The Braindump Blog

The Wayback Machine is a superbly useful tool in finding out what various websites in the past looked like. You can use it to dig up the tragically high number of websites that have suffered from the ravages of link-rot, or to see what still-here websites used to look like in the past.

The latter use is particularly important for journalists and us everyday citizens in this modern era when, for instance, the current US administration, being the most-censorious, anti-free-speech, scared-of-words governments over there in recent times is forcing its agencies to quietly remove or edit sections of their websites - including removing, potentially forever, many important datasets on subjects like health and climate change.

It’s one of the few sites that, like Wikipedia, I think is a wonderful example of the internet used for unalloyed good, and like Wikipedia, worth donating to now and then if you have spare money.

But how do the website snapshots get to the Machine in the first place? They do operate their own crawler, but that’s not the only way. They enlist the help of several third party organisations to get at content they otherwise might not have found and catalogued in time

One of these external organisations is the Archive Team.

The Archive Team focuses on grabbing content that’s hosted by services that are or were at risk of closure or some other kind of deletion. In the past this has included GeoCities, Yahoo Video, Friendster and others.

In their official words:

Archive Team is a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage. Since 2009 this variant force of nature has caught wind of shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions - and done our best to save the history before it’s lost forever.

Per co-founder Jason Scott:

Archive Team was started out of anger and a feeling of powerlessness, this feeling that we were letting companies decide for us what was going to survive and what was going to die

And recently I discovered it was extremely easy to join in with the “rogue archivists” in this important project. You should consider it too.

The easiest way is to download their “warrior”. This is a program that runs inside a virtual machine you first install on your computer (e.g. VirtualBox). Once that’s up and running and you’ve chosen the project you want to work on, it simply automatically downloads the at-risk items that need archiving and then uploads them to Archive Team in the format they need to eventually end up on the Wayback Machine.

All the software is free. And don’t let the need for a Virtual Machine put you off. It was a very simple process for me - something you could complete in a handful of minutes, and fully documented here.

The main caveat is that you need to have a “clean” internet connection. What that means is detailed in the “Can I use whatever internet access for the Warrior?” section on this page. It basically means no VPNs, DNS accelerators, ISP connections that inject adverts, proxies, content filtering firewalls, being in a country that heavily censors the internet, and so on. Your computer basically needs to be able to access the webpage its archiving in its pure, unadulterated form.

But if you’re good with that, why not join the effort to preserve that wealth of content out there that’s at risk of forever vanishing?

A few of their current projects:

Meta Ad Library: Database for advertisements for Facebook and other products by Meta. IRC Channel US Government: Archiving the US government. IRC Channel #UncleSamsArchiv Radio Free Asia: Non-profit media organization owned by USAGM. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: Non-profit media organization owned by USAGM. Voice of America: An internationally-broadcasting state media network at risk of closure.

Telegram: Archiving public messages in various newsworthy and/or otherwise notable Telegram channels

There’s a lot of other ways you can get involved if you have technical ability or computational resources. But this is something you can run very easily on your average everyday computer whilst you’re using it for whatever you turned it on to do.

AI to help police catch criminals before they strike

says a press release from the UK Government last week.

This does not fill me with confidence. We’re heading towards the era of actual Minority Report it would seem - possibly another example of the torment nexus humanity constantly fails to avoid creating.

Firstly, to make an obvious technical point, someone isn’t a criminal before they commit a crime. They are in fact an innocent person. Nonetheless, crime prevention is obviously better than letting it happen. Which is one reason why we already have plenty of laws around “conspiracy to commit” crime, which if you break, make you a criminal, with a potentially length prison sentence. These are examples of “incohate” offences:

An inchoate offence is one that is incomplete.

Anyway, what is the actual government plan? Basically it’s to have someone make a crime hotspot map that has to somehow involve using the black box magic of feeding sensitive personal data into “advanced AI”.

Innovators have been tasked with developing a detailed real time and interactive crime map that spans England and Wales and can detect, track and predict where devastating knife crime is likely to occur or spot early warning signs of anti-social behaviour before it spirals out of control

which:

…will be rooted in advanced AI that will examine how to bring together data shared between police, councils and social services, including criminal records, previous incident locations and behavioural patterns of known offenders.

