some false starts I was introduced to some scientists who were trying to build a new kind of laser, called a transversely excited atmospheric pressure carbon dioxide laser, or TEA laser. I thought it would make an interesting master’s topic to see how people learned to build one of these lasers. What I had in mind is that I would study information transmission.

This perspective came through philosophers—Ludwig Wittgenstein and Thomas Kuhn. How do people come to accept what is true? In ordinary life it is a matter of social agreement, and so when I wandered into science labs, that question guided me.

Interviewer: What did you learn?

COLLINS: I was lucky because it happened that nobody could make the laser work if they hadn’t spent time in a laboratory that already had a working laser. There was very good information in the journals about how to build such a laser. But anybody who tried to put one together using written articles failed. They had something that looked like a laser on their bench, but it wouldn’t lase.

What people didn’t understand was that the inductance of the leads was important. If you’d been to somebody else’s lab, you would build a complicated metal framework to hold a big capacitor close to the top electrode. But if you were working from just a circuit diagram, you naturally put this big heavy thing on the bench, and the lead from the capacitor to the top electrode would be too long and have too high an inductance for the laser to work. That is the kind of thing that is involved in the transfer of tacit knowledge.

At some stage (I forget when or where) Harry proposed an insightful metaphor for the process of knowledge exchange which I’ve used ever since in supervising students. In formal knowledge-engineering exercises in the 1980s, researchers would interview experts to try to extract the rules or heuristics that they employed in their work — and then try to express those in computerised ’expert systems’ which would supposedly work, but often didn’t. Harry’s metaphor was that such interviewing methods are like straining dumpling soup through a colander: you get the dumplings, but you lose the soup. And it’s the soup you really need, because it’s the tacit knowledge.

Books, etc.

Eric Schliesser has written two critical pieces on Crooked Timber about William MacAskill’s book, What We Owe the Future, of which this is the second. What struck me after I’d read it was a comment by ‘Alex SL’ under the second essay:

The most interesting observation to me is the final one: “At present, society is still malleable and can be blown into many shapes [but]… at some point … it might set”.

This highly implausible statement must be motivated reasoning, because, if we think about it, for their ideology to make any sense, longtermists have to believe that the future is malleable now but will soon become set into a straight path. If one were to acknowledge that the distant future was still equally malleable by actors in a hundred years, or by actors in five hundred years, or by actors in one thousand years, with the possibility of contemporary achievements being reversed by some of those later actors, then one would immediately realise to what hilarious degree individual contemporary “moral entrepreneurs” or EA billionaires or philosophers overestimate their own ability to forecast and their own impact on the imagined shape of imaginary events happening millions of years from now. And also, in their arrogance, overestimate their influence compared to that of billions of others, who they effectively visualise and treat as non-player-characters, a form of dehumanising others.

And the insight that future actors still have the same freedom to shape their world as we do today might reduce the likelihood of a longtermist being considered a very important person right now or of somebody donating to MIRI [Machine Intelligence Research Institute] and similar undertakings, which is what matters to longtermists in practice. I am not even saying this in the sense of it all being a fraud (although I find it very, very difficult to believe that the likes of MacAskill and Bostrom can actually, really believe the stuff they argue for publicly, given that they are by all accounts smart people), but in the sense that in their own logic they need to gain such influence and funding to shape the future for what they see as the better. This is not the case for philosophies centred on becoming a better person oneself, for example.

Spot on.

My commonplace booklet

“Ladies in shorts
And gentlemen with naked torsos
Are invited to forbid themselves
To enter the Church”

Church Notice, French Pyrenees.

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Classical selfie

All that’s missing is a smartphone.

Seen in the gardens of Dartington Hall.

Quote of the Day

”The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.”

• Dylan Thomas, speaking of his native Wales.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett – Over the Rainbow (Tokyo 1984)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Heresy

Thoughtful essay by Paul Graham.

April 2022

One of the most surprising things I’ve witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth of the concept of heresy.

