1. Model collapse isn’t just for AI
When a large language model starts to ingest a lot of content written by either itself or other large language models, it falls into what’s called model collapse: a state where, like a snake eating its own tail, it no longer makes sense.
Back when I was working on the philosophy of AI in the 1990s, one of the strands of study was using computers to understand human behaviour by creating models and seeing if the quirks of us meat sacks would emerge from the model. And I would argue that model collapse is one of these quirks. If the information you are exposed to is limited to an echo chamber, then you see the same kind of behaviour in people.
Unfortunately – but predictably – the “super-smart” Silicon Valley billionaires are just as susceptible to model collapse as either an LLM or every other human. Only, unlike most people (and most LLMs) the damage they can do because of this model collapse is actually enormous. Musk, Andreessen, Thiel and the rest have created a model of the world which bears no relation to reality, but unfortunately, they have it in their power to influence the world so it matches their views.
2. RIP AnandTech
At its height, AnandTech was the best site around for deep, highly researched reviews of significant products. As such, it was an outlier as technology product writing moved to an affiliate-based revenue model which focused on lists of potential options for purchase. It had more akin to the technology publishing landscape that I learned the trade in, where products were tested (occasionally to destruction) in labs by people who focused on devising ever more fiendish methods of working out how a product would perform in the real world.
I’m sad to see it go, but at least it doesn’t have to suffer the same fate as so many other sites which have simply been used as fodder for boosting the SEO rankings of lesser brands.
3. Monoculture is mono failure
Diversity, as anyone smart knows, is strength. That applies to farming. It applies to organisations. And it applies to platforms. Diversity protects you from the impact of monocultures, which inevitably contain the seeds of their own downfall.
And yet, the technological systems we currently have implicitly rewarded monocultures, monopolies and monopsonies. Wherever you look, from hardware systems to social media platforms to online retailing, we are creating failure points through a lack of diversity. CrowdStrike is just the latest example, but 21st century capitalism’s addiction to the Highlander Principle (“there can be only one!”) is going to present some profound problems over the next few decades. Assuming of course we survive them at all…
4. I just wish Bluesky was actually a federated system
Bluesky, the “not Twitter” that isn’t either Mastodon or Threads, has seen an influx of users from both Britain and now Brazil as people become more and more annoyed with Elon Musk. But it’s also been focusing on some fascinating approaches to content moderation and protecting users. The latest is the ability, if a post of yours is quoted, to “decouple” the post from the quote – effectively stopping in its tracks one commonly used method of abuse, the “quote tweet pile-on”.
I still don’t like that it’s not, yet, truly federated: you can’t run your own server, and even if you use a name based on your own domain you can’t move servers no matter what. But I like that they are experimenting with different options.
5. JISC leaving Twitter
And speaking of leaving Twitter, JISC announced it would be ceasing activity on there. The organisation is “the UK digital, data and technology agency focused on tertiary education, research and innovation”, a non-profit which drives digital transformation in education in the UK. It’s a big deal that it no longer believes being active on Twitter is in alignment with its values.
6. The NeXT IPO that never happened
Via Michael Tsai, this is not only a great little potted history of NeXT, the company that effectively did a reverse takeover of Apple (and ruined my 30th birthday), but also reveals that it was at one point planning an IPO. The thing that made an IPO possible wasn’t the hardware (NeXT was out of that market) or NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP. Instead it was WebObjects, the web development platform which made creating complex dynamic sites much more easy than before. At the beginnings of the Dotcom boom, this was a major potential business.
Extra bonus fact: Dell apparently used WebObjects to create its online store in just four weeks. That, at the time, was incredible.
7. Moof!
8. Starship Stormtroopers
I was far too young to read New Worlds magazine, but by my early teens I had moved on from Tolkien to Michael Moorcock, borrowing the Dorian Hawkmoon and Corum Jhaelen Irsei series from the local library and being absolutely amazed by the sheer muscularity of the writing. At some point – and I can’t remember where I found it – I read Moorcock’s “Starship Stormtroopers” essay on the fascistic nature of much of the Science Fiction canon, and that was it: my life – and my politics – changed for good. I became a teenage anarchist.
I’m not sure if I am still one today (the teenage bit, definitely not) but I occasionally reread the essay, just to remind myself that it’s OK Not To Like Frank Herbert.
9. The best novel about 21st Century male loneliness
The second of the holy trinity of New Worlds writers that changed my view of fiction was, of course, M John Harrison. There’s an argument to be made that Harrison is our best living writer, although I’m sure that he would hate anyone for making it. Harrison was unique at the time for not allowing genre to dictate what he should write, and Climbers, his 1989 novel about rock climbing in Yorkshire, saw him walk a long way out of science fiction without breaking a step. It’s a brilliant book, and I was really pleased to see this article which argues that it’s also become the definitive novel about 21st century male loneliness.
And I think it’s right: part of the impact of our relationships moving from primarily face to face to being mediated by the internet is, as Sherry Turkle put it, that we are alone together. In that sense, it mirrors the mental state of going climbing, which is a social activity done primarily in solitude.
10. Ignorance of your (global) culture is not considered cool
I think of myself as pretty well-educated. But I didn’t understand the role that India played in essentially creating the numbering system which we all used – I, like most, thought it originated with Arab mathematicians.
But it didn’t, and the forthcoming book by William Dalrymple about how India changed the world got ordered quickly once I read this article. And it is, as Dalrymple notes, ironic that the innovations in banking, accounting and business enabled by the Indian system of numbers when it reached the west did so much to create the financial muscle which allowed Europe to ultimately subjugate India. After all, it was “the East India Company – run from the City of London by merchants and accountants, with their ledgers and careful accounting – that ran amok and seized and subjugated a fragmented and divided India in what was probably the supreme act of corporate violence in history.”