Why do I feel like it’ll involve dumping a load of person data into some privately-controlled-by-a-weird-billionaire version of ChatGPT and asking it to make a map?

Outside of the potential use of ChatGPT (which to be fair is something I just assumed, it might well having nothing to do with it) - it’s not like this type of thing hasn’t been done before. Witness the rise of “predictive policing” using now-less-fashionable forms of AI.

The typical implementation did not go well.

To quote a headline from the MIT Technology Review:

Predictive policing algorithms are racist. They need to be dismantled.

Why? At least partially from the nature of the data they tend to be fed:

Yet increasing evidence suggests that human prejudices have been baked into these tools because the machine-learning models are trained on biased police data. Far from avoiding racism, they may simply be better at hiding it.

The UK Government’s own “Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation” wrote in 2019 that:

The evidence suggests that there is an absence of consistent guidelines for the use of automation and algorithms, which may be leading to discrimination in police work. … Multiple types of potential bias can occur. These include discrimination on the grounds of protected characteristics; real or apparent skewing of the decision-making process; and outcomes and processes which are systematically less fair to individuals within a particular group.

Now, some of these efforts were from a few years ago. Unquestionably, the nature and abilities of AI tools has radically changed since then. It does make sense to me that there is a potential good use of these type of tools in the field of crime prevention - even if we don’t know what it is yet. Plus more people have spent more time thinking about the potential perils embedded in these systems that we should aim to avoid.

So maybe it’s just a bad headline and this effort will prove to be something that will materially help society. But I feel it’s far more likely to be the government getting on the generative AI hype train with some underspecified request that will end up offloading the responsibilities of the state, as well as a big bucketload of public money, to some blackbox software under the exclusive control of an agenda-ridden US tech billionaire which ends up doing nothing more than further embed inequality and prejudice into the criminal justice system.

I hope I’m wrong.

Also, in extreme irony:

This announcement is the second challenge to be announced as part of the Programme, building on our Clean Energy challenge aiming to deliver cheaper bills for households across the UK by shifting electricity demand during evenings and weekends by two gigawatts by 2030 – the equivalent of 1.5 million homes.

Feeding tons of data into some unspecified “advanced AI” is unlikely to help any clean energy challenge.

📚 Finished reading America, América by Greg Grandin.

This book, by a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, was a lengthy, yet extremely readable, 500-year history of the modern Americas that really quite shifted my views of the birth of the modern-day United States, whilst providing insights into the history and influence of the nations of South America that I had essentially no knowledge of.

Sure, it covers the horrors inflicted on the indigenous population coming from the violent greed of various European colonisers - a ghastly, but at least somewhat well-known history - but it was much of the the interplay between the ever-changing north and south of the American continent that was fresh to me. I learned a lot more detail about the rulers and other key figures from North, and especially South American history.

The general premise is that the identity of the United States was formed not only in relation to the commonly-held idea of “looking east” to Europe, but rather in relation to its southern neighbours, South America. And likewise Latin America’s various identities were shaped by their constant political and/or actual battles against its expansionist-inclined northern neighbour.

A key issue throughout the book is the author’s contrasting of the northern Anglo-American approach to expanding their territory - violently conquering so-called “terra nullis” - vs the countries of Latin America which were often more included to think of indigenous people as being part of the existing communities rather than as something between the non-existent and rival nations.

Grandin asserts that it was really Latin America that was the key driving force behind liberal internationalism. After their own wars of independence, the republics of southern America pioneered “American International Law” - which (in theory) promoted the equality of nations great and small, respect for the sovereignty of other nations, and, in general, the idea that you usually shouldn’t intervene in the business of other countries. These are ideas that ended up influencing the founding of transnational organisations such as the League of Nations and the UN.

This is a contrast to a more “might is right” expansionist doctrine, whereby if your country happens to be big and powerful then you have every right to - and maybe even a duty to - control or conquer other nations which cannot physically defend themselves.

These were ideas more associated with the early years of the United States (some might say they are unfortunately making a comeback). The US used its “Monroe Declaration” - originally celebrated as an expression of solidarity by Latin American nations - as an excuse to manipulate and assault the countries to its south and elsewhere; undermining foreign governments, enacting regime changes and so on.