In his excellent biography of Newton, Richard Westfall writes about the moment when he was elected a fellow of Trinity College:

Supported comfortably, Newton was free to devote himself wholly to whatever he chose. To remain on, he had only to avoid the three unforgivable sins: crime, heresy, and marriage.

The first time I read that, in the 1990s, it sounded amusingly medieval. How strange, to have to avoid committing heresy. But when I reread it 20 years later it sounded like a description of contemporary employment.

There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for. Those doing the firing don’t use the word “heresy” to describe them, but structurally they’re equivalent. Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done…

One of the few interesting pieces I’ve read on a contemporary malaise.

Longtermism: how good intentions and the rich created a dangerous creed

Yesterday’s Observer column:

In the past few weeks a photograph of Tony Blair and his buddy Bill Clinton sharing a panel with a scruffy kid wearing a T-shirt, baggy shorts and trainers has been doing the rounds. The April event was in the Bahamas and funded by an outfit called FTX – a supposedly “user-friendly crypto exchange” – owned by the scruffy kid, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF from now on). Blair and Clinton are looking very pleased to be there, providing confirmation of the aphrodisiac effect of great wealth, because the lad who was playing host was apparently as rich as Croesus, or at any rate worth $32bn.

And this was real wealth, it seemed. After all, the venture capitalists at Sequoia – who had backed Silicon Valley success stories such as Google and PayPal – had given him the green light (as well as some of their investors’ money). A few months after Blair and Clinton made their pilgrimage to the sun-soaked and regulation-lite Bahamas, one of Sequoia’s partners offered a breathless endorsement of SBF and his crypto exchange. “Of the exchanges that we had met and looked at”, she wrote, “some of them had regulatory issues, some of them were already public. And then there was Sam.” And FTX, which, Sequoia felt, was “Goldilocks-perfect”.

And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. In fact it was effectively bankrupt. And it had been managed, said the administrator brought in to sort out the mess, using fraternity-house accounting principles – which kind-of squared with SBF’s sartorial style…

Do read the whole thing.

Books, etc.

Apropos my Observer column (see previous item), this review of the MacAskill book by Scott Alexander makes for interesting reading.

Mastodon and Twitter

From Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve):

Mastodon is like email and twitter got married and had a baby. Last night I posted a message to both Mastodon and Twitter saying how great M’s support for RSS is. Apparently a lot of people on Masto didn’t know about it and the response has been resounding. And the numbers are very lopsided. The piece has been “boosted” (the Masto equiv of RT) 1.1K times, yet I only have 3.7K followers there. Meanwhile on Twitter, where I have 69K followers, it has been RTd just 17 times. My feeling was previously that Mastodon was more alive, it’s good to have a number to put behind that.

Interesting, ne c’est pas?

Correction

The link in Friday’s edition to Kieran Healey’s blog post on the January 6 ‘insurrection’ was faulty. It should have been this.

Apologies. And thanks to the readers who pointed it out.

My commonplace booklet

MARMALADE

Ingredients: Sugar Oranges Conservatives

Jar Label, Hong Kong

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The Hall, in technicolour

Like me, William Davies (Whom God Preserve) loves Dartington Hall. And when I opened my laptop yesterday evening, this is what I found in an email from him. With this note attached:

So we are here again and after entering the arch we’re greeted by the quad in Christmas multicolour! The South Devon railway, with audio enhancement, sounding like the Polar Express in the background, and Jupiter above.

Good way to start December, eh?

Quote of the Day

”He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”

• Jonathan Swift, 1738

Agreed. Can’t stand the things.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett Solo

Link

One of my great regrets is that I could have gone to his Köln concert in 1975 and didn’t. (I was in Germany at the time within driving distance.) Sigh.

Long Read of the Day

What happened?

By Kieran Healy. A sociologist’s view of what happened in the January 2021 ‘insurrection’ in the run-up to Biden’s Inauguration. Written two day’s afterwards.

