Quotulatiousness

September 16, 2024

Stephen Fry on artificial intelligence

Filed under: Books, History, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On his Substack, Stephen Fry has posted the text of remarks he made last week in a speech for King’s College London’s Digital Futures Institute:

Yes, I’m still 12

So many questions. The first and perhaps the most urgent is … by what right do I stand before you and presume to lecture an already distinguished and knowledgeable crowd on the subject of Ai and its meaning, its bright promise and/or/exclusiveOR its dark threat? Well, perhaps by no greater right than anyone else, but no lesser. We’ll come to whose voices are the most worthy of attention later.

I have been interested in the subject of Artificial Intelligence since around the mid-80s when I was fortunate enough to encounter the so-called father of Ai, Marvin Minsky and to read his book The Society of Mind. Intrigued, I devoured as much as I could on the subject, learning about the expert systems and “bundles of agency” that were the vogue then, and I have followed the subject with enthusiasm and gaping wonder ever since. But, I promise you, that makes me neither expert, sage nor oracle. For if you are preparing yourselves to hear wisdom, to witness and receive insight this evening, to bask and bathe in the light of prophecy, clarity and truth, then it grieves me to tell you that you have come to the wrong shop. You will find little of that here, for you must know that you are being addressed this evening by nothing more than an ingenuous simpleton, a naive fool, a ninny-hammer, an addle-pated oaf, a dunce, a dullard and a double-dyed dolt. But before you streak for the exit, bear in mind that so are we all, all of us bird-brained half-wits when it comes to this subject, no matter what our degrees, doctorates and decades of experience. I can perhaps congratulate myself, or at least console myself, with the fact that I am at least aware of my idiocy. This is not fake modesty designed to make me come across as a Socrates. But that great Athenian did teach us that our first step to wisdom is to realise and confront our folly.

I’ll come to the proof of how and why I am so boneheaded in a moment, but before I go any further I’d like to paint some pictures. Think of them as tableaux vivants played onto a screen at the back of your mind. We’ll return to them from time to time. Of course I could have generated these images from Midjourney or Dall-E or similar and projected them behind me, but the small window of time in which it was amusing and instructive for speakers to use Ai as an entertaining trick for talks concerning Ai has thankfully closed. You’re actually going to have to use your brain’s own generative latent diffusion skills to summon these images.

[…]

An important and relevant point is this: it wasn’t so much the genius of Benz that created the internal combustion engine, as that of Vladimir Shukhov. In 1892, the Russian chemical engineer found a way of cracking and refining the spectrum of crude oil from methane to tar yielding amongst other useful products, gasoline. It was just three years after that that Benz’s contraption spluttered into life. Germans, in a bow to this, still call petrol Benzin. John D. Rockefeller built his refineries and surprisingly quickly there was plentiful fuel and an infrastructure to rival the stables and coaching inns; the grateful horse meanwhile could be happily retired to gymkhanas, polo and royal processions.

Benz’s contemporary Alexander Graham Bell once said of his invention, the telephone, “I don’t think I am being overconfident when I say that I truly believe that one day there will be a telephone in every town in America”. And I expect you all heard that Thomas Watson, the founding father of IBM, predicted that there might in the future be a world market for perhaps five digital computers.

Well, that story of Thomas Watson ever saying such a thing is almost certainly apocryphal. There’s no reliable record of it. Ditto the Alexander Graham Bell remark. But they circulate for a reason. The Italians have a phrase for that: se non e vero, e ben trovato. “If it’s not true, it’s well founded.” Those stories, like my scenario of that group of early investors and journalists clustering about the first motorcar, illustrate an important truth: that we are decidedly hopeless at guessing where technology is going to take us and what it’ll do to us.

You might adduce as a counterargument Gordon Moore of Intel expounding in 1965 his prediction that semiconductor design and manufacture would develop in such a way that every eighteen months or so they would be able to double the number of transistors that could fit in the same space on a microchip. “He got that right,” you might say, “Moore’s Law came true. He saw the future.” Yes … but. Where and when did Gordon Moore foresee Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Bit Coin, OnlyFans and the Dark Web? It’s one thing to predict how technology changes, but quite another to predict how it changes us.

Technology is a verb, not a noun. It is a constant process, not a settled entity. It is what the philosopher-poet T. E. Hulme called a concrete flux of interpenetrating intensities; like a river it is ever cutting new banks, isolating new oxbow lakes, flooding new fields. And as far as the Thames of Artificial Intelligence is concerned, we are still in Gloucestershire, still a rivulet not yet a river. Very soon we will be asking round the dinner table, “Who remembers ChatGPT?” and everyone will laugh. Older people will add memories of dot matrix printers and SMS texting on the Nokia 3310. We’ll shake our heads in patronising wonder at the past and its primitive clunkiness. “How advanced it all seemed at the time …”

Those of us who can kindly be designated early adopters and less kindly called suckers remember those pioneering days with affection. The young internet was the All-Gifted, which in Greek is Pandora. Pandora in myth was sent down to earth having been given by the gods all the talents. Likewise the Pandora internet: a glorious compendium of public museum, library, gallery, theatre, concert hall, park, playground, sports field, post office and meeting hall.

