The Braindump Blog

📚 Want to read: Power to the People by Danny Sriskandarajah.

The book presents a blueprint for how we, as individuals, can make a difference through greater community engagement, and how we can deliver a society that works for the many and not the few. He speaks to voter apathy and a growing sense that elections no longer matter, with politicians and institutions too focused on short-term issues to grapple with complex global problems such as climate change, rising inequality, and digital disruption.

14% of Britons apparently believe that “The best system for running a country effectively is a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with elections” according to a recent poll.

This time we can’t even rely on the young folk to save us from our terrible national opinions. The sentiment actually runs even higher in those of younger age, with over 1 in 5 of those aged 18-45 thinking that would be a good thing.

In the same poll, fewer than 1 in 4 people think the UK is going in the right direction. Nearly 2 in 3 think we’re in a period of steep decline. Almost 60% think the UK’s best years are behind us.

It is hard not to join them on these latter propositions, but I find it absolutely insane that a measurable number of people think it’d be better if we didn’t have to “bother” with elections given no alternative beyond (red flag alert) “a strong leader” was given. Cue the famous Churchill quote about worst form of government except all the rest.

This seems like it should be illegal. From today’s Observer:

A new payment system brought in by YoungOnes, which supplies “freelance” retail assistants to many well-known high street stores, charges gig workers 4.8% of their earnings to be paid in one minute or 2.9% to be paid in three days. If they decline, they typically have to wait 30 days

I hadn’t realised quite how much reach our tax-funded public news organisation, BBC News has. It’s impressive.

From this week’s New Statesman:

The BBC News website is by some distance the largest English-speaking news website in the world.

According to analysis of November 2024 data by Press Gazette, BBC News is the only news website to receive more than a billion global views per month. Its audience is 50 per cent larger than its closest competitor (the New York Times).

It reaches nearly ten times as many people worldwide as the Washington Post. In the US it has millions more readers than the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, Bloomberg, CNBC, Newsweek or Google News. Its US traffic is also growing rapidly, by 40 per cent in the past year

Although the point of the article itself is that this reach, and the BBC’s apparent fascination with writing stories about him, is possibly the reason that Elon Musk has been saying so many incoherent, stupid and dangerous things about the little ol' UK in recent times.

To maintain the world’s attention and the riches it brings, Musk must therefore continue to make himself a rolling news story, serving up outrage and provocation on the platforms that command the largest audiences.

Obviously I can hardly say anything in criticism of those who give the world’s richest public bore undue attention. But it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.

Andrew Tate launches ‘Bruv Party’

Andrew Tate, an extraordinarily unpleasant grifter who has been charged with criminal counts of rape, sex with a minor and human trafficking, apparently wants to set up a political party in the UK and run for Prime Minister.

It’s the ‘Bruv party’, which aims to “restore underlying values back to Britain”. Values is the V of Bruv, which turns out to be an acronym of “Britain Restoring Underlying Values”. I suppose there is some indisputable tie-in with the historic British imperialist values of rape and human trafficking.

And of course, as do all these right-wing madmen, he’s seeking succour from famously non-British wannabe-king Elon.

Polices include a reform of the BBC. This would include featuring a “24/7 live broadcast of knife crime offenders serving solitary confinement” whilst getting its other topics from Musk’s “X” network, borrowing the same community notes system that Zuckerberg also is pretending he sees as the solution to humanity’s moderation problem.

Naturally he’s also going a crypto route - saving our faltering economy via creating a national Bitcoin reserve. Oh, and holding weekly referendums. Probably via x.com polls knowing his type.

It’s very possible this thing is just an attention-seeking joke, also very common amongst his ilk. But, when I noted that possibility to an American friend. they cautioned me that the same assumption was thrown about with reference to Trump not all that many years ago.

Here’s hoping that being under house arrest in Romania curtails Tate’s chances a little.

From 404 Media:

Meta’s HR team is deleting internal employee criticism of new board member, UFC president and CEO Dana White, at the same time that CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced to the world that Meta will “get back to our roots around free expression”

Surprise surprise. Zuckerberg’s new obsession with free speech is - as is the case for all these fragile snowflakes - contingent on the speech concerned being of the ilk that either he or the person he’s sucking up to agrees with.

Simon Williamson reviews what we learned about Large Language Model AI development in 2024.