I don’t know what happened. But here’s my current theory of what the White House thought was going to happen. I don’t have any more information than you do, and here I’m not concerned with the broader question of how the country came to this end. I am just trying to make sense of what happened on Wednesday.

From the moment he knew he’d lost the presidential election, Trump absolutely wanted to get the result overturned. Some large proportion of his own staff and Congressional Republicans thought there was no harm in humoring him. Many surely knew him well enough to realize he was quite serious about it. But most, falling into a way of thinking that Trump has repeatedly benefited from over his entire career, and especially during his Presidency, figured that he could not possibly overcome the weight of institutional and conventional pressure behind the transition of power. Still, by the first week of January he had not relented in his efforts to find some way to do it, whether through bullying local election officials, chasing wild geese through the courts, or directly intimidating state officials. That all failed, or looked like failing. The next thing on the horizon was Electoral College certification.

So, Team Trump organized a big day of protest to coincide with the certification…

Read on. It’s perceptive, given that it was written just after the events in question.

Books, etc.

As you may remember, I was very impressed by Brad DeLong’s book, Slouching Towards Utopia and have been tracking the reviews via his blog. When I enthuse about the book to people they often ask for a thumbnail description (something like an elevator pitch, I suppose) and I struggle to come up with something compact and succinct. So I was pleased to discover yesterday that Brad now has one, courtesy of Robert Reich (who, if memory serves me right, was Secretary for Labor in Bill Clinton’s administration.

Anyway, here it is:

My thumbnail description—which Bob Reich suggested to me—is that, while we have made extraordinary progress at figuring out how to bake a sufficiently large economic pie so that, potentially, everyone can have enough, the problems of slicing and tasting that economic pie have completely flummoxed us. Thus while we are rich and powerful beyond the wildest dreams of avarice of previous centuries, that is all. We can neither equitably distribute our wealth nor properly utilize it to live wisely and well, so that people feel safe and secure, and live lives in which they are healthy and happy. To say “have not been distributed particularly evenly” and “our desires have grown” catches only half of it. Distribution has not been inept, but has been positively poisonous. And utilization has fallen vastly short not just because of our rising expectations: people 200 years ago would also have hoped along with us for a world in which they were not stalked by flying killer robots, and in which sinister people in steel and glass towers did not attempt to hypnotize them via dopamine loops to glue their eyes to screens in terror so they could be sold fake diabetes cures and crypto grifts.

That’ll do nicely.

My commonplace booklet

UNESCO lists the French baguette as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity

From Euronews…

Imagine the cliché of a French person, and you’ll probably picture someone carrying a baguette.

And rightly so – it’s a national treasure and nothing beats it, or that warm nostril-tingling waft of freshly baked bread as you enter a boulangerie.

Make no mistake: it’s less a baked good and more a way of life, a symbol of the French art of living.

Well, now the baguette has (finally) been inducted into the UNESCO World Heritage List. To be precise, the “Artisanal know-how and culture of baguette bread” has officially inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

I’m delighted by this elevation of the baguette. But it’s in no way “intangible”. That’ indeed’, is the whole point of it.

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Predictive Signology

You’ve heard of predictive policing, but how about this from Bath? And it was done long before the Queen died!

Thanks to Christopher Smart for the pic.

Quote of the Day

”War is capitalism with the gloves off.”

• Tom Stoppard

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Ruhe Sanft (Sleep Safely) | Mojca Erdmann

Link

This was new to me. It’s from Zaide. an unfinished opera by Mozart.

Long Read of the Day

If you’re puzzled about ‘blockchain’ then read this piece by Tim Bray — and relax. (The Andy Jassy to whom he refers in the first para is Amazon’s current CEO.)

At some point in mid-2016 I got hauled into a conversation with Andy Jassy. I can’t remember if it was video or f2f, can’t remember how many of his staff were there. There were four of us present who were senior techs, not Jassy staff. ¶

Andy is an outstanding communicator and was eloquent on this occasion. You have to understand that one of the most important parts of his job was listening to the CIOs and CTOs of huge enterprises explain their problems and concerns.