Anger sells – “Words like ‘wrong’, ‘bad’, ‘awful’, ‘hate’, ‘sick’, ‘fight’, and ‘scary’ each predict a 2.3% increase in click-through rates”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Rob Henderson explains the incentives that lead to provoking as much anger as possible among readers (and especially voters):

It seems like people are angrier than ever. According to a poll by CBS News, 84 percent of Americans believe we are angrier than previous generations. Another survey recently found that nine in ten Americans can name either a recent news event or something about American politics that made them angry, while only half could identify a recent news event or something about American politics that made them proud.

What explains this feeling of rage? One noteworthy reason is that exploiting anger is politically convenient.

The strategic use of anger in politics has transformed it from a natural human emotion into a weapon of division, with far-reaching consequences for our social cohesion and democratic governance.

According to Steven Webster, author of “American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics” and assistant professor of political science at Indiana University, “Anger provides ample benefits to those politicians who are able to use it most skillfully”.

Indeed, across political settings, angry people are more likely to vote than those who are not angry. In other words, politicians who can stoke anger can use it to motivate their base. The angrier voters are at the opposing party, the more likely they are to show up to the polls to support their own party. As Webster puts it, “angry voters are loyal voters”.

Political anger has consequences that extend beyond how Americans view their governing institutions or the opposing political party. When American voters are angry about politics, they are inclined to avoid social interactions or social events where they are likely to come into contact with those whose political leanings differ from their own.

In a chapter titled “Emotions in Politics” published last year, the psychologists Florian van Leeuwen and Michael Bang Peterson suggest that along with other emotions, anger “seems to be a distinct strategy for increasing what one is entitled to in the minds of others”.

Provoking rage against selected groups is an effective way to promote unity in politics. Today, many Americans across the political spectrum are encouraged to feel they are being victimized. It’s no coincidence that one of Donald Trump’s go-to lines on the campaign trail is “They’re laughing at us”. Being laughed at induces humiliation, which often quickly transforms into rage.

In a notable historical illustration of a political movement using anger as a limitless source of ideological fuel, consider the case of the “Recalling Bitterness” campaign in Maoist China. In the 1960s, the communist dictator Mao Zedong grew worried that ordinary Chinese citizens were developing lukewarm attitudes about the socialist revolution. In response, the regime forced people into rituals in which they publicly announced how bad life was before they had been liberated. Mao ordered writers and artists to rewrite history through the lens of class struggle to suit the needs of his political agenda. Regime officials held meetings encouraging peasants to describe how much better life was now compared to pre-liberation, hoping to convince them that the revolution’s successes outnumbered its failures. The “devils” here were reactionaries, landlords, rich farmers, and counterrevolutionaries. Documenting the rituals of the Recalling Bitterness campaign, the historian Guo Wu has written, “Only poor peasants were allowed to speak; former landlords and rich peasants were silenced”.

September 10, 2024

“The world has gone mad. But nothing is as crazy as the AI news”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia is covering the AI beat like nobody else. In this post he shares several near-term predictions involving AI development and deployment:

The world has gone mad. But nothing is as crazy as the AI news.

Every day those AI bots and their human posse of true believers get wilder and bolder — and recently they’ve been flexing like body builders on Muscle Beach.

The results are sometimes hard to believe. But all this is true:

We truly live in interesting times — which is one of the three apocryphal Chinese curses.

(The other two, according to Terry Pratchett, are: “May you come to the attention of those in authority” and “May the gods give you everything you ask for”. By tradition, the last is the most dangerous of all.)

I get some credit for anticipating this. On August 4, I made the following prediction:

But it’s going to get even more interesting, and very soon. That’s because the next step in AI has arrived — the unleashing of AI agents.

And like the gods, these AI agents will give us everything we ask for.

Up until now, AI was all talk and no action. These charming bots answered your questions, and spewed out text, but were easy to ignore.

That’s now changing. AI agents will go out in the world and do things. That’s their new mission.

It’s like giving unreliable teens the keys to the family car. Up until now we’ve just had to deal with these resident deadbeats talking back, but now they are going to smash up everything in their path.

But AI agents will be even worse than the most foolhardy teen. That’s because there will be millions of these unruly bots on our digital highways.

