I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.

The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion)

Sam Kriss wrote a funny review of Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk in The Point. The part that stood out the most was Kriss' opinion of Isaacson.

Walter Isaacson is the perfect writer for the biographies of our times because he appears to be a born sycophant, and fate decreed that he would be in the right position, at the right moment, to spread as much propagandistic bullshit as possible. After stints at Harvard, Oxford, the Sunday Times and Time magazine—Christopher Hitchens called him “one of the best magazine journalists in America”—Isaacson was appointed CEO at CNN in July 2001. During the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, he sent his staff a memo, warning them not “to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” Every mention of people being vaporized in their homes by U.S. bombers had to be “balanced” with reminders that these were the people responsible for 9/11. “You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” Later, he told PBS that he wasn’t really so jingoistic: CNN initially tried reporting on the casualties in Afghanistan, but then they received some pushback. “You would get phone calls,” he said. “Big people in corporations were calling up and saying, you’re being anti-American here.” So he caved. What else was he supposed to do? Follow the demands of human dignity even in the face of mild, non-life-threatening opposition? Don’t be ridiculous.

Very Ordinary Men: Elon Musk and the court biographer (Sam Kriss/The Point)

Scathing.

Meredith Whitaker, the President of Signal and chief advisor to the AI Now Institute, appeared on the Big Technology Podcast and she had some interesting things to say about OpenAI, Microsoft and the hype that has built around AI since the release of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT itself is not an innovation. It's an advertisement that was very, very expensive that was placed by Microsoft to advertise the capacities of generative AI and to advertise their Azure GPT APIs that they were selling after effectively absorbing OpenAI as a Microsoft subsidiary. But the technology or frameworks on which ChatGPT are based are dated from 2017.

So, Microsoft puts up this ad, everyone gets a little experience of communicating with something that seems strikingly like a sentient interlocutor. You have a supercharged chat bot that everyone can experience and have a kind of story about. It's a bit like those viral "upload your face and we'll tell you what kind of person you are" data collection schemes that we saw across Facebook in the 2010s and then an entire narrative of innovation or a narrative of scientific progress gets built around this sort of ChatGPT moment.

Suddenly generative AI is the new kind of AI. Suddenly claims about sentience and about the superintelligence and AI being on the cusp of breaking into full consciousness and perhaps, endangering human life. All of this almost like religious rhetoric builds up in response to ChatGPT.

I'm not a champion of Google but I think we need to be very careful about how are we defining innovation and how are we defining progress in AI because what I'm seeing is a reflexive narrative building around what is a very impressive ad for a large, generative language model but not anything we should understand as constitutionally innovative.

Meredith Whitaker on ChatGPT

She also talks about the dangers of trusting the models to return factual information.

I didn't say useless. I said not that useful in most serious contexts or that's what I think. If it's a low stakes lit review, a scan of these docs could point you in the right direction. It also might not. It also might miss certain things because you're looking for certain terms but actually, there's an entire field of the literature that uses different terms and actually if you want to research this and understand it, you should do the reading.

Not maybe trust a proxy that is only as good as the data it's trained on and the data it's trained on is the internet plus whatever fine-tuning data you're using.

I'm not saying it's useless, I'm saying it is vastly over-hyped and the claims that are being made around it are I think leading to a regulatory environment that is a bit disconnected from reality and to a popular understanding of these technologies that are far over-credulous about the capabilities.

Any serious context where factuality matters is not somewhere where you can trust one of these systems.

Meredith Whitaker on AI Hype and Doing the Reading

I remember Ezra Klein talking about the importance of doing the reading and the connections that can be formed in your mind as the material becomes more familiar to you. That depth of knowledge can provoke insights to create something new or to improve an existing service. Loading all your books into an expert system does not help this type of thinking if you never read them yourself.

Productivity in knowledge work is still incentivized to produce more volume rather than more quality. There's great story about Bill Atkinson when Apple decided to track the productivity by the number of lines of code that they wrote in a week. According to Folklore.org:

Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

-2000 Lines Of Code (Andy Hertzfeld/Folklore.org)

I'm afraid that the diligence and craft displayed by Bill Atkinson would not be rewarded today when developers are encouraged to crank out as much code as possible using GitHub Copilot or some other AI assistant.