He said something like this: “All these leaders are asking me what our blockchain strategy is. They tell me that everyone’s saying it’s the future, the platform that’s going to obsolete everything else. I need to have a good answer for them. I’ll be honest, when they explain why it’s wonderful I just don’t get it. You guys got to go figure it out for us.”

Well, OK then. I can’t remember whether it was right there in the room or by email after a short caucus, we got back to Andy along the lines of “We mostly think it’s mostly bullshit and probably not strategic for AWS, but we’ll look harder.”

Before I move along, Dear Reader: There was a dead give-away in Andy’s presentation of the problem. I’ll get back to it later but do you see it?

Do read it. It’s great.

H/T to Charles Arthur, who spotted it first.

Building a PDP-11/70 Kit

If you’re a geek of a certain age, this is truly lovely. The DEC PDP11 was an iconic minicomputer on which many of my contemporaries cut their programming teeth. The one in my department was the size of a refrigerator and had the most compelling control panel with switches and blinkenlights! And it was so popular with students that it was hard to get any time on it.

Kieran Healey is Professor of Sociology at Duke University. His research is on the social organisation of exchange in human blood and human organs, cultural goods, software, and ideas. But in the pandemic he found that he had an interest in reviving old computers. And then he discovered that Oscar Vermeulen makes a fabulous little kit called the PiDP-11. It is a 6:10 scale replica of the PDP-11/70’s front panel. You assemble the board connect it to a Raspberry Pi via the Pi’s GPIO port. It runs some software that emulates the PDP’s operating system. The switches and LEDs and so on all function just as they would on the real machine. So he got one of the kits and set to work.

The blog post is an account of how he did it. And it includes a nice video of the device in action, sitting on a bookcase in his office. And he signs off with a nice message: “If anyone needs me, I’ll be running the inventory and payroll of a medium-sized business in 1974.”

Which indeed is what you could do with a PDP11 in the mid-1970s!

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Into the Light

Quote of the Day

”I believe in the Church, the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church; and nowhere does it exist.”

• William Temple, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942 (and was an outspoken advocate of social reform).

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton | San Francisco Bay Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online

Lovely piece by Will Douglas Heaven on the incurable tech hubris that surrounds all big machine-learning ‘language’ models.

On November 15 Meta unveiled a new large language model called Galactica, designed to assist scientists. But instead of landing with the big bang Meta hoped for, Galactica has died with a whimper after three days of intense criticism. On November 18 the company took down the public demo that it had encouraged everyone to try out. Like all language models, Galactica turned out to be “a mindless bot that cannot tell fact from fiction”.

It’s an interesting read, if only because it highlights the ability of smart and highly-paid software engineers to believe nonsense.

A mathematical puzzle

Why were these Chinese students protesting with a set of equations? What could it mean?

Answer: they’re the Friedmann equations which, as Wikipedia explains, are

“a set of equations in physical cosmology that govern the expansion of space in homogeneous and isotropic models of the universe within the context of general relativity. They were first derived by Alexander Friedmann in 1922 from Einstein’s field equations of gravitation for the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric and a perfect fluid with a given mass density ρ and pressure p.

Or might these clever students be saying “I am a freed man”?

Thanks to Alex Tabarrok for the link.

My commonplace booklet

 How gaslighting came to encapsulate the spirit of 2022

If you’re puzzled by the popularity of this word, then join the club. But Quartz has an explanation.

Gaslighting is not a new word—but it’s one that people have taken newfound interest in this year.

In 2022, searches for “gaslighting” increased 1740% year-on-year, according to Merriam-Webster. “In this age of misinformation—of ‘fake news,’ conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes—gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time,” the American publisher, well known for its dictionary, noted while announcing it as the word of the year.

According to Miriam-Webster, a well-known American dictionary compiler, it means:

1. psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.
2. the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.

In other words, common practice on social media.

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The Way In…

… to the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen.

Quote of the Day

”I went to Vietnam to take the train. People have done stranger things to that country.”