September 8, 2024

Ancient sources

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Middle East, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In writing history from the early modern period onward, it’s a common problem to have too many sources for a given event so that it’s the job of the historian to (carefully, one hopes) select the ones that hew closer to the objective truth. In ancient history, on the other hand, we have so few sources to rely upon that it’s a luxury to have multiple accounts of a given event from which to choose:

Unrolled papyrus scroll recovered from the Villa of the Papyri.
Picture published in a pamphlet called “Herculaneum and the Villa of the Papyri” by Amedeo Maiuri in 1974. (Wikimedia Commons)

We used to play this game in graduate school: find one, lose one. Find one referred to finding a lost ancient text, something that we know existed at one time because other ancient sources talk about it, but which has been lost to the ages. What if someone was digging somewhere in Egypt and found an ancient Greco-Roman trash dump with a complete copy of a precious text – which one would we wish into survival? Lose one referred to some ancient text we have, but we would give up in some Faustian bargain to resurrect the former text from the dead. Of course there is a bit of the butterfly effect; that’s what made it fun. As budding classicists, we grew up in an academic world where we didn’t have A, but did have B. How different would classical scholarship be if that switched? If we had had A all along, but never had B? For me, the text I always chose to find was a little-known pamphlet circulated in the late fourth century by a deposed Spartan king named Pausanias. It’s one of the few texts about Sparta written by a Spartan while Sparta was still hegemonic. I always lost the Gospel of Matthew. It’s basically a copy of Mark, right down to the grammar and syntax. Do we really need two?

What would you choose? Consider that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are only two of the poems that make up the eight-part Epic Cycle. Or that Aristotle wrote a lost treatise on comedy, not to mention his own Socratic dialogues that Cicero described as a “river of gold”. Or that only eight of Aeschylus’s estimated 70 plays survive. Even the Hebrew Old Testament refers to 20 ancient texts that no longer exist. There are literally lost texts that, if we had them, would in all likelihood have made it into the biblical canon.

The problem is more complex than the fact that many texts were lost to the annals of history. Most people just see the most recent translation of the Iliad or works of Cicero on the shelf at a bookstore, and assume that these texts have been handed down in a fairly predictable way generation after generation: scribes faithfully made copies from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages and eventually, with the advent of the printing press, reliable versions of these texts were made available in the vernacular of the time and place to everyone who wanted them. Onward and upward goes the intellectual arc of history! That’s what I thought, too.

But the fact is, many of even the most famous works we have from antiquity have a long and complicated history. Almost no text is decoded easily; the process of bringing readable translations of ancient texts into the hands of modern readers requires the cooperation of scholars across numerous disciplines. This means hours of hard work by those who find the texts, those who preserve the texts, and those who translate them, to name a few. Even with this commitment, many texts were lost – the usual estimate is 99 percent – so we have no copies of most of the works from antiquity.1 Despite this sobering statistic, every once in a while, something new is discovered. That promise, that some prominent text from the ancient world might be just under the next sand dune, is what has preserved scholars’ passion to keep searching in the hope of finding new sources that solve mysteries of the past.

And scholars’ suffering paid off! Consider the Villa of the Papyri, where in the eighteenth century hundreds, if not thousands, of scrolls were discovered carbonized in the wreckage of the Mount Vesuvius eruption (79 AD), in a town called Herculaneum near Pompeii. For over a century, scholars have hoped that future science might help them read these scrolls. Just in the last few months – through advances in computer imaging and digital unwrapping – we have read the first lines. This was due, in large part, to the hard work of Dr. Brent Seales, the support of the Vesuvius Challenge, and scholars who answered the call. We are now poised to read thousands of new ancient texts over the coming years.

[…]

Now let’s look at a text with a very different history, the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia. The Hellenica Oxyrhynchia is the name given to a group of papyrus fragments found in 1906 at the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, modern Al-Bahnasa, Egypt (about a third of the way down the Nile from Cairo to the Aswan Dam). These fragments were found in an ancient trash heap. They cover Greek political and military history from the closing years of the Peloponnesian War into the middle of the fourth century BC. In his Hellenica, Xenophon covers the exact same time frame and many of the same events.2 Both accounts pick up where Thucydides, the leading historian of the Peloponnesian War (fought between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BC), leaves off.

While no author has been identified for the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, the grammar and style date the text to the era of the events it describes. This is a recovered text, meaning it was completely lost to history and only discovered in the early twentieth century. Here, the word discovered is appropriately used, as this was not a text that was renowned in ancient times. No ancient historians reference it, and it did not seem to have a lasting impact in its day. What is dismissible in the past is forgotten in the present. The text is written in Attic Greek. This implies that whoever wrote the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia must have been an elite familiar enough with the popular Attic style to replicate it, and likely intended for the history to equal those of Thucydides and Xenophon. There were other styles available to use at the time but Attic Greek was the style of both the aforementioned historians, as well as the writing style of the elite originating in Athens. Any history not written in Attic would have been seen as inferior. Given that the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia was lost for thousands of years, it would seem our author failed in his endeavor to mirror the great historians of classical Greece.

The Hellenica Oxyrhynchia serves as a reminder that the modern discovery of ancient texts continues. Many times, these are additional copies of texts we already have. This is not to say these copies are not important. Such was the case of the aforementioned Codex Siniaticus, discovered by biblical scholar Konstantin von Tischendorf in a trash basket, waiting to be burned, in a monastery near Mount Sinai in Egypt in 1844. Upon closer examination, Tischendorf discovered this “trash” was in fact a nearly complete copy of the Christian Bible, containing the earliest complete New Testament we have. One major discrepancy is that the famous story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery – from which the oft-quoted passage “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” originates – is not found in the Codex Sinaiticus.