He goes into a lot of detail on each point so the article itself is well worth a read (as is his blog in general if you’re interested in this topic). But in summary:

• Several models that outperformed GPT-4 were released, including those from Google, Claude and various other lesser-known ones. Context lengths were also increased.
• Supercomputers are not required to use them! Many of these are efficient enough to able to be run locally on your own home computer if it’s a reasonably decent one. The smaller ones can even work powered by your mobile phone.
• The cost of running a prompt through a hosted LLM decreased a lot.
• Multimodal models became common - those which are able to respond to pictures, audio and video.
• Live voice and camera modes were added - you can talk to some of them in a way very reminiscent of the film “Her”.
• You can now build entire apps via prompting LLMs.
• The best models stopped being free to use, with OpenAI launching a $200 per month subscription for its fanciest one.
• There was a lot of buzz about AI agents but they’ve not really taken off yet. It’s not even clear what it means to be an agent.
• Evaluating models became a very important skill.
• Apple released a great library for running models (mlx-lm) on Apple silicon - but its consumer Apple Intelligence features were not very exciting.
• New “reasoning” models were released, such as OpenAI’s o1 series. The quality of their output can be improved by increasing inference compute, not just training compute.
• A leading openly licensed model, DeepSeek v3, was trained for under $6 million.
• The energy usage of these models, and hence their environmental impact, dramatically decreased.
• But the environment was adversely impacted in other ways, with all the big tech companies building out a ton of infrastructure - data centres.
• The word “slop” became a popular way to describe undesirable AI content.
• It was found that synthetic training data actually works well, contrary to what was originally thought by some.
• The optimal use of LLMs became harder. They each have their different limitations, they’re all inherently unreliable in some way - and learning how to work with them best is a non-intuitive skill users would need to develop.
• The knowledge gap between people that actively follow and hence know what’s going on with these models and the vast majority of the population who don’t is huge.
• Much as it’s important to critique LLMs for the ways that they can create harm, the way some people criticise these models is unhelpful and doesn’t at all help people get the best value from them.

Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content

Just what 2025 needs to really push it into dystopia.

Zuckerberg’s announcement about Meta’s new-found prioritisation of “free expression” on Facebook and Instagram is, to me, nothing short of a sign of an increasingly horrific future for life on that all-too-ubiquitous platform. I loathe almost every word, and certainly the underlying conspiracy-laden, responsibility-shirking, favour-currying sentiment of it all.

I mean, any weird tech billionaire that thinks checking facts is “too political” and takes the wastelands of x.com as the paradigmatic model of good information hygiene is either selling their entire soul to the Trump / Musk ingratiation train or, perhaps worse, has become a true believer in their cause.

The 5 minute video itself is probably worth a look, particularly if you imagine the reaction must be an exaggeration. To be honest, the first time I saw it I thought it might be a deepfake - especially when I got to the line about how they’re basically moving some of their employees to Texas because California is just too woke, plus when they said they’re going to copy X’s ideas - but apparently it’s real, unless literally everyone fell for it.

I hate but can’t resist giving him attention, but the world’s richest pub bore is really on one with regards to overthrowing the UK government

Turns out he’s a fan of monarchy. Quelle surprise that someone of his petty character and unpleasant views prefers undemocratic systems.

Elon Musk makes 23 posts urging King Charles III to overthrow UK government

Though there is one type of bizarre and public opinion gathering system he does appear to respect - that of the twitter/X poll, which of course coincidentally he owns the means of production of.

Elon Musk hints at US invading the UK to ‘liberate’ it in latest bizarre twist in X saga

The only good thing to come out of recent Elon news is the extremely fast demise of his romance with Nigel Farage, of the Reform party. He seems to have gone from thinking about giving him an absolute bucketload of money to further distort our electoral system straight to calling for him to be deposed. It’s not entirely clear why - but the consensus at present seems to be down to Farage disagreeing with Musk’s view' “jailed far-right anti-Islam agitator” Tommy Robinson Is Good Actually. These poor fragile billionaire babies just can’t handle anyone disagreeing with any of their ill-informed and ridiculous views.

Astonishingly, I suppose this means I agree with Farage on something.

Not content with imperilling a single country, or the international community as a whole, Musk continues his bizarre fixation on trying to get Prime Minister of the UK thrown in jail whilst at the same time appearing to suggest that British convicted criminal / racist / fraudster Tommy Robinson should be released.

There’s nothing new or all that interesting here. I mainly just thought the headline’s characterisation of Musk as ‘the world’s richest pub bore’ was both accurate and darkly hilarious.

His knowledge of British history also seems a little stunted if he believes that some of Starmer’s decisions whilst he was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service were “the worst mass crime in the history of Britain”.

This year it seems this blog contributed nearly 100k words to the unwitting public sphere / purloined AI corpus. My apologies to at least the former.

(Not including any of the linklog posts.)

Here’s the music I apparently listened to this year.

Sometimes I look at these kind of stats and think there must have been a bug. Can it really be true that Britney Spears is in my top 5? In 2024? I vaguely remember listening to a compilation album or two after watching a documentary about her, but that’s about it.