Although there were exceptions on both sides. The author seems to be quite a fan of the US President Franklin Roosevelt. His “Good Neighbour Policy” led to the recognition of the sovereignty of other nations and their right to govern themselves. This, in the view of the author, gave him the moral authority to fight against the rise of global fascism.

The inhabitants (and colonisers of) southern America were of course not morally pure. Far from it. This book details enough for us to realise that the author certainly does not intend to portray ever resident of the south as morally heroic. But rather that there was a real difference between the typical Latin American vision of democracy (“vibrant and egalitarian”) and that of it northern neighbour (“tepid and unequal”); the presence of social and economic rights, vs the critical focus being solely on political rights (for some).

It’s also an exceptionally readable book. I believe it is over 700 pages long which would normally put me off. But I’m glad in this case it did not. It is, at least to me, an absolutely fascinating and quite radical rethinking of, in particular, the history of the US as I knew it, as well as the history, intellectual and otherwise, of South America -including the latter’s philosophical influence on several of the concepts that drive the ideas of international law, democracy and human rights as we know them today.

Or knew them.

The book has tremendous contemporary relevance. Some of the sentences above might resonate as topics we urgently need to be concerned with today, even whilst they are told from the perspective of events of up to several centuries ago. It would appear that this history of politics and justice is not always a one-way journey. And, as always, as trite and predictable as it is to say it: those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.

I’ll end with a quote from the book’s own blurb, which, as naturally biased as it will be, reflects how I felt about this exceptional book. I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in history, the Americas, geopolitics and related subjects - or simply in how the world we know today came about.

At once comprehensive and accessible, America, América shows that centuries of bloodshed and diplomacy not only helped shape the political identities of the United States and Latin America but also the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world.

A culmination of a decades-long engagement with hemispheric history, drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World.

Some facts and figures that are useful to know as the battle around inheritance tax in the UK will most likely come to the fore again following reports that the government is considering changing it.

The vast majority of deaths do not involve any inheritance tax charge at all:

in the tax year 2022 to 2023, 4.62% of UK deaths resulted in an Inheritance Tax (IHT) charge, increasing by 0.23 percentage points since the tax year 2021 to 2022. This means that IHT is payable on fewer than 1 in 20 estates, as it has been since 2007 to 2008, and broadly since statistics were first produced

And the rate paid by those who do is far lower than the headline 40% rate.

t…he average effective tax rate paid by taxpaying estates was 13% (compared to the headline marginal rate of 40%), reflecting the impact of exemptions, reliefs, and tax-free allowances.

These charts based on a report commissioned by the Bible Society, leveraging a poll run by Yougov, tell a story that surprised me.

Over the past few years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of young people - aged 18-34 - that report believing in God.

And some of them seem to be actively engaging with their beliefs, with a massive increase in the % who report going to a Christian church at least monthly.

It’s still a minority pursuit to be sure. But, nonetheless, the upswing reflects a 400% increase in the 18-24 group.

The increase is dominated by young men, with not so far off twice the proportion of young men reporting that they regular attending church than women.

I haven’t read the full report, but I do intend to, to see if it it includes any theories of why this is.

📚 Want to read: Goliath’s Curse by Luke Kemp.

The usual cheery reading.

Luke Kemp surveys the history of the fall of yesterday’s ‘great civilisations’ (not that I think he’d call them that) in order to find the patterns in why they are no longer with us.

America or Tiwanaku in South America, or the sprawling empires of Egypt, Rome and China, it was increasing inequality and concentrations of power that hollowed these Goliaths out before an external shock brought them crashing down.

And whether it always led to catastrophe:

These collapses were written up as apocalyptic, but in truth they were usually a blessing for most of the population.

And, naturally, what it means for us living in today’s world:

Now we live in a single global Goliath. Growth obsessed, extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, big tech and military-industrial complexes rule our world and produce new ways of annihilating our species, from climate change to nuclear war. Our systems are now so fast, complex and interconnected that a future collapse will likely be global, swift and irreversible.

Good to know!

Let’s hope there are some concrete ideas herein to save us from ourselves. After all:

All of us now face a choice: we must learn to democratically control Goliath, or the next collapse may be our last.

I first heard of the book from this newspaper article which covers some of the author’s theories and thoughts.