Yet, sometimes something truly new to us, that no one has seen for thousands of years, is unearthed. In the case of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, no one seemingly had looked at this text for at least 1,500 years, maybe more. This demonstrates that there is always the possibility that buried in some ancient scrap heap in the desert might be a completely new text that, once published for wider scholarship, greatly increases our knowledge of the ancients.

How does this specific text increase our knowledge? Bear in mind that before this period of Greek history, we have just one historian per era. Herodotus is the only source we have for the Greco-Persian Wars (480–479), and the aforementioned Thucydides picks up from there and quickly covers the political climate before beginning his history proper with the advent of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC. But Thucydides’s history is unfinished – one ancient biography claims he was murdered on his way back to Athens around 404 BC. Many doubt this, citing evidence that he lived into the early fourth century BC. Either way, his narrative ends abruptly. Xenophon picks it up from there, and later we get a more brief history of this period from Diodorus, who wrote much later, between 60 and 30 BC. While describing the same time frame and many of the same events, these two sources vary widely in their descriptions of certain events. In some cases, they make mutually exclusive claims. One historian must have got it wrong.

For centuries, Xenophon’s account was the preferred text. That is not to say Diodorus’s history was dismissed, but when the two accounts were in conflict, Xenophon’s testimony got the nod. This was partially because Xenophon actually lived during the times he wrote about, whereas Diodorus lived 200 years after these events in Greek history. Consider if there were two conflicting accounts of the Battle of Gettysburg from two different historians: one actually lived during and participated in the war, while the other was a twenty-first century scholar living 150 years after the events he describes. They disagree on key elements of the battle. Who do you believe? This was precisely the case with Xenophon and Diodorus. Yet, once the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia was published, it corroborated Diodorus’s history far more than that of Xenophon, forcing historians to reconsider their bias toward the older of the two accounts.

    1. You can find a list of texts we know that we have lost at the Wikipedia page “Lost literary work“.

    2. “Oxyrhynchus Historian”, in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, ed. MC Howatson (Oxford University Press, 2011).

August 29, 2024

Pavel Durov’s arrest isn’t for a clear crime, it’s for allowing everyone access to encrypted communications services

Filed under: France, Government, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Tuccille explains the real reason the French government arrested Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram:

It’s appropriate that, days after the French government arrested Pavel Durov, CEO of the encrypted messaging app Telegram, for failing to monitor and restrict communications as demanded by officials in Paris, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that his company, which owns Facebook, was subjected to censorship pressures by U.S. officials. Durov’s arrest, then, stands as less of a one-off than as part of a concerted effort by governments, including those of nominally free countries, to control speech.

“Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov is expected to appear in court Sunday after being arrested by French police at an airport near Paris for alleged offences related to his popular messaging app,” reported France24.

A separate story noted claims by Paris prosecutors that he was detained for “running an online platform that allows illicit transactions, child pornography, drug trafficking and fraud, as well as the refusal to communicate information to authorities, money laundering and providing cryptographic services to criminals”.

Freedom for Everybody or for Nobody

Durov’s alleged crime is offering encrypted communications services to everybody, including those who engage in illegality or just anger the powers that be. But secure communications are a feature, not a bug, for most people who live in a world in which “global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023”, according to Freedom House. Fighting authoritarian regimes requires means of exchanging information that are resistant to penetration by various repressive police agencies.

“Telegram, and other encrypted messaging services, are crucial for those intending to organise protests in countries where there is a severe crackdown on free speech. Myanmar, Belarus and Hong Kong have all seen people relying on the services,” Index on Censorship noted in 2021.

And if bad people occasionally use encrypted apps such as Telegram, they use phones and postal services, too. The qualities that make communications systems useful to those battling authoritarianism are also helpful to those with less benign intentions. There’s no way to offer security to one group without offering it to everybody.

As I commented on a post on MeWe the other day, “Somehow the governments of the west are engaged in a competition to see who can be the most repressive. Canada and New Zealand had the early lead, but Australia, Britain, Germany, and France have all recently moved ahead in the standings. I’m not sure what the prizes might be, but I strongly suspect “a bloody revolution” is one of them (if not all of them).”

August 21, 2024

The Great Enshittification – technological progress is now actually regressing

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia provides ten reasons why all our lovely shiny technological improvements have turned into a steady stream of enshittified “updates” that reduce functionality, add unwanted “improvements” and make things significantly less reliable:

By my measure, this reversal started happening around a decade ago. If I had to sum things up in a conceptual chart, it would look like this:

The divergence was easy to ignore at first. We’re so familiar with useful tech that many of us were slow to notice when upgrades turned into downgrades.

But the evidence from the last couple years is impossible to dismiss. And we can’t blame COVID (or other extraneous factors) any longer. Technology is increasingly making matters worse, not better — and at an alarming pace.

[…]

But I have avoided answering, up until now, the biggest question — which is why is this happening?

Or, to be more specific, why is this happening now?

Until recently, most of us welcomed innovation, but something changed. And now a huge number of people are anxious and fearful about the same tech companies they once trusted.

What caused this shift?

