Project 1921 / 1973 / 2025

If we can tear our eyes away from the early days of the Starmer government and cast an eye upon other big electoral events in 2024, we find Rick Perlstein providing some much-needed perspective on Project 2025’s antecedents:

One thing that especially grates on me as a historian is how much of the discourse treats Project 2025 as if it’s some novel thing. I mean, what about Project 1921?

I refer, of course, to the administration of Warren G. Harding, who intoned in his inaugural address of dedicating himself to “the omission of unnecessary interference of Government with business.”

Not so much a radical new idea as it is the latest incarnation of several long-standing right wing objectives, then.

With the Conservative party’s MPs about to see whose turn it is to succeed Rishi Sunak, how long will it be until some Tufton Street think tank brings us a report proclaiming that Project 2029 ¹ is the way forward for the UK?

The fungus expects to be repaid

Go read Doug Muir’s Fungal banking at Crooked Timber. Fascinating stuff:

So in the last couple of decades we’ve discovered that many plants rely on networks of soil fungi to bring them critical trace nutrients. This is a symbiotic relationship: the fungal network can access these nutrients much better than plants can, and in return the plants provide the fungus with other stuff — particularly energy, in the form of glucose sugar, made from photosynthesis.

It turns out this relationship is particularly important for large, long-lived trees. That’s because trees spend years as seedlings, struggling in the shade of their bigger relatives. If they’re going to survive, they’ll need help.

The fungal network gives them that help. The fungus not only provides micronutrients, it actually can pump glucose into young seedlings, compensating for the sunlight that they can’t yet reach. This is no small thing, because the fungus can’t produce glucose for itself! Normally it trades nutrients to trees and takes glucose from them in repayment. So it’s reaching into its own stored reserves to keep the baby seedling alive.

Gosh that’s beautiful isn’t Nature great! Well… yes and no.

Because the fungus isn’t doing this selflessly. The nutrients and glucose aren’t a gift. They’re a loan, and the fungus expects to be repaid […]

Doug Muir has contributed a terrific run of posts about science to Crooked Timber lately. Miles away from the stuff of politics that the site normally publishes, but right up my street. Well worth a read.

Daylight DC-1

If the Daylight DC-1 proves to look as good in real life as it does in their launch video then it’s going to be a seriously tempting proposition.

Give me a touch-responsive monochrome E-Ink screen that refreshes at 60 frames per second and I can live without it displaying those images in colour.¹ Granted the operating system is a tweaked version of Android, which is not ideal,² but it’s also not that big a deal.

Part of me would prefer that the launch of the DC-1 was followed shortly after by the launch of a DC-1 Mini, matching that screen with the immensely more practical form factor of my beloved iPad Minis, but I’ve learned by now not to expect the tablet market to follow my little whims on that front.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Run, Bezos, run

Doug Muir over at Crooked Timber, recounts a recent thought experiment:

A transcript from memory of an evening conversation with my two older sons:

“I heard that Jeff Bezos could run through the streets every day, throwing hundred dollar bills in the air, and he’d still be making money.”

“I wonder if that’s true?”

[…]

Pretty sure it is true, but it’s good to see the workings-out that led my thoughts in that same direction.

As one commenter pointed out:

David in Tokyo 05.07.24 at 8:39 am The freaky thing about JB is that he had to give up half his wealth to divorce his wife to cavort with younger women, but he bounced back to the top almost immediately.

Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot?

I am reliably informed¹ that Angie Wang’s New Yorker cartoon pondering the question Is my toddler a stochastic parrot? earned her a Pulitzer nomination last year.

Seems like a reasonable nomination. Had I been aware of the cartoon’s existence prior to getting word of it from today’s From The Editor’s Desk email, if the New Yorker’s content management system permitted it then I’d have happily thrown them US$1 to read the whole thing.² As it stands, that was my first look at the New Yorker’s web site for a bit so it was my one free look this month. Had I read something else at the New Yorker earlier this month, I’d have had to hope that someone had arranged for Archive.org to grab a copy.

One day our supposed “AI” successors may deem Angie Wang’s cartoon to be unbearably sentimental about her child’s development, but I can buy that what she’s seeing is not remotely like what LLMs are giving to the world.

Just because Large Language Models (LLMs) are at present a shiny new toy for executives who are willing to throw vast sums at the companies that claim to understand them in the hope of reaping efficiency gains, that doesn’t mean that a decade from now that particular bubble won’t have burst. Perhaps we’ll all look back on how much money was spent on LLMs when public services were starved for funding and feel bad about that.