Enough of the billionaires and their big tech. ‘Frugal tech’ will build us all a better world

This is one of those articles that makes you remember that how things are is not how things had to, or have to, be.

With a tiny bit of imagination there’s a way to develop technologies that serve the interests of the users, not the handful of secretive billionaires that own them.

And it doesn’t require us to invent any new process. There are people and communities out there that show us how it can be done.

There’s a common misconception that state-of-the-art technology has to be expensive, energy consumptive and hard to engineer. … The real pioneering technologies of today are genuinely useful systems I like to call “frugal tech”, and they are brought to life not by eccentric billionaires but by people doing more with less. They don’t impose top-down “solutions” that seem to complicate our lives while making a few people very rich. … While most of what we consider to be “hi-tech” is closed off behind proprietary algorithms, the open-source technologies above all require community involvement. This can be immensely empowering, and can improve public trust: it’s hard (and unwise) to give yourself over to a technology that won’t tell you how it works, particularly when its predefined settings allow only for meagre approaches to “user privacy”. … Tech bros may want you to believe there is no point in making something new unless it is difficult, inaccessible and exclusionary. But technological innovation is about collaboration as much as it is about competition. For many people across the world, a product’s value isn’t in a sky-high valuation, or in it being impossible to take apart (as with impenetrable iPhones). Often, the smartest technologies are those that distil a problem down to its bread and butter components in order to disseminate a solution to the masses.

So, while innovative individuals and communities around the world quietly get on with improving their lives and those around them, it’s high time the rest of us stopped being passive recipients of technology, and started asking ourselves what kind of world we want to live in and how to create it.

Democrats Act Like Elections Are Complicated. They’re Not.

Our research found that economically populist policies - like a higher federal minimum wage, limits on imports to protect US jobs, and expanding Medicare - appeal to working-class people on both sides of the aisle

A US article, but imagine it’s relevant here in the UK too. Basically, if you want to win back some ‘working-class’ votes then it pays to address the issue that modern day life is basically unaffordable for an incredible number of people.

The claim is that this idea is a big part of Zohran Mamdani’a success in the New York mayoral campaign.

The usual relationship between religion and political party in the UK - something that has really stood the test of time, and isn’t explainable entirely by factors like voter age - appears to be breaking down.

The Conservative party has been very close to English Anglicanism since its emergence in the mid-19th century. Catholics and free-church Protestants (such as Baptists and Methodists) have tended towards the Labour and Liberal/Liberal Democrat parties. Even as Britain has become more secular, these relationships have persisted.

Upsettingly, the new dynamics appear to be rather in favour of Reform.

In addition, Reform is as popular as the Conservatives among Anglicans, and as popular as Labour among Catholics. This suggests it is appealing across the traditional denominational divide more successfully than either of the major parties.

If there is to be a single party that attracts the bulk of Britain’s Christian support, at this point it is far more likely to be Reform than anyone else.

📺 Watched seasons 1-3 of The White Lotus.

I missed this the first time round, but it appeared to feature in many people’s lists of “what to watch if you love Severance” - which I did, so I did.

It’s a dark kind of comedy that each series follows the lives of a different set of well-to-do guests and less privileged employees of a different branch of a luxury hotel/spa chain called The White Lotus.

The show has a magical way of projecting stress and ominousness even whilst there’s a sense in which, especially in the earlier episodes of each season, not a lot is exactly happening.

Rightfully acclaimed for its implied social commentary and satirical take on the winners of modern-day capitalism.

📺 Watched season 3 of Beyond Paradise.

The set-in-Britain spin-off of its more famous cousin, Death in Paradise sees Detective Goodman’s local town continue to suffer from an extraordinarily high murder rate.

To be fair, he and his team are a lot better at solving them than the typical real-life crime-solving rate we see in the rest of the country.

Previous seasons.

🎶 Listening to Cacophony by Paris Paloma.

I’m told a big chunk of folk who have social media accounts will already be very familiar with at least one of the songs on this album - “Labour” - which, by addressing the vast amount of unrewarded domestic labour that even in this day and age women are often expected to do on behalf of men, has formed the soundtrack to plenty of feminist-inspired Tiktoks.