That’s a big issue. Unless we understand how things went wrong, we can’t begin to fix them. Otherwise we’re just griping — about bad software or greedy CEOs or whatever.

It’s now time to address the causes, not just complain about symptoms.

Once we do that, we can move to the next steps, namely outlining a regimen for recovery and an eventual cure.

So let me try to lay out my diagnosis as clearly as I can. Below are the ten reasons why tech is now breaking bad.

I apologize in advance for speaking so bluntly. Many will be upset by my frankness. But the circumstances — and the risks involved — demand it.

August 20, 2024

QotD: The printing press was to the Reformation what social media is in the Current Year

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Quotations, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Consider the Reformation. I’m in no way qualified to walk you through all the various doctrinal issues, but in this case a superficial analysis is not only sufficient, it’s actually better. Instead of getting lost in the theological weeds, I want to focus on the process. So let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that nothing Luther said was all that original, theologically — you can find pretty much any tenet of “Lutherism” (as it then was) somewhere in the past, often among the Church Fathers (the “double predestination” that drove Calvinists insane is straight out of St. Augustine, for example). Wyclif, Hus, Nicholas of Cusa, Marsilius of Padua, all those guys were proto-Luthers, at least in part.

The thing about Luther, then, wasn’t what he said, so much as how he said it.

Martin Luther was the world’s first spin doctor. Though he insisted for a long time that his famous 95 Theses were, and were always intended to be, a scholastic debate between clergymen, Luther mastered the use of printed propaganda. His opponents soon followed, or tried to, in an ever-increasing spiral of printed viciousness. Mutatis mutandis, the exchanges between Luther, Erasmus, Thomas More (to say nothing of a thousand lesser lights) and their opponents all sound shockingly Current Year. They’re snarky and waspish at best, grotesque ad hominem at worst. Modern flame wars have nothing on the way Thomas More and William Tyndale tore into each other, for instance, and More and Tyndale were rank amateurs compared to Luther.

As with the Current Year, where being first on social media is the only criterion that matters, so the printing press injected something very like “hot takes” into the late-Medieval intellectual atmosphere. If you tried to respond to your opponents the old-fashioned way — with closely reasoned, heavily cited arguments, on parchment, hand-copied by monks — you might win the intellectual battle … 500 years later, among historians who thank you for providing such a useful glimpse into late-Medieval mentalités, but in your own time you’d get fired at best, get burned at the stake at worst, if you didn’t respond instantly, in kind.

The printing press, in other words, represented a quantum leap in the velocity of information. Those who grasped its fundamentals prospered, while those who fell behind perished. King Henry VIII, for instance, fatally damaged his cherished intellectual reputation when he deigned to attack to Luther in person. Luther hit back with a tirade that wouldn’t be out of place on Twitter1, and Henry responded in kind, and now the king, who was hip-deep in self-inflicted shit by that point, had to drop the fight. Having been publicly abused by a mere ex-monk, he had to quit the field with his tail between his legs.

Severian, “Velocity of Information”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-10.

    1. Again, mutatis mutandis. Though this sounds to modern ears like an abject apology on Luther’s part (“especially as I am the offscouring of the world, a mere worm who ought only to live in contemptuous neglect”, etc.), in context it’s a vicious attack. For one thing, what’s a great king like Henry doing responding to a “mere worm”? And Henry had to know, since Wolsey did nothing without his master’s orders … except everyone had heard the rumors that Henry was just a dimwitted playboy, and Cardinal Wolsey was really the king in all but name, so maybe he didn’t know. Either way Henry, who prided himself on being an intellectual, was a fool. That’s the kind of thing that would get you executed in the 16th century, and here’s this “mere worm” publishing it, for all the world to see, with no possibility of reprisal from a supposedly puissant monarch.

August 17, 2024

Twit/X – Hellsite or online Hotel California?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ed West on the odd phenomenon of people loudly claiming they’ve had it with “this hellsite” and that they’re decamping to social-media-site-of-the-minute, yet in many, many cases they’re back on “this hellsite” not very long afterwards:

There was something of a trend in the late 2000s for former hell-raising journalists to start more sedate publications because they felt that society was changing, and people didn’t want to drink and party as much as they used to. It was heralded as the end of the “new lad” and the rise of a more mature outlook among men, largely by culture journalists whose job it is to invent societal trends.

And I remember reading these articles and always thinking “isn’t this just you getting old?” None of my friends go out and get pissed four times a week anymore — what does this say about British society?

I’ve long felt the same about Twitter, that while it’s immensely useful as a resource for news and information, and interacting with friends, I’ve got to the stage where it’s not fun. But that’s probably just middle age, and at a certain point people should avoid too much time joking around on social media, lest they become Facebook boomer memes. (Or, in Britain, go to jail.)

This week I was on the Spectator Americano podcast talking about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, following my recent post on how he had changed the nature of the place. (I promise this is the last time I write about every journalist’s favourite social media site for at least two weeks.)

Everyone claims to hate Twitter, I pointed out, but they never leave. I actually started writing this piece a few months back, and noted that many people have bailed out from “X”, as no one calls it, among them academic Kathleen Stock, satirist Andrew Doyle and Labour politician Dawn Butler.