[Via From The Editor’s Desk (The New Yorker)]

Oh, the Humanity

I’m indebted to The Overspill for sharing the intro to M. G. Siegler’s latest piece on the Apple Vision Pro:

Arguing about the shipment projections for Apple’s Vision Pro is sort of like arguing about how many tickets were sold on the fateful Hindenburg journey.[¹] For one thing, we’re going to find out the number one way or another, eventually.[²] For another, we’re sort of overlooking the massive airship exploding in the sky.

[Footnote links omitted from this quotation since this is a paid subscriber post at Spyglass, so we non-subscribers can’t see that content.¹]

On the one hand, we’re still a few months on from the release to actual paying customers of the Apple Vision Pro. On the other, rumours that the Vision Pro won’t see a hardware update until late 2026 do suggest that the Apple faithful are going to look back on this experience as an extended beta test of an idea that the world wasn’t ready for yet. The Vision Pro may be seen as a testbed for ideas that will reappear down the line in other products. Like the Xerox Alto was.

[Via The Overspill]

Smart in theory

Now the embargo on reviews of the Humane Ai Pin has come to an end, Humane might be wishing it hadn’t. Let Cherlynn Low at Engadget stand as an example of what’s out there:

[Low is describing the way you find yourself needing to enter a number in order to validate your identity multiple times a day, on a device that lacks a keypad so has to project numbers onto the palm of your hand. Sounds complicated, but I’m sure Humane’s designers thought users would get used to it over time.]

This gesture is smart in theory but it’s very sensitive. There’s a very small range of usable space since there is only so far your hand can go, so the distance between each digit is fairly small. One wrong move and you’ll accidentally select something you didn’t want and have to go all the way out to delete it.

“Smart in theory” That damning phrase might serve as Humane’s epitaph.

Given how frequently the response to reading about the Ai Pin seems to be some variation of “what does this do that my smartphone can’t do better and faster?”, three thoughts arise:

1. Displacing the smartphone is going to take quite some doing; and,
2. Paying Humane US$699 for the Ai Pin itself, plus a monthly bill for the supporting cell service/gateway to off-device network services, is a sign that some people have more money than sense;¹ and,
3. Are we 100% certain that the founders of Humane weren’t sent on a kamikaze mission by Apple to remind us all of how useful smartphones are?

Of course, almost everyone asking about using a smartphone to accomplish similar goals has not yet had hands-on experience of using an Ai Pin. Perhaps using the device in real life will transform opinions. That’s not the impression I get watching Joanna Stern’s 90 second video review on Twitter/X, but it’s early days yet.

[Via Daring Fireball]

View Source

Gary Ings’ article in HTML Review issue 3, a view source web, takes me back:

On my personal websites view source meant being able to adapt and remix ideas. Like drawing a map, elements and pages acted as landmarks in the browser to be navigated between. As a self-initiated learner, being able to view source brought to mind the experience of a slow walk through someone else’s map.

It’s also very nicely presented. Look at it on a decent web browser and be impressed.¹

View Source on modern web browsers tends to reveal a whole heap of custom CSS, so it can take some digging to get down to the HTML building blocks of the article you’re reading. I’m glad I taught myself HTML in those simpler times.

Nowadays 99% of what I post here I write in Markdown² because that’s the core of what I’m trying to communicate here: the words and hyperlinks with the occasional embedded image or video. Nobody will learn very much by using View Source on this content, I’m afraid.

[Via Pixel Envy]

Mind the Orwellian Surveillance Apparatus ¹

The biggest surprise to me reading this piece about Transport For London’s experiment at Willesden Green tube station is that all this extra technology could piggyback on the existing, slightly old and outdated CCTV cameras. ²

[This] was not just about spotting fare evaders. The trial wasn’t a couple of special cameras monitoring the ticket gate-line in the station. It was AI being applied to every camera in the building. And it was about using the cameras to spot dozens of different things that might happen inside the station.

For example, if a passenger falls over on the platform, the AI will spot them on the ground. This will then trigger a notification on the iPads used by station staff, so that they can then run over and help them back up. Or if the AI spots someone standing close to the platform edge, looking like they are planning to jump, it will alert staff to intervene before it is too late.

In total, the system could apparently identify up to 77 different ‘use cases’ — though only eleven were used during trial. This ranges from significant incidents, like fare evasion, crime and anti-social behaviour, all the way down to more trivial matters, like spilled drinks or even discarded newspapers.

So, the system identified 77 different use cases but they only decided to use 11 of them. That graphic would look a lot scarier if the left pane listed all 77 potential use cases.

Given how much the alerts the system generates rely upon station staff reacting to them in order to fix the issues being identified, it’d be nice to imagine that the quantity of incidents revealed might argue for increasing staffing levels.