According to this study from Stanford University, the answer is yes. From the conclusion:

We conducted the first user study examining how people interact with an AI code assistant (built with OpenAI’s Codex) to solve a variety of security related tasks across different programming languages. We observed that participants who had access to the AI assistant were more likely to introduce security vulnerabilities for the majority of programming tasks, yet were also more likely to rate their insecure answers as secure compared to those in our control group.

Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?

I just finished the second season of Things Fell Apart, a BBC podcast series where Jon Ronson dives into the culture wars. The first season was excellent and the second matched it.

It focuses on the changes in the culture wars brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic but moves through the deaths of sex workers in Miami in the 1980s to Plandemic to a family being terrorized while on holiday in Oregon to George Floyd's murder and the BLM protests to the Great Reset. It's just a fascinating listen.

I've always appreciated Ronson's empathy when interviewing people, especially when he disagrees with them. His curiosity helps me to try to understand why they think what they think. He lets them speak but also puts their claims against actual evidence and experts to see if they have any merit.

I liked how he signed off the series.

This has been a series about the culture wars that snowballed during lockdown told by some of the main players. There have also been stories about untruths and their consequences.

Excited delerium is not real and George Floyd wasn't suffering from it.

Judy Mikovits was not jailed by a medical establishment for exposing Big Pharma's deadly secrets and vaccines aren't killing millions.

I don't believe that Brandon, put on trial for plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan, was a white supremacist. Nor that Covid and lockdown were engineered to enslave the people.

The family in the Big Bertha school bus weren't Antifa and the media shouldn't scare people that way nor forego evidence for ideology.

Children are not using cat litter boxes as toilets in American schools and being confronted with uncomfortable ideas is not the same as suffering from PTSD.

Finally, tempting as it always is, documentarians should try not to see the world in terms of heroes and dragons.

We all get things wrong sometimes. No one is perfect. But as this series has shown, when untruths spread, the ripples can be devastating. And so it feels more important than ever to try and hold onto the truth, like driftwood in the ocean, because, if not, we might drown.

Things Fell Apart (Season 2, Episode 8: Mikki's Hero's Journey)

Sunday Independent - 17 December 2023

Taxing issue of JP's gifts: Billionaires play by different rules to the rest of us. Their displays of generosity keep us off their backs

"If you suspect that tax is a rigged game, a con, designed to fleece the little guy, you are about to find out how shockingly true that is..."

Taxtopia, The Rebel Accountant

A PR industry has sprung up around billionaires (they make up 0.001 per cent of the world's population) that casts them as humanitarians and heroes. It is important not to rub the little people's noses in it too much. So, you donate a children's hospital wing or support a popular sports star or team and in this way become a national treasure. Except with the bloody lefties and those people before profit commies.

The PR coaxes us not to criticise but to applaud the winners. We are begrudgers if we criticise. We are made to feel spiteful and ungrateful. Why can't you just celebrate the success of these winners? Why are you jealous if their private jets and yachts and helicopters? What the hell is wrong with you?

So, when PBP councillor Madeleine Johansson tweeted "Just pay your f**king taxes," Fianna Fáil TD Willie O'Dea angrily countered, "JP voluntarily donates millions of his own money to good causes. Let's leave the envy to one side and celebrate what's being done."

Or as my good friend Tomás Ó Sé tweeted in 2018 when JP donated €3.2m to the GAA, "Is it an Irish thing or what but the negativity aimed at JP McManus for the gesture he gifted on every GAA club in the country is wrong. He didn't have to do it and does so much no one sees or hears. We should be grateful and let the haters hate!! Míle Buíochas JP."

In this world, billionaires know best how to spend their money. Governments are wasters. Charity, not paying taxes, is the true solution to inequality. The new way of saving the world is private, voluntary and accountable to no one.

Let us imagine for a moment that every citizen of Ireland could register in a tax haven for a nominal fee, say €20. Or that every citizen could simply opt out of paying tax. They could, instead, at their sole discretion, make donations to good causes. It is certain that the vast majority of people would opt out. Within months, without tax receipts, Irish society would collapse. No money for teachers or police officers or bus drivers or schools or hospitals or vital infrastructure. So my question is this: Why should tax be optional for billionaires but not for nurses?