But there’s plenty more on here to keep listeners interested beyond that hit, a good selection of which include further very necessary & modern-feeling feminist takes.

🎶 Listening to Mirror Starts Moving Without Me by Pom Pom Squad.

More angsty than the band name would suggest, the album’s name apparently comes from the horror movie trope where standing perfectly still, looking at yourself in a mirror and, all of a sudden, your reflection moves. Aargh.

In line with that, you can expect songs along the themes of the struggles of dealing with the ever-changing nature of one’s identity and self-image - even when you’re a justifiably famous star of the indie music world

🎶 Listening to Wake Up, Shut Up, Work by Millie Manders and The Shutup.

I came across this one looking for modern day political protest type songs. Sure enough, this high-energy combo of at least pop punk, rock, rap & ska covers a lot of subjects that we certainly should be protesting about - everything from toxic relationships, sexual violence, sexism, mental health struggles, all the way up to the horror that is modern-day genocide.

🎶 Listening to I’m Doing It Again Baby! by Girl in Red.

The first of a ton of belated and brief media-diet entries I’ve built up whilst being distracted by other projects. Normal service may resume soon, who’s to say.

This album is a sequel to 2021’s If I Could Make It Go Quiet, which is also worth a listen. This newer one is not quite as emotionally dark as the original was, but still manages to convey the artist’s apparent inner turmoil perfectly well.

Potentially the worst data leak I’ve ever heard of has just come to light, two years after it actually took place, seemingly after a substantial effort to cover it up by the British government.

In summary, after the catastrophic “betrayal” that was the withdrawal of UK (and US) troops from Afghanistan after twenty years of conflict in 2021 took place, the UK set up a scheme - the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy or “ARAP” - where Afghan locals who had helped out with the UK military effort over there could apply to seek safe haven in the UK. This was on the basis that the fact that they worked with us against the Taliban would obviously make them key targets for the Taliban’s cruelty.

A list was assembled of the thousands Afghan folks that had applied for the scheme and their families. Predictably, most of them received no help from the UK at all, so remained in Afghanistan, facing the substantial afore-mentioned risks.

In an extra layer of horror, what has just come to light is that the list of applications - i.e. the list of people who had worked against the Taliban to further British efforts - was leaked. Two years ago.

It seems that we don’t know by whom or why. But we do know that the Ministry of Defence found out about it in 2023 after the data had been posted to, wait for it, a Facebook group.

…it contained 33,000 records among which was “personal information associated to 18,714 Afghans who had applied either to the ex gratia or the Arap [Afghan relocations and assistance policy] scheme on or before 7 January 2022.

As well as:

…details of MPs, senior military officers and government officials linked to individual claims.

The parts of the Conservative UK government who know about this list rightly feared that were the Taliban to become aware of this list then the people on it might be in great danger if seen as “collaborators” by the new Afghani regime and their hangers on.

However, defence secretary Ben Wallace took out a super-injunction such that no-one was allowed to acknowledge the existence of this list outside of the few people that already knew. Various defence secretaries of both major political parties in the UK have kept the injunction going since then.

Journalists started hearing about it but were legally unable to report on it. The vulnerable people who featured on the list were not allowed to be told about it, or even asked to take special precautions, just in case it raised questions. Those most at risk would have no way of knowing that their data was out there in the public domain.

Most British government ministers remained in the dark.

All in all, it was subject to a fairly unique amount of secrecy, until earlier this week - 2 years later - when the super injunction was finally lifted. Just as, it seems, the Afghan Response Route scheme which had been put in place to help the people unknowingly on the list to come to relative safety in the UK was pre-emptively closed, seemingly on the basis that it cost a bit too much money to help save the lives of the people that had risked life and limb to help our failure of a war effort.

This, cruelly, leaves not far off 10,000 people stuck in Afghanistan who I suppose, now at least know they face an enhanced level of risk - but have very few options in terms of mitigating it.

Says a lawyer with a firm who is representing some of the people affected:

This is essentially a database for anyone who wants to know who assisted the armed forces in Afghanistan. If you’re someone whose family member or friend was killed by these individuals I’m sure you will want to take vengeance.