Why do I have an uneasy feeling that it might not go that way?

[Via LinkMachineGo]

WilliamsF1Parts2024.xlsx

It’s not so much that Excel is a bad place to store your parts catalogue as it is that it’s a less than ideal starting point if you go no further than dumping your data in Excel:

It is not an exaggeration to say that up to and including at least the initial work on the 2024 Williams, its car builds were handled using Microsoft Excel, with a list of around 20,000 individual components and parts.

Unsurprisingly, ex-Mercedes man Vowles - someone used to class-leading operations and systems — had a damning verdict for that: “The Excel list was a joke. Impossible to navigate and impossible to update.”

Managing a car build is not just about listing all the components needed. There wasn’t data on the cost of components, how long they took to build, how many were in the system to be built.

[…] “When you start tracking now hundreds of 1000s of components through your organisation moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless.”

“You need to know where each one of those independent components are, how long it will take before it’s complete, how long it will take before it goes to inspection. If there’s been any problems with inspections, whether it has to go back again.”

“And once you start putting that level of complexity in which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that’s exactly where we are.”

I have a vision of some poor intern at the back the garage¹ working their way through an in-tray, which is struggling to contain a huge pile of printouts² listing changes that needed to be entered into the spreadsheet YESTERDAY. Not a fun or glamorous job, even if you get to wear the pit crew’s uniform for Williams Racing.

Fair to say that Williams Racing Team Principal James Vowles is talking about this so that in a couple of years time he’ll be able to reassure us that WilliamsF1Parts2024.xlsx is a thing of the past.³ Hopefully by then Williams will be a bit further up the leaderboard (if only on the principle that other teams might be having a worse time that year.)

[Via The Overspill]

Spreadsheet errors

I’m always up for someone reminding us of the impact VisiCalc had on the world.¹ Let Tim Harford pick up the story:

Despite its stuttering beginning, VisiCalc quickly became a phenomenon. Watching those two strangers walk out of his presentation in 1979, Bob Frankston could hardly have dared to hope that, three years later, Apple II computers were being sold as “VisiCalc accessories” — the $2,000 entry fee to get access to the spreadsheet, a $100 miracle. Unsurprisingly, it was the accountants who caught on first and drove demand.

Bricklin recalled in a 1989 interview with Byte magazine, “if you showed it to a person who had to do financial work with real spreadsheets, he’d start shaking and say, ‘I spent all week doing that.’ Then he’d shove his charge cards in your face.” […]

Tim Harford, being Tim Harford, has to remind us of the downside of all this reliance on technology:

[…] Looking at the way spreadsheets are used today certainly suggests a warning. They are endlessly misused by people who are not accountants and are not using the careful error-checking protocols built into accountancy for centuries. Famous economists using Excel simply failed to select the right cells for analysis. An investment bank used the wrong formula in a risk calculation, accidentally doubling the level of allowable risk-taking. Biologists have been typing the names of genes, only to have Excel autocorrect those names into dates. ²

When a tool is ubiquitous, and convenient, we kludge our way through without really understanding what the tool is doing or why. And that, as a parallel for generative AI, is alarmingly on the nose.

I acknowledge that electronic spreadsheets might have been invented to retroactively justify the aphorism, “To err is human. To really $!&@ up — takes a computer,” but I don’t think it’s fair to spreadsheets to equate them with Large Language Models hallucinating all over the place.

Shōgun

I’m old enough to have watched the Richard Chamberlain/Toshiro Mifune version of Shōgun back in the day, but I don’t remember it well enough to fairly evaluate the quality of the 1980 version this long afterwards. I remember it was a huge hit at the time, part of a resurgence in the limited series/miniseries format that followed in the wake of Roots a few years earlier.

Having at least three lead characters, two of them Japanese, sharing the main storyline seems likely to work better than focussing as heavily on our English central character’s experience of Japan as the earlier adaptation did.

The first four episodes of the 2024 take on the story have me gripped, not to mention glad that we’re getting episodes weekly rather than being invited to devour the whole story in one lump. I’m glad that I now have a whole week to think about how the fourth episode ended with things taking a distinct turn for the worse¹ for Lord Toranaga’s attempt to quietly outmanoeuvre his fellow regents.

Lots of reviews of Shōgun have made comparisons with Game Of Thrones and that’s not unreasonable because it’s referring to early seasons of that show, when Game Of Thrones was still seen as ground-breaking work, perhaps the best fantasy show on television.²

Fair to say that I’ll be watching all ten episodes of Shōgun with great interest despite my having a general idea of how the story turns out. Shōgun looks likely to repay as much attention as you’re willing to give it.