I’ve had to rewrite this because I think they’re all back now. In fact almost everyone who leaves the Hellsite soon returns; it’s a running joke, because we’re all addicted. I checked in on Threads the other day and it was full of people expressing their relief about breaking their Twitter habit and finding a new home. We shall see.

Others, like Alastair Campbell, have set up accounts on Bluesky but still proclaim their intention to stay on Twitter to fight the far-Right. Okay, sure.

Stock and Doyle seemed to be leaving in part because of the toxicity of their own side, in their case gender-critical feminists, and this kind of unpleasantness can indeed feel worse than when it comes from opponents. Watching online debates about immigration, for instance, I’m often reminded of GK Chesterton’s famous quote about pity and truth:

    The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

On one side will be vaguely establishment figures repeating arguments that feel warm-hearted and kind but also untrue, and on the other, mostly anonymous users citing a wealth of studies to show that the situation is actually much worse than that, and clearly having better arguments, while often being incredibly unpleasant and personal to the journalists involved. The fact that anonymous users are often the most informed and insightful accounts adds to the Chestertonian feel.

August 16, 2024

After the Trump livestream, Elon Musk’s been “charged with coercive chuckling, a legal first”

Filed under: Government, Law, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray has been following the legal sideshow of the United Auto Workers union filing charges with the US National Labour Relations Board (NLRB), alleging that Trump and Musk made threats against organized labour during the recent livestreamed event:

The UAW complaints against Tesla and Trump for President 2024 have been listed on the NLRB website. They really did it, and I got it wrong. The delay in listing the complaints, and the lunacy of the charges, led me to the wrong conclusion. The complaints are real: there are forms with vague and obviously ridiculous complaints on them, and they filed the things.

But they’re still functionally fake, and they’ll die quickly. Anti-Trump organizations have been doing this for years, without success; this is the third complaint filed with the NLRB against Trump campaign organizations.

In the first of those previous cases, the NLRB raised the obvious question about jurisdiction, expressing doubt (“without deciding”) that they can police presidential campaigns using labor law:

The NLRB has previously declined to pursue labor complaints against Trump for President, and the UAW has filed a labor complaint against Trump for President. We can make educated guesses about what happens next. I’ve emailed professors who teach labor law to ask them if the National Labor Relations Act governs the political speech of presidential candidates, but they haven’t responded.

As for the complaint against Tesla, Elon Musk had a livestreamed discussion with Donald Trump in which Trump said that striking workers should be fired; Musk laughed, but didn’t say anything in response. This news report includes audio of that exchange. The complaint alleges that Musk therefore made coercive statements

August 10, 2024

British NPCs have all downloaded the latest patch – “Spaceship Man Bad!”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elon Musk is the new Emmanuel Goldstein for British NPCs:

I always knew Britain’s liberals were secretly illiberal. That our chattering classes who genuflect at the altar of “human rights” would happily snatch away the rights of anyone who says something offensive online. That these dwellers of the leafy suburbs who weep over the jailing of dissidents in China will chortle over the sacking or blacklisting of dissidents at home, whether it’s women who think you can’t have a knob and be a lesbian or ex-Muslims whose criticisms of Islam are a tad too salty. And yet even I’ve been shocked by their frothing rage against Elon Musk in recent days. By their priestly demands that X be censured and possibly even wiped from the web. It’s one of the most batshit things I’ve seen in ages.

It’s not enough to call this a “mask-off moment”. It’s more like the phoney liberals have ripped their masks to shreds and stomped them into the dirt for good measure. Their rage is linked to the riots currently rocking the UK. Musk’s own tweets, they say, not least his chatter about Britain being on the road to “civil war”, have helped to whip up the mayhem. Worse, his “free-speech absolutism”, as one “liberal” magazine snottily refers to it, has meant that every tosser with a smartphone has been able to tweet their inflammatory views on the riots and even to spread misinformation. In essence, says a writer for the Guardian, Musk has been “leading from behind on UK thuggery and race riots”.

Got that? The reason Britain is going to shit is not because of any internal rot but because a billionaire in Texas said “civil war” on the internet. Glad we cleared that up. Even worse than the great and the good’s shameless deflection tactics – where they try to pin the blame for their own failures on a foreigner with money – is their tinpot solutions to this supposed problem. It might be time, says that sexagenarian Marxian in a leather jacket, Paul Mason, to “pull the plug” on X entirely. Yesteryear’s tyrants smashed up printing presses and chased booksellers out of town – today’s want to switch off a website on which no fewer than half a billion souls regularly share their thoughts and feelings.

They really have taken leave of their senses. Musk’s “horrific version of Twitter” is “a bit like Paris under Nazi occupation”, says Peter Jukes of Byline Times, the preferred publication of rich liberals who’ve been in a state of red mist since the plebs voted for Brexit eight years ago. Just like Paris in the 1940s, says Jukes, some are fleeing Musk’s X, while others are sticking around to “work for liberation”. The narcissism of it. Imagine thinking that keeping your X account open so you can continue spouting bollocks in your echo chamber is as brave as when Parisians stayed in Paris to resist Nazi rule.