Assuming no actual inaccuracy, I suppose these sort of surprises come from the fact that, at least from devices I scrobble from, it seems that I rarely listen to the same track multiple times. Especially this year where there were months where I barely listened to anything. So it doesn’t take many plays, or perhaps just a particularly lengthy album, to promote something to the top.

Here are the books I finished reading in 2024.

📚 Finished reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami .

I scraped this one in on the last day of 2024. Anything for my book target (which I still failed).

This is actually a trilogy, 3 books in one, although I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them sold in separate volumes. This makes it very long; around 1300 pages depending on your edition. But it made enough of the “best books” lists in the past that I forced myself to not be put off by that fact.

Our heroine, Aomame, climbs down a highway’s emergency staircase in order to try and get out of the traffic jam and make her rather unusual business appointment. But she descends into something a bit more unusual than your typical road. The world shifts a little, almost unnoticeably at first - but one night she notices that she’s looking at a sky with two moons in it. It’s no longer the standard world of 1984 that she knows, so she switches out the 9 and christens her new locale, a world filled with questions, as 1Q84.

This made me realise that I had misread the title for the longest time, thinking it said IQ84. Whoops.

The year was apparently picked as a deliberate call-back to Orwell’s extremely famous novel 1984. Some parallels are there, but presented in an entirely different way, subtle enough to miss. There’s a powerful and secretive force controlling the world in both - Big Brother vs the Little People. History is rewritten. Most people don’t seem to realise what’s going on, that something is different to what is presented on the surface. Our two protagonists are deeply in love but kept away from each other. IQ84 even directly Orwell’s work at least once. But IQ84 is less obviously a work of political dystopia, and it ends a lot more hopefully. If you hated 1984 you could still easily love this.

Back to the story: Tengo is a guy she went to primary school with and hasn’t seen since, despite them both feeling a special connection with each other. He also finds himself in this new world. He’s a writer and find himself involved in a cunning plot to rewrite a story created by a 17-year old girl called Fuka-Eri, who has an association with a cult called Sakigate, such that it wins her a literary prize.

Of course Aomame and Tengo slowly find themselves drawn together into each other’s lives and plot lines. IQ84 can be a surreal world, where nothing is quite what it seems, and seeming coincidences abound. Most people haven’t noticed. But these two have.

It’s a pretty epic tale, and not just in page count. I found it highly gripping, very imaginative and enjoyed feeling the mystery along with the protagonists. The language is of a somewhat unusual style, with repeated phrases that somewhat stick out as slightly unnatural. The book is a translation so perhaps it’s that, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s deliberate. I found it novel and refreshing.

I understand that the ending has left some readers unsatisfied, and sure, there are fundamental curiosities left unresolved. But to be honest I’m not sure how one would neatly sum up this grand adventure of magical realism in any satisfying way. Perhaps sometimes we just have to live with mystery. I’m very glad to have experienced it.

Add 2024 to the list of years where humanity didn’t do much about the impending climate catastrophe.

From The Guardian:

The organisation said the past year was set to be the warmest on record, capping a decade of unprecedented heat fuelled by human activities and driving increasing weather extremes, while greenhouse gas levels continued to reach new highs, locking in more heat for the future.

Such that:

The top 10 hottest years on record have happened in the last 10 years, including 2024

Although ‘impending’ is probably the wrong word for something that is already contributing towards the killing of thousands and displacing of millions of people.

The WMO pointed to a new report that found climate change intensified 26 of the 29 extreme weather events studied by World Weather Attribution (WWA) in 2024, which killed at least 3,700 people and displaced millions.

I’m not at all hopeful that we’ll make much progress next year either, given a mix of our apparent natural disinclination to take meaningful action and the geopolitical situation of the world.

📺 Watched season 68 of Have I Got News For You.

This is a comedy political news quiz show I remember from my childhood. Apparently the first episode was an outrageous 34 years ago. It’s I’m not sure when I started watching it but it certainly had the same team captains - Ian Hislop, editor of the Private Eye magazine and Paul Merton, comedian - who have remained consistently and impressively hilarious to me since my initiation into the show.

When I first watched it it was hosted by Angus Deayton, but he had to leave back in 2002 following various sex and drugs scandals. Now they have a different guest host each week. Some are better at delivering the hilarity than others, but the team captains (and show writers) make every episode wonderfully entertaining, bitingly satirical about those who seek to govern over us.

📺 Watched Good Behavior.

Letty, a compulsive thief since childhood, gets out of prison, intending to start a wholesome new life with her child, which due to her past escapades she was not legally allowed to even see. However, whilst satisfying her urge to steal things she overhears Javier, a fairly compulsive hitman himself, being hired to kill someone’s wife. Overcome in a moment of morality she sets out to prevent that murder-for-hire. Antics ensue as the two of them meet, fall in love and struggle against their self-destructive tendencies.