One of the reporters who learned what was going on very early on is a host on the podcast The News Agents. This episode from a couple of days ago, when one of the hosts, Lewis, could finally tell the story that he’d been forced to conceal for the past two years, is quite illuminating on the frustration and possible dangers of exactly what went on.

We should be ashamed. Again.

The Trump administration’s cuts to, or rather near eradication of, US Agency for International Development (USAID) have predictably deadly consequences for those who the funding previously helped.

A recent scientific study puts the number of deaths that the cuts will cause at somewhere around astonishing 14 million deaths by the year 2030, including 4.5 million children under the age of 5.

Our estimates show that, unless the abrupt funding cuts announced and implemented in the first half of 2025 are reversed, a staggering number of avoidable deaths could occur by 2030.

Over here in Britain, the Labour government have also made huge cuts to aid.

“ONE”, an organisation that fights “for a more resilient, equitable future for all” calculated the potential death count from these cuts at at least 600,000 over five years - and that seems to be based only one one of the programs Britain helped fund, Gavi.

📚 Finished listening to The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman.

Suleyman is the co-founder of the cutting-edge AI lab DeepMind so certainly could claim to have the expertise to know what’s going on at the cutting-edge of AI.

In this book he provides a stark warning about both that, and another potentially transformative technology - synthetic biology.

He regards these both as general-purpose technologies with many potential uses. Enough that either or both could transform society, for better or worse. Horrific dystopia, the end of life as we know it - or unbridled prosperity and happiness? That is the choice humanity is going to have to make. After we figure out how exactly we can even make those choices.

Why are these technologies of AI and synthetic biology so different to the inventions of the past? Suleyman notes 4 features that make their “coming wave” hard to control.

Asymmetry: It may be far easier to use them for offense than defence. In the future, it might not be hard for an individual to gain access to an engineered pathogen that could kill millions of people. Defending against such threats is likely to remain incredibly challenging.

Hyper-evolution: The pace of development of these technologies is far faster than the rate at which societies and regulators and adapt to them. The sheer speed of progress means dangerous future developments might appear before we have the structure in place to control them.

Omni-use: These technologies are very general, very versatile. We’ll want to use these technologies for beneficial uses - but how then can we prevent them from being used for harm? The same algorithm that can discover new medicines may also be able to discover new deadly poisons.

Autonomy: These technologies can in theory operate without direct human control. AI systems can make decisions. Biological entities will reproduce. How can we make sure that what they do, or “choose” to do, is in line with the values of humanity?

The central problem might be that of containment. Given these technologies exist and are seeing rapid development, how can we ensure they don’t break out of their confines and run amok in our world? How can we keep abreast of their “modes of failure” and regulate to mitigate any negative impact they might bring?

We don’t have a great history of successfully containing technology. The big success story to me, if there is one, might perhaps be nuclear weapon containment. But anyone who read a newspaper recently will see how fragile even that system is.

But with technology as potentially all-encompassing and powerful as AI and synthetic biology, Suleyman argues, we simply must get it right - if it is possible, which is in itself uncertain.

He provides 10 suggestions. Roughly:

1. Safety: invest in an “Apollo program” for technical safety. Require funding to go to safety. Be sure we can shut down AIs if we need to.
2. Audit: regularly audit and share knowledge about AI systems. Don’t rely on institutions that don’t have enough information to act optimally. Transparency and accountability are key.
3. Choke points: buy time to build a defence. Consider import/export restrictions, constraints on use of certain software and hardware, limit chip sales.
4. Critics as makers: ensure the views and expertise of AI critics are used when developing and building these systems. Responsible developers must build safety controls into the technology from day 1.
5. Profit should not be the only incentive for developing these technologies. We need to use business models that promote safety as well as profitability.
6. Help strengthen governments; support them in adapting to these technologies so that they can regulate effectively. Consider a licensing system, and education initiatives. We may need to change the tax system.
7. Create global treaties and alliances to negotiate universal standards and regulations.
8. Promote an open culture - encourage experiments, share learnings, fail openly, learn from what went wrong.
9. Promote public awareness of what’s going on. Incorporate grassroots public movements into technological development processes.
10. Produce a coherent whole. None of the above steps will work in isolation. These technologies are extremely complicated; focus on careful rather than rapid changes. The above 9 steps should be considered as a virtual circle, not competing programs.