Any mention of the Nazis is usually a reliable sign of madness. And so it is with the outburst of Muskphobia among Britain’s influencers. Musk’s antics on X led “straight to” rioting in the UK, says Will Hutton of the Observer (my italics). Do they really believe this? Do they really believe the reason that young shirtless fella looted the Greggs in Hull is because Elon Musk said “#TwoTierKeir” on X? Apparently they do. And there’s only one solution. “Pass a bill closing down Twitter in the UK”, says barrister and arch Remoaner Jessica Simor. That she said this on Twitter at least provided us with fleeting comic relief amid the elite’s lunacy. Does she know she can deactivate her account? Can someone tell her?

It’s the haughtiness of Britain’s influential haters of Musk that is most irksome. Alastair Campbell accused Musk of talking “utter shite” about Britain and its riots. That’s big talk from the undisputed king of shite, the man whose BS about Iraq helped to start a war in which tens of thousands of Arabs perished. Look, I know Musk’s words hurt liberals’ feelings, but at least they don’t hurt people’s lives and limbs.

“Elon Musk’s menace to democracy is intolerable”, pronounced Edward Luce of the Financial Times. That’s the paper that regularly made the case for overthrowing the largest democratic vote in British history. “Democracies can no longer ignore” the threat posed by Musk’s X, says Luce. I don’t like the term dogwhistle, but this is a tyranny dogwhistle, isn’t it? It’s a nod and a wink at “democracies” to clamp down on the “menace” of unfettered online speech. Lewis Goodall of The News Agents – a podcast hosted by ex-BBC staff for whom the BBC wasn’t quite wanky enough – wonders if “unmediated platforms” like Musk’s X are “beyond redemption”. “Should we stop using it?”, he wonders. Please, yes.

August 7, 2024

Maxims in the Skies: the German LMG 08/15

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Apr 24, 2024

As soon as the MG08/15 “light” machine gun was adopted by Germany, it was recognized as an ideal basis for an aircraft gun. Weight was of the essence for WW1 aircraft, and a lightened Maxim was just the thing to use. So the Spandau Arsenal began producing the LMG08/15 (the “L” in which might stand for either air-cooled or lightweight; we really don’t know which) in May 1916. In addition to cutting a ton of lightening slots in the water jacket, the guns also had mechanisms added to allow a pilot to cycle both the bolt and the feed system from behind the gun (something not possible with a standard ground model). The example we are looking at today has a great example of an early style of such device completely intact …
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August 6, 2024

The CrowdStrike outage and regulatory capture

Filed under: Business, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Peter Jacobsen discusses the July technical and financial fiasco as a faulty software patch from CrowdStrike took down huge segments of the online economy and how regulatory capture may explain why the outage was so widespread:

“CrowdStrike outage at Woolworths in Palmerston North” by Kiwi128 is marked with CC0 1.0 .

On July 19th, something peculiar struck workers and consumers around the world. A global computer outage brought many industries to a sudden halt. Employees at airports, financial institutions, and other businesses showed up to work only to find that they had no access to company systems. The fallout of the outage was huge. Experts estimate that it totaled businesses $5 billion in direct costs.

The company responsible, CrowdStrike, was also severely impacted. Shareholders lost about $25 billion in value, and some are suing the company. The outage has led to expectations of, and calls for, stricter regulations in the industry.

But how did the blunder of one company lead to such a massive outage? It turns out that the supposed solution of “regulation” may have been one of the primary culprits.

Regulatory Compliance

CrowdStrike, ironically, is a cybersecurity firm. In theory, they protect business networks and provide “cloud security” for online cloud computing systems.

Cloud security, in and of itself, is likely a service that businesses would demand on the market, but the benefit of increased security isn’t the only reason that businesses go to CrowdStrike. On their own website, the company boasts about one of its most important features: regulatory compliance.

[…]

When experts who have relationships with companies are called in to help write regulations, they may do so in a way favorable to industry insiders rather than outsiders. Thus, regulation is “captured” by the subjects of regulation.

We can’t say with certainty that this particular outage is the result of an intentional regulatory capture by CrowdStrike, but it seems clear that CrowdStrike’s dominance is, at least in part, a result of the regulatory environment, and, like most large tech companies, they’re not afraid to spend money lobbying.

In any case, without cumbersome regulations, it’s unlikely that cybersecurity would take on such a centralized form. Despite this, as is often the case, issues caused by regulation often lead to more calls for regulation. As economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out:

    Popular opinion ascribes all these evils to the capitalistic system. As a remedy for the undesirable effects of interventionism they ask for still more interventionism. They blame capitalism for the effects of the actions of governments which pursue an anti-capitalistic policy.

So despite the reflexive call for regulation that happens after any disaster, perhaps the best way to avoid problems like this would be to argue that in terms of regulation, less is more.

