Monday 2 December, 2024
Say ‘Cheese’!
The Little Cheese Shop in Dingle on Saturday night.
Quote of the Day
“God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”
Bismarck
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Grace | The Dubliners & Jim McCann | from the group’s 40 Years Reunion in the Gaiety theatre in 2002.
Extraordinary song written in 1985 by Frank O’Meara (melody) and Seán O’Meara (lyrics) which tells the story of Grace Gifford’s marriage to Joseph Plunkett in Kilmainham Jail, hours before his execution for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising.
Wikipedia has a wonderful, sombre photograph of Grace on the day of their wedding.
For a larger image click here
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Long Read of the Day
On the Coming Merger of Tech and State Power
Sobering and realistic assessment of our new reality by Taylor Owen. The only thing I disagree with is the word ‘coming’ in the title of the essay.
First, the relationship between tech companies and Washington is transforming into something we haven’t seen before. While Silicon Valley has always wielded influence in American politics, what’s emerging now is different – a world where the interests of select technology companies become indistinguishable from US government policy.
Look at Elon Musk’s growing empire. Tesla, Starlink, X, and Neuralink all stand to benefit substantially from this new alignment. They won’t be alone. Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril are perfectly positioned to collect expanded defense contracts, while major venture capital cryptocurrency investments are likely to see favorable regulatory treatment. The concentration of power in these companies’ hands isn’t just about market dominance, it’s about shaping the very rules of our digital future…
Yep. Do read it.
If AI can provide a better diagnosis than a doctor, what’s the prognosis for medics?
Yesterday’s Observer column:
AI means too many (different) things to too many people. We need better ways of talking – and thinking – about it. Cue, Drew Breunig, a gifted geek and cultural anthropologist, who has come up with a neat categorisation of the technology into three use cases: gods, interns and cogs.
“Gods”, in this sense, would be “super-intelligent, artificial entities that do things autonomously”. In other words, the AGI (artificial general intelligence) that OpenAI’s Sam Altman and his crowd are trying to build (at unconscionable expense), while at the same time warning that it could be an existential threat to humanity. AI gods are, Breunig says, the “human replacement use cases”. They require gigantic models and stupendous amounts of “compute”, water and electricity (not to mention the associated CO2 emissions).
“Interns” are “supervised co-pilots that collaborate with experts, focusing on grunt work”…
Chart of the day
A neat graphical summary of the UK’s problem.
My commonplace booklet
ChatGPT was two yesterday. So I asked it how it would be feeling if it could feel.