Importantly, note that containment isn’t a project with an end date. One of the most terrifying aspects of this whole thesis is that, if these technologies are as powerful as the author thinks, then, however well we have done so far, it might only take a single bad decision in the future to push humanity to the brink of catastrophe.

Apparently Meta is so ashamed of their AI efforts to date that they are offering $100 million signing bonuses plus ‘even higher renumeration’ in an effort to steal employees from OpenAI.

That feels absolutely mind blowing if one thinks about what $100 million actually means. Like legacy level wealth.

It would immediately make you a centi-millionaire, of which there are around 28 thousand in the world.

Although I suppose the people likely to be able to take up this offer are already probably rather well-remunerated. The FT shares what the normal comp for these jobs might be:

Salaries for a software engineer at OpenAI range from around $238,000 to $1.34mn, according to financial package tracking website Levels, while Meta’s salaries varied from $212,000 to around $3.7mn

Reuters has however in the past shared higher figures for the leading researchers in the field.

Top OpenAI researchers regularly receive compensation packages of over $10 million a year, sources said.

Admittedly the source for the $100 million claim this is Sam Altman who is not exactly known for his veracity.

New (to me) vocab just dropped. Apparently the youngsters have taken to referring to an ice cold Diet Coke as a “fridge cigarette”.

And in general the drink is making a comeback with the Gen Zers.

In recent years, Diet Coke has made a noticeable comeback. Gen Z’s version of the smoke break is the “Diet Coke break.” On TikTok, Diet Coke “recipes” go viral. “Gen Z is obsessed with Diet Coke,” Snaxshot writer Andrea Hernández noted in a recent newsletter.

Not that Diet Coke is really thought to be a healthy option, but rather worse probably is that the same article suggests that actually cigarettes are making a bit of a comeback, culturally at least.

It’s a sign of the times. Clean Girl is out. Cigarettes are cool again. And in a world full of prebiotic soda and protein water, sometimes all you really want is a crispy “fridge cigarette” to take the edge off.

WhatsApp is finally rolling out adverts to all users. If you have a Facebook or Instagram account it expropriate the data from those to personalise them.

It’s also accidentally shared someone’s personal phone number via its hated AI feature.

Waiting on the platform for a morning train that was nowhere to be seen, he asked Meta’s WhatsApp AI assistant for a contact number for TransPennine Express. The chatbot confidently sent him a mobile phone number for customer services, but it turned out to be the private number of a completely unconnected WhatsApp user 170 miles away in Oxfordshire.

We, or at least the supposed “most intelligent AI assistant you can freely use”, doesn’t seem to know why:

The AI explained vaguely it was generated “based on patterns” and promised to “strive to do better in the future” by admitting when it didn’t know an answer. But it then falsely described the number as “fictional” and not “associated with anyone”. When Smethurst challenged that, it admitted: “You’re right,” and said it may have been “mistakenly pulled from a database”.

Asked which database, it muddied the waters further by contradicting itself again saying: “I didn’t pull the number from a database. I generated a string of digits that fit the format of a UK mobile number but it wasn’t based on any real data on contacts.”

Is this enough to make more people consider Signal as their messenger app? I’d like to think so, but not really all that optimistic.

Trump’s New Post About Taylor Swift Is So Immature We Needed Child Psychologists To Explain His Thinking

Mainly sharing because the headline is so great.

It does of course raise serious behavioural concerns about the leader of the previously free world, but that’s nothing new.

It’s of course in relation to the time the President of the USA recently took a break in his busy day to share this gem with the world:

Has anyone noticed that, since I said “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,” she’s no longer “HOT?””

An article in a recent issue of the Byline Times headlined “The British Political-Media Class’ Mainstreaming of the Populist Radical-Right” provides nice simple definitions of some of the words that sadly we’re having to use more and more when considering modern day politics where I live and beyond. These are frequently used words that are often used in a vague or confusing way in my experience.