• Paul Theroux, 1975

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Lauridsen | O Magnum Mysterium | Nordic Chamber Choir

Link

Eerily beautiful. I’ve often heard it in the background of radio broadcasts and wondered what it was. Now I know.

Long Read of the Day

 Gone Bad, Come to Life

Extraordinary (and revelatory) reflections by Justin E.H. Smith on fermentation, distillation, sobriety — and ‘bucket lists’. Sample:

Is any product of bourgeois consumer ideology more noxious than the “bucket list”? At just the moment a person should be adjusting their orientation, in conformity with their true nature, to focus exclusively on the horizon of mortality, they are rudely solicited one last time, before it’s really too late, for a final blow-out tour of the amusement parks and spectacles that still held out some plausible hope of providing satisfaction back in ignorant youth, when life could still be imagined to be made up of such things. “Travel is a meat thing”, William Gibson wrote, to which we might add that the quest for new experiences in general is really only fitting for those whose meat is still fresh.

But our economic order cannot accept this. Capitalism obscures from view first the meaning of life, which properly understood is a preparation for death, and then it obscures the meaning of death, which properly understood is the all-surrounding horizon of a mortal life. Instead it portrays life as an opportunity to go to amusement parks and accumulate novelty foam hats and so on, which is silly enough, but then, at the end of it all, it has the audacity to portray death itself as an event of life, at which you would do best to arrive with all the right “souvenirs” (what a word: memory congealed into artifact!), all the right photos of the Grand Canyon or your Kenyan safari or whatever stored for you in your personal space in the “cloud”… stored for whom, now? For what? I will not venture any dogmatic claims here about the existence or non-existence of an afterlife, whether conceived as infinite duration or as a state outside of time.

What I will say, with as much certainty as I have about anything, is that death is not an event of life, it is not something you pass through and then keep going, and it certainly is not going to matter to you, when you’re dead, if you ever rode a camel or not. It might matter whether you loved another person with all your heart, whether you attained any lucidity about your mortal condition or only lived like a puffed-up fool (you will certainly not be riding your camel through the eye of any needle); it will not matter whether you fed a watermelon to a hippopotamus.

Amazing philosopher, who always comes up with something unexpected.

Mastodon’s Moment

An interesting conversation about comparing Twitter and Mastodon between two experienced journalists — Julia Angwin and Adam Davidson, who has set up a Mastodon server for hacks.

Sample:

Angwin: Can you talk more about how the platforms differ?

Davidson: I think the interface on Mastodon makes me behave differently. If I have a funny joke or a really powerful statement and I want lots of people to hear it, then Twitter’s way better for that right now. However, if something really provokes a big conversation, it’s actually fairly challenging to keep up with the conversation on Twitter. I find that when something gets hundreds of thousands of replies, it’s functionally impossible to even read all of them, let alone respond to all of them. My Twitter personality, like a lot of people’s, is more shouting.

Whereas on Mastodon, it’s actually much harder to go viral. There’s no algorithm promoting tweets. It’s just the people you follow. This is the order in which they come. It’s not really set up for that kind of, “Oh my god, everybody’s talking about this one post.” It is set up to foster conversation. I have something like 150,000 followers on Twitter, and I have something like 2,500 on Mastodon, but I have way more substantive conversations on Mastodon even though it’s a smaller audience. I think there’s both design choices that lead to this and also just the vibe of the place where even pointed disagreements are somehow more thoughtful and more respectful on Mastodon.

Interesting throughout. And squares with my impression of Mastodon.

My commonplace booklet

From Quentin’s blog:

Someone on Mastodon pointed out a useful thing today:

One mile per gallon is exactly the same thing as one furlong per pint.

So if anyone quotes their fuel consumption in furlongs-per-pint, you’ll now know what it means. Pleasingly, this works even in America.

Once you’ve impressed your friends at the pub with that one, you can point out that one mile per gallon is about 3 leagues per firkin.