Me262 – Why It Was Rubbish

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

HardThrasher
Published Feb 16, 2024

A brief and sober discussion of the multi-faceted nature of aircraft development in the 3rd Reich, and an assessment of the aircraft itself in context of the political and organisational challenges and changes from 1939-1945. Or to put it another way, why it was rubbish from start to finish.

Timestamps
00:00 – 00:22 – Trailer
00:22 – 01:49 – Introduction
01:49 – 05:14 – Willy Messerschmitt’s World Falls Apart
05:18 – 08:03 – Udet’s Flying Circus
08:07 – 11:26 – Me262’s Development
11:26 – 11:32 – Popcorn
11:33 – 13:37 – The Me163 Affair
13:42 – 19:30 – Milch Tries to Break His Willy
19:33 – 30:18 – Hitler’s Big Brain Moment
30:21 – 42:03 – Speeds and Feed of the Me262
42:05 – 46:53 – Operational History
46:54 – 48:50 – Survivor’s Club
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August 5, 2024

Short-term technological forecast – “If I were a commercial pilot, I’d tell you to return to your seats and buckle up”

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Most of this Ted Gioia post is behind the paywall (and if you can afford it, I’m sure you’d get your money’s worth for a subscription):

I anticipate extreme turbulence on every front for the remaining five months in 2024. You will see it in politics, business, economics, culture, world affairs, the stock market, and maybe even your own neighborhood.

That’s one of the themes of my latest arts and culture update below.

What happened to the AI business model last week?

After almost two years of hype, the media changed its opinion on AI last week.

The hype disappeared almost overnight

All of a sudden, news articles about AI went sour like reheated 7-Eleven coffee. The next generation AI chips are delayed, and 70% of companies are behind in their AI plans. There are good reasons for this — most workers now say AI makes them less productive.

People are also noticing that AI businesses want to use the entire electricity grid to run their money-losing bots. Meanwhile AI companies are burning through cash at historic levels. Even under the best case scenario, this all feels unsustainable.

But the worst disclosure, in my opinion, came on July 24 — just eleven days ago.

A study published in Nature showed that when AI inputs are used to train AI, the results collapse into gibberish.

This is a huge issue. AI garbage is now everywhere in the culture, and most of it undisclosed. So there’s no way that AI companies can remove it from future training inputs.

They are caught in the doom loop I described last week.

That same day, the Chief Investment Officer at Morgan Stanley warned investors that AI “hasn’t really driven revenues and earnings anywhere”. One day later, Goldman Sachs quietly released a report admitting that the AI business model was in serious trouble.

Even consulting firms, who make a bundle hyping this tech, are backtracking. Bain recently shared the following chart (hidden away at the end of a report) which explains why AI projects have failed.

These findings are revealing. They show that management is absolutely committed to AI, but the tools just don’t deliver.

And, finally, last week the media noticed all this.

They published dozens of panic-stricken articles. Investors got spooked too — shifting from greed to fear in a New York minute. Over the course of just two days, Nvidia’s stock lost around $400 billion in market capitalization.

In this environment, true believers quickly turn into skeptics. The whole AI business model gets scrutinized — and if it doesn’t hold up, investment cash flow dries up very quickly.

This is exactly what I predicted 6 months ago. Or even a year ago.

I expect that the next few weeks — or maybe even the next few days — will be extremely turbulent in the AI world.

Buckle up!

The dominant AI music company just admitted that it trained its bot on “essentially all music files on the Internet”.

Suno is a huge player in AI music — it tells investors it will generate $120 billion per year. Microsoft is already using its technology.

But there’s a tiny catch.

The company now admits in a court filing:

    Suno’s training data includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet, abiding by paywalls, password protections, and the like, combined with similarly available text descriptions

Hey, this is totally illegal — it’s like Napster all over again.

Suno will need to prove that all these copyrighted songs are “fair use” in AI training. I doubt that any court will take that claim seriously.

If the music industry is smart, they will use this violation to shut down AI regurgitation of copyrighted songs.

If the music industry is stupid — run according to my “idiot nephew theory” — they will drop charges in exchange for some quick cash.

What the First Astronauts Ate – Food in Space

Filed under: Food, History, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Apr 23, 2024

Smooth, sweet, and sour Tang pie in a graham cracker crust

City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1960s

Contrary to popular belief, NASA did not invent Tang, but the company that did, General Foods, used the association in a lot of their marketing. They even developed this recipe for Tang pie, also called astronaut pie.

The texture of the pie is smooth and very nice, but it had too much of a sour zip in it, or “tang” if you will, for me. If you like sour notes like in lemon meringue or key lime pies, or if you just like Tang, then I think you’ll like this. You can use a ready-made graham cracker crust to make this pie even easier to put together.

    Tang Pie. It’s the pie of the future. Here it goes space boys and girls:

    TANG Pie
    1 can sweetened condensed milk
    3/4 C. Tang® powder drink mix
    1/2 C. sour cream
    1 (9 oz.) tub Cool Whip®
    1 graham cracker pie crust.
    Mix condensed milk and Tang. Add in sour cream until well blended. Then fold in tub of Cool Whip. Pour into pie crust and refrigerate for 4 hours or until set and cold.

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