Here are three that are of relevance to the modern day radical right-wing political ideas that have entered the fray

Populism:

…populism valorises “the people”, which it conceives as a unified and homogenous whole (as in, for instance, the “silent majority”)

“The people” are defined in opposition to an out-of-touch, unrepresentative “Establishment”, or more commonly in the UK, “liberal elite”. This typically includes the mainstream media (“fake news” in Trump)-speak, the BBC in the case of those vociferously lobbying against it); elected politicians (in it only for themselves); public functionaries (obstructive and unaccountable bureaucrats); intellectuals (pointy-headed inhabitants of the ivory tower); the legal profession (“lefty lawyers”, judges as “enemies of the people”); and international organisations such as the UN (interfering busybodies subverting national sovereignty).

Populism almost invariably involves the identification of out-groups: stigmatised Others who are represented not simply as being not of “the people” but as a distinct threat to them — for example asylum seekers, migrants, people of colour, travellers, LGBTQIA+ people, the “woke”, and so on and on. In other words, those who are not part of “us”. Indeed, what constitutes “us” is defined largely in opposition to those who are not “us”.

Finally there is an admiration for charismatic leaders and the increasingly fashionable “strong man” not bound by democratic niceties.

Such values include respect for minority rights, the rule of law and the separation of powers, whereas right-wing populism is anti-pluralist, refusing to recognise the existence of legitimate differences among “the people”, and hostile to cultural, religious, sexual and other kinds of diversity.

Nativism:

…nativism holds that “states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (‘the nation’) and that non-native elements (persons and ideas) are fundamentally threatening to the homogeneous nation state”.

Authoritarianism:

Authoritarianism, meanwhile, is the belief in a strictly ordered society in which authority must be respected and deviant behaviour stigmatised and punished.

The article itself is about the mainstreaming of radical right ideas. What is mainstreaming.

Mainstreaming:

Mainstreaming takes place because traditional right-wing parties increasingly address the same issues as radical right-wing ones, and do so in a similar way.

This is particularly the case given the increasing dominance of the political agenda by socio-cultural issues — multiculturalism, identity politics and culture wars. Sentiments that used to be exclusive to radical right parties have increasingly become the “common sense” of the more mainstream right, and the boundaries between the two have become increasingly blurred and porous.

That’s because the modern radical right often doesn’t really have any of its own novel ideas. It just takes existing ones to extremes.

…the radical right “does not stand for a fundamentally different world than the political mainstream; rather it takes mainstream ideas and values to an illiberal extreme.

The press aids with mainstreaming. The most obvious example in the UK is GB News.

Obviously the arrival of GB News in June 2021 and Ofcom’s remarkable latitude in allowing it to run a coach and horses through the due impartiality clauses in its Broadcasting Code has enabled populist radical right views to be expressed on television in an unfettered way that up until very recently would have seemed quite unthinkable.

Whilst it’s hardly a popularly watched TV channel, I do see clips from the station shared widely on the Internet. And perhaps one of its most insidious effect comes from boosting its preferred opinions in other outlets:

…surely the way in which it has allowed populist politicians such as Tice, Farage, Rees-Mogg and Lee Anderson such relatively unmediated access to the airwaves and established a bridgehead with the right-wing press by hiring presenters from the Telegraph (formerly Christopher Hope, now Camilla Tominey) and Mail (Andrew Pierce), as well as providing the right-wing press commentariat as a whole with yet another platform on which to air its views.

What’s a critical danger here?

What in fact they are doing is ventriloquising what they claim to be public opinion, as opposed to the views of those who own and run them, and of their dwindling readerships. But as long as governments and oppositions believe in this ventriloquism act, it works politically, and so the process of normalising populist right-wing discourse continues apace.

Budget shopping store Poundland, who has ‘everything costs one pound’ as its key selling point (well, in the past at least), has itself been sold to a US investment firm.

For £1, obviously.

📚 Finished reading Conclave by Robert Harris.

I joined the macabre throng of people who suddenly found renewed interest in this Pope-related thriller after the real-life death of Pope Francis earlier this year.

It’s now a popular film, but in its original form it was this book. It is of course fiction - and let’s hope the specific story told in the book never comes true. But I did read somewhere that the depiction of the process of selecting a new pope - the “conclave” - is relatively accurate. Wikipedia tells us that IRL Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor thought so at least - although be very cautious about clicking on that link if you don’t want any spoilers.

Anyway, to the extent that it does reflect the reality of the process, it can only have increased my previously rather sparse knowledge of the procedures involved, whilst being an extremely gripping story in its own right.