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Morning has broken

Early morning at Dartington Hall, where we spent the weekend (as we generally try to do whenever we’re in Devon). It’s a wonderful place, with a fascinating history which is well recounted by Michael Young in his book, The Elmhirsts of Dartington.

Quote of the Day

”The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.”

• Jonathan Swift, 1711

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez | Chimes of Freedom

Link

Long Read of the Day

Building Fast and Slow: The Empire State Building and the World Trade Center

The astonishing story, told by Brian Potter, of how one of the modern world’s iconic buildings was constructed — on time and within budget.

The Empire State Building and the World Trade Center make for an interesting comparison. In many ways, they’re similar. They’re both iconic Manhattan skyscrapers (they were built just 3 miles apart) that sit right next to each other in the sequence of “world’s tallest building”. Both started out as projects aimed at creating (among other things) a large amount of commercial office space, and were later nudged by their owners into becoming the world’s tallest building. Both were completed in the midst of a severe economic downturn (the Great Depression and the 1973 Oil Shock, respectively), and took many years to be fully occupied. The Empire State Building would be only partially occupied through the 1930s (making money largely from visitors to the observation deck), and the owners were only saved from bankruptcy because the lender (MetLife) didn’t want the building. It wouldn’t start to turn a profit until after WWII. Similarly, the World Trade Center didn’t reach full occupancy in 1980. In both cases the building owners had to coerce government agencies to use much of the available space.

They also share an architectural genealogy – the architect of the World Trade Center, Minoru Yamasaki, had worked for several years at Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon, the architectural firm that designed the Empire State Building.

But in many ways they’re different. The Empire State Building is often the first example reached for by those nostalgic for an America that builds. Not only was it built impossibly fast by modern standards (less than a year from setting the first column to being completed), but it came in under budget, with its design becoming a widely praised example of Art Deco architecture.

The World Trade Center, on the other hand, was continuously mired in controversy and difficulty. It was slowed by lawsuits from displaced residents, political opposition from both New York and New Jersey, difficult site conditions, union strikes, and novel building systems and construction methods. From its conception in 1961 (and arguably even earlier) the project took more than 10 years to complete, going far over its planned schedule and budget.

Probably because I have an engineering background I’m a sucker for these kinds of stories. (One of my favourite books is David McCullough’s  Great Bridge, a riveting account of how the Brooklyn Bridge was built.)

Alexa, how did Amazon’s voice assistant rack up a $10bn loss?

Sometimes, invasions don’t work out as well as you hoped.

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Intrigued by an Ars Technica post about Amazon’s Alexa that suggested all was not well in the tech company’s division that looks after its smart home devices, I went rooting in a drawer where the Echo Dot I bought years ago had been gathering dust. Having found it, and set it up to join the upgraded wifi network that hadn’t existed when I first got it, I asked it a question: “Alexa, why are you such a loss-maker?” To which she calmly replied: “This might answer your question: mustard gas, also known as Lost, is manufactured by the United States.” At which point, I solemnly thanked her, pulled the power cable and returned her to the drawer, where she will continue to gather dust until I can think of an ecologically responsible way of recycling her…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

What is it with so-called ‘luxury’ wristwatches? Every weekend the Financial Times’s ‘How to Spend It’ supplement is full of advertisements for analogue timepieces costing half the GNP of smallish countries. Even more puzzling: some of these watches are billed as diver’s watches, waterproof down to formidable depths and pressures. But none of their wearers known to me has ever dived deeper than the average swimming pool.

A similar thing applies to fancy ‘aviator’ timepieces. A friend wears one made by Breitling which costs over five grand, and I know for sure that he doesn’t have a pilot’s licence. He may have logged a lot of hours in the air, but all of it has been in First or Business class.

So there’s no utilitarian rationale for these watches, which basically means that they’re just male jewellery.

Errata

There were two missing links last week.

1. The NYT report by Cade Metz and Ian Clontz on Tesla and the future of autonomous vehicles was here.
2. The link for Nancy Sinatra’s boots was here.

Apologies for both.

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