Here is the compromise: Leave us billionaires alone and we will look after you when our winnings are win. We will spend it much more wisely than any government. In this compromise, generosity is a substitute for a fairer and more equal system of living. The winners do not have to make any sacrifices. They do not have to play by the same rules as the rest of us. They are great men and we should be thankful that they sprinkle us with some of the profits of their greatness every now and again. And it works. Their public displays of generosity are enough to keep us off their backs and preserve the status quo.

The trick is to donate in a way that is eye catching and pulls at the heart strings. What better way to achieve it than through a beloved community organisation? This provides moral cover. It feels good. And it does good. As Trump might say, "it really does."

But it is a pleasant fantasy. It means that the billionaire does not have to interact with the messy reality. It avoids the duty of citizenship. It is a dystopian world where the rich and powerful get to decide what is best for the world. And what is best for the world is what is best for them.

But if you are an Irishman, if you have respect and empathy for the people of Ireland, you should pay your taxes here. You should be pulling your weight with the nurses and teachers and firemen. Not counting the days to make sure you don't go over your 182-day residency limit.

John Patrick McManus, pay your taxes here.

Sunday Independent - 17 December 2023

FAI is still making the same mistakes: Hill's idea of staff relations is at odds with reality

The FAI's payments to CEO Jonathan Hill epitomised a familiar form of modern entitlement. Yet again, someone already paid more than enough got to plunge their snout further into the trough.

The Ryan Tubridy deal that almost capsized RTÉ was a classic example. The sums are smaller in Hill's case but the mentality, that fat cats can never have enough cream, is the same.

Former FAI chairman Roy Barrett told last weekend's AGM that he made the extra payment to "incentivise the executive." Seriously? Hill earns €258,000 per annum. Shouldn't that be sufficient incentive for him?

FAI administrative staff, meanwhile, are supposed to stay incentivised on an average wage of €32,000 a year. The figure for development staff is €40,000. Comments that the Hill payment doesn't matter because"€12,000 isn't that much money" is an insult to people for whom it's several months wages.

Hill claims he has a good relationship with Siptu, who represent many of those workers. But Siptu Services Division Organiser Teresa Hannick doesn't agree: "We would like to clarify that relations in terms of dealing with management have broken down to such a degree that the employees are bringing management to the Workplace Relations Commission. Both parties have agreed to attend."

Hannick insists Hill misled Wednesday's Dáil Committee hearing by describing their members as merely, "a small cohort," within the organisation. She says Siptu has, "a sizeable membership within the FAI."

Hill has caused, "extreme annoyance" by failing to recognise the union for collective bargaining purposes. "The staff are continuously told 'we are one' but this is far from the truth," laments Hannick.

What also rankles is the double standard operated as regards pay. While the CEO's pay is benchmarked against the public sector, the FAI refused to do the same for staff. The result is that while Hill's pay has risen by 22 per cent in the last years, some employee's with over 10 years experience have seen their pay rise by just three per cent compared to 2011 figures.

This is a poor reward for people who agreed to pay cuts so the Association could stay afloat during the Delaney era. It's a classic example of the modern trend where those at the top are afforded every consideration, but those lower down must like it or lump it. It's Class War.

Four years ago, Siptu asked for a worker director position to be made available on the board. The request, which still stands, was turned down. The workers apparently aren't qualified to deal with the really important issues.

Corporate Ireland's values were writ large in the Hill payment saga. Barrett implied that he didn't tell the FAI board about the payments in case media leaks led to the public finding out. That's a strange attitude for an organisation in receipt of public money.

Sunday Independent - 3 December 2023

So they're trying the Great Replacement theory on us

They are in too deep to see themselves as suckers, the kind of people who trashed the US Capitol for Trump - many of whom have gone to jail for a long time, while their main man is still out there, denying all responsibility. They are McGregor without the money - and when you consider how angry he is despite all that opulence, the mind boggles at how angry they are without it.

Yet because they live in a world of Steve Bannon's bullshit, somehow they will never be angry about the right things.

I keep going back to the great film Nomadland, about this world of people abandoned for the greater good of Corporate America, and that moment when it hits you: that the evil genius of the far right is to persuade such victims of the oligarchs that their problems are caused by those who have even less money than they do.

And that those with the most money - Trump, Musk, Carlson, McGregor - are somehow on their side.

They're not... obviously.