A mostly gripping drama-thriller. It’s based on Blake Crouch’s book of the same name, which consists of 3 novellas The Pain of Others, Sunset Key, and Grab all about Letty. Which I might have to read, given the show was cancelled after 2 seasons.

Just learned that you can now turn off Microsoft Excel’s previously incessant desire to corrupt your data files by automatically converting your carefully handcrafted data into an entirely inappropriate different type.

Go into Options, then Data, to do this:

The things you can turn off include:

• Remove leading zeros and convert to a number
• Keep first 15 digits of long numbers and display in scientific notation.
• Convert digits surrounding the letter E to a number in scientific notation.
• Convert continuous letters and numbers to a date

If only genetics scientists had waited yet another 3 years before deciding that it was just easier to rename a stack of human genes than wait for Microsoft to do something about the issue given the prevalence of Excel-driven errors in their literature

Edit csv is a very handy tool if you need to make some basic edits to a CSV file on a computer without a nice editor installed. You can upload your CSV (or create it directly on the web), do edits, additions, removals etc. and download again without the format getting messed up.

For this reason it’s useful on computers that insist on opening CSVs in Microsoft Excel - Excel being a tool so bad at dealing with CSVs it forced scientists to rename some human genes just to stop them getting messed up in what for many people is their default CSV tool.

The most popular show on UK Netflix over Christmas was a continuous loop of logs being burned, called ‘Crackling Birchwood Fireplace’.

It features footage of burning wood on an open fire on a loop.

On Boxing Day one of its rivals, ‘Classic Crackling Fireplace’ made the number 3 spot.

Riveting.

I like to prioritise much of my news reading by starting off with what makes the first few pages of a ‘real’ paper.

Ever since The Guardian kind of ruined its nice subscriber-only app ‘Guardian Editions’ by making it a rebranded PressReader app I’ve switched to using the web version of each day’s newspaper when browsing on my phone.

Stories specifically from today’s newspaper update each day here.

PressReader itself isn’t terrible to be clear. I just don’t find it very mobile friendly and loathe that you can’t save or share links easily from it. It’s one of the surprising features that if you’re a member of a UK (?) library you might already have for free. Worth a look if you do.

A common enough Christmas tradition in the UK (and I imagine elsewhere) - in the past anyway, even centuries ago - is to form a group, go and knock at some local randomer’s door, and sing at them. They might even give you a treat or a charitable donation for taking the time to do so, or possibly to encourage you to leave.

Anyway, this is the practice of door-to-door carolling, or ‘wassailing’ if you want to feel like an ancient Nordic.

Annie is right when noting that this feels extremely weird in modern times.

It’s a wild tradition when you think about it. You show up at strangers' homes and… sing at them. They stand awkwardly in the doorway, forced to listen to a few rounds of Gloooooo-ooooo-ooooo-rias before you yell Merry Christmas and release them to the blessed peace of their own home

Possibly almost inconceivably so to the new generation it would seem.

I just described this caroling tradition to my oldest two kids, who are sitting at the table crocheting, playing with Play-Doh, and watching Instagram Reels. They agree: Absolutely unhinged move. Showing up at someone’s house, stranger or friend, to stand on their doorstep and sing a traditional holiday anthem at them.

Although I suppose it could be rebranded as some type of ‘grammable flashmob and at least it might feel a bit more normal. To millennials at least, I’m too old to know whether flashmobs are also old and passé to the newest generation du jour.

📚 Want to read: Proof of Spiritual Phenomena by Mona Sobhani, On the Edge by Nate Silver and The Great Post Office Scandal by Nick Wallis - all books generously bestowed upon me this Christmas.

📚 Want to read: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly.

I’ve a feeling this book might reinforce my fears that the big streaming services like Spotify are…not good for music. The medium is the message etc.

From the Guardian:

More than £100m was spent last year by local authorities and the government on failed efforts to block support for children and young people with special educational needs in England, according to analysis by the Guardian.

A considerable amount of resources are being deployed to avert the duty of providing support for children with special educational needs by councils. But most of the time when their decision is appealed it is later over-turned, meaning they have to pay it and any costs of contesting it in any case, rendering the actually entirely unproductive even on its own terms. Councils won just 1.2% of these cases during 2022-2023.

Per the Independent Provider of Special Education Advice:

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that local authorities must calculate, at some level, that it costs them less to contest tribunal appeals, even if they lose, than to provide every child and young person with what the law entitles them to as a matter of course – because the majority of families don’t [or] can’t appeal.

And at a time where the services are needed more than ever. As the budget for other types of support have dwindled, a lot more families are applying for and getting these education, health and care plans, which end up being the only way to support their children through education. Nearly 1 in 19 children aged 5-15 currently have such a plan.