The Winchester Bible

At the A.I. Epicenter, Technologists Dismiss Pope Leo’s Warnings About the New Technology: Well, of course! Did anyone expect thoughtful response? The people who run the big A.I. companies believe that they are so rich and powerful that they can do anything they want, and don’t require public support to do it. Time will tell if they are correct. 

Tom Stafford:

A lot happened in 2016. It would be easy to imagine that the entire reason for this change was the election of Donald Trump as president, and to stop looking for other causes, but something else also happened which I think we should at least consider, and that other thing says something important about how social media and human psychology interact.

In March 2016 Twitter completed their transition to the algorithmic feed, meaning that it was the default for all users to have their timeline populated by what Twitter thought they would want to see, rather than a chronological feed of posts from people they had decided to follow.

Count me a big fan of the infographics the Vatican has helpfully made to illustrate the main points of Leo’s encyclical. 

The last few weeks have been pretty miserable, honestly, but tonight I’ve made myself a Frisco and an listening to Ella singing Rodgers & Hart. So for the moment I have absolutely nothing to complain about.

Six years ago, I called for the Gandalf Option — and now I see that Pope Leo has endorsed my call. I admit that he didn’t mention me by name, but come on, the debt is obvious.

Disney was an early adopter of a then-struggling technology called Technicolor: you can see it in the landmark shorts “The Three Little Pigs” (1933) and “The Grasshopper and the Ants” (1935). But while the artwork and animation in those films are first-rate by the standards of the time, they haven’t aged very well. Contrast them to “The Old Mill” (1937) — which looks gorgeous even today. What happened? The animators were working on the first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and they were learning on the job at an astonishing rate. “The Old Mill” appeared just six weeks before Snow White; it was a harbinger. 

I wrote about Rowan Williams’s new book on solidarity.

I do love a new version of BBEdit, but what I love even more is reading Bare Bones’s release notes.

Fascinating tidbit from David Thomson’s biography of David O. Selznick: When Selznick heard what the studio did to The Magnificent Ambersons, he tried to get the original footage donated to the Museum of Modern Art (357). There’s no citation for this claim, however; I assume Thomson’s source was Irene Selznick, DOS’s first wife, whom Thomson interviewed at great length. If the story is true, which I doubt, DOS showed remarkable foresight; and of course if he had managed it, an artistic tragedy would have ben averted.

Michael Feldstein on the implications of the Canvas hack: Let’s be clear: This was not some rando script kiddie waltzing through a wide-open back door. The hackers used multiple attack vectors, including Canvas’s open course sites, their help desk software, and social engin...

Finished reading: Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler. A remarkable biography of a remarkable man. One memorable story among dozens: All the Disney employees were profoundly anxious at the premiere of Snow White — it was after all the first animated feature and no one knew how it would be received. But when the dwarfs laid the dead Snow White on her bier, one of the animators could hear a couple near him sniffling and trying to stifle sobs. He couldn’t resist taking a peek. They were Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. 📚

Frame and Cut: a new entry at Cosmos Malick

I am never ever going to read a story that says that anything “changes everything.”

Freddie deBoer: I don’t know how many American colleges and universities will exist in ten years. Probably fewer than now, but then a little right-sizing has made sense for awhile, and would likely increase rather than decrease the health of the system. The ones that keep e...

The epicenter of joy 

Robin Sloan:

It makes me wonder if it would be possible for a company like Anthropic, with their hard-won expertise in alignment, to train their models such that they could not — and I mean really deeply, constitutionally, viscerally COULD NOT — lie about their identity, or pretend to be anything other than an AI model? 

Maybe it’s time for the AI version of Asimov’s laws of robotics? 

I wrote about Sean Keilen’s wonderful new book Shakespeare’s Scholars. Now it’s time for me to go back and re-read the plays he writes about.

Guy writes a book that “explains how seemingly objective technologies known as Artificial Intelligence are poised to take hold of the concept of Truth and replace human complexity with potentially catastrophic robotic certainty.” Guy’s book turns out to be full of AI-fabricated quotations. Guy says that if his fabrication “serves as a warning about the risks of A.I.-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book.” Friends: This is not chutzpah, this is megachutzpah, this is summa cum chutzpah. I want to shake that guy’s hand. 

I wrote a short post on Arsenal’s Premier League title.

I love these photos. 

Drafting templates

This is the world I grew up in. But just a few years later, my elementary-school classroom was integrated. A few years after that, my high school was thoroughly integrated, and though there were still racial tensions, blacks and whites could openly be friends. Then came the white flight from Birmingham: the city’s public schools are now 99% black. Dark forces that seem invincible aren’t; but no victories are permanent either.

Well duh — have you ever seen a more obvious handball?

A CONSTELLATION — a remarkable short film by Miriam Hitchcock.

A Surveillance ‘Cat-and-Mouse’ Game With AI:

In 2023, a team led by Ming Gao, now a researcher at Nanjing University, used human voices to defeat speech-recovery algorithms in a different way. Its jammer, called MicFrozen, is worn by a speaker who doesn’t want to be recorded. It listens as they talk and then generates a real-time stream of ultrasonic “anti-speech” tuned to the speaker’s voice, much like the noise-cancellation technology in your headphones. The device then sends out another layer of counterfeit speech-shaped sound to mislead any algorithm that tries to reconstruct what was lost. 

Note that the “answer” to digital technologies we hate is always MOAR DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES. For previous entries on this point, see this and this. 

I explain why The Gulag Archipelago is not “narrative history.”

Via Peter Atwood, a map made by Paramount Studios in 1927 to show directors and producers that they didn’t need to film in exotic locations: California and Nevada offered all the necessary exoticism! (I’d like to get a closer look, though, at the parts of southeastern California that are supposed to stand in for Sherwood Forest. And at a number of other things, if I’m being honest.) 

Everybody, including me, is shouting VAR MUST GO! (And if it does, then the first time a ref flubs a big call everybody will be shouting BRING BACK VAR! But I solemnly pledge that I will not join that chorus.)

There is no handball rule in European football. Anything might or might not be a handball in any given circumstances. Whenever there’s a possible handball the ref should just flip a coin.