Sunday Independent - 3 December 2023

Icons of hope have much more to offer: McGregor's brand of Irishness is fuelled by hate

Much condescending rubbish was written about the authentically proletarian nature of McGregor's behaviour by those apparently convinced that working class life consists solely of telling people to f**k off and punching them in the mouth.

---

Some Irish people would like to disown McGregor, but to a certain extent he both embodies and magnifies the worst elements of the national character. Take his declaration to Mayweather that he didn't need to be told about racism because, "My people have been oppressed our entire existence. And still very much are."

This particular trope proved popular with the right-wing Yanks who during the Black Lives Matters protests never tired of saying that African Americans had nothing to complain about because Irish people had it just as bad. The same belief, that Irish history is so uniquely harrowing it's made us experts in suffering, is common here too.

In reality we enjoyed a much less terrible 20th century than most European nations by dint of avoiding World War II. But much of the commentary on the immigration issue suggests we still feel so sorry for ourselves there's not much sympathy left for anyone else.

A man who says he loves his home city shouldn't want to see it in flames.

The riot was greeted with barely concealed glee by people who oppose curbs on hate speech yet seem fine with the harassment of library staff by homophobic cranks, use women's sport as a vehicle for attacking trans people and hint that climate change doesn't exist. They highlight crimes by immigrants while ignoring crimes against them, admire Trump and Musk, never stop banging on about Wokeness and will have got a kick out of Russia banning the gay rights movement. When called out, they affect indignation like footballers rolling on the ground feigning injury.

There are those too who, while disapproving of the riot, will be happy if it results in the Government adopting a draconian immigration policy. By showing just how ugly this stuff is when you strip away the veneer of respectability, McGregor might actually have done Ireland a favour.

Well done champ.

I was scrolling through my RSS feeds on Friday when I came across the news of Sam Altman being fired as the CEO of OpenAI. After the success of OpenAi's Dev Day the previous week, I was surprised by this. After reading the blog post announcing the decision I still didn't understand why exactly he had been fired.

According to the OpenAI board

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

OpenAI announces leadership transition

This raised way more questions than it answered. I spent over an hour trying to find out what was going on but then I remembered a quote from Brian Stelter gave in an interview about breaking news.

We oftentimes have the most interest in a news story when there's the least amount of information. You know, something's breaking news and we really know absolutely nothing about it but that's when everybody wants to know everything and by the time we know all the facts, everybody's moved on.

Brian Stelter on the Offline podcast

It's important to for me to remember that I don't need to keep up with events like this. It will work itself out eventually and I can deal with it then. There's no point responding to speculation about things that haven't happened yet. It's usually wasted energy.

Cory Doctorow wrote a piece that appeared on John Scalzi's blog that had some great quotes on writing.

I wrote because that’s how I go from being life’s passenger to taking a small bit of control over my destiny. Writing isn’t just a way for me to escape to a better world, it’s a way to help conjure that world into existence.

Science fiction, after all, is a literature that says we’re not prisoners of history. It’s a way to say, “Things can be different. What we do matters. The future is up for grabs.”

Bill McKibben called The Lost Cause “The first great YIMBY novel,” adding “forget the Silicon Valley bros–these are the California techsters we need rebuilding our world, one solar panel and prefab insulated wall at a time.”

Kim Stanley Robinson said, “Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope.  May it go like this.”

For me, these two quotes are the perfect summary of why writing – especially writing sf – feels so satisfying in anxious times. None of us can stop the bus on our own, but if we can break free of the frozen terror of helplessness and understand that the bonds that hold us in our seats are forged of our own constrained imagination. we can grab the wheel and swerve.

The Big Idea: Cory Doctorow

"There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints." - Rita Dove

Interview with Jesse Kornbluth for "The Book Report". April 8, 1997.

I was listening to the Bill Simmons' conversation with Chuck Klosterman on his podcast and this quote stuck out for me.

The size of your reality is the size of your memory.

Chuck Klosterman on the Bill Simmons podcast

It's for quotes like this that I started this blog. I had completely forgotten about it until I was going through my unfinished posts today.

I listened to a podcast episode from the Things Fell Apart podcast. It's an interview with Jon Ronson and Dolly Alderton on his career and the podcast series covering the culture wars.

The whole interview is worth listening to but I loved this quote in particular.

“No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”
― Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel