The Braindump Blog

There’s a way in which nothing is new under the sun. No matter how appalling it seems. That’s not to excuse it of course. So many people should know better than to play with particular kinds of fire.

I don’t pretend to have knowledge of the inner workings of ex-president George Bush Junior’s mind - I was, to put it mildly, never a fan back in the day - but yesterday’s ridiculous inauguration ceremony brought back to my mind his reputed comments from last time we had to witness the same man speak his megalomaniac delusions as a good proportion of the world was subjected to yesterday.

In fact the Intelligencer could really just re-run this article, after subbing a couple of the audience names.

The inauguration of Donald Trump was a surreal experience for pretty much everyone who witnessed it, whether or not they were at the event and regardless of who they supported in the election.

…

But, according to three people who were present, Bush gave a brief assessment of Trump’s inaugural after leaving the dais: “That was some weird shit.” All three heard him say it.

From Reuters:

U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday issued pre-emptive pardons for General Mark Milley, Dr Anthony Fauci and members of the Jan. 6 congressional committee and witnesses, saying they “do not deserve to be the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions.”

It’s a terrifying world where it would even occur to someone that this might be necessary in a supposedly “civilised” state (not to mention that it’s not entirely obvious to me that Presidential pardons should even be a thing that exists).

I’m sure a certain type of nu-Republican is going to see the ultimate in conspiracies lurking in every corner of this. But it’s very obvious what Biden is trying to protect against, and why it might well be necessary. At least make it harder for a vindicative Trump, or any of his tag-a-long snowflakes, to hang these folk out to the wolves in any undeserved way without an overt breakdown of the rule of law.

📚 Want to read: From Label to Table by Xaq Frohlich.

How did the Nutrition Facts label come to appear on millions of everyday American household food products? As Xaq Frohlich reveals, this legal, scientific, and seemingly innocuous strip of information can be a prism through which to view the high-stakes political battles and development of scientific ideas that have shaped the realms of American health, nutrition, and public communication.

Unpleasant to see Trump setting a new high score record in terms of amount donated to his inauguration fund. Ne’er-do-wells have apparently funneled a record-breaking $170 million in his direction.

Statista summarises the recent history via this infographic:

This is a concept quite alien to me as a non-American, but I gather it funds such absolute necessities as having a massive party in the conventional rather than political sense.

From the Independent:

The donations are usually spent on events surrounding the inauguration, such as the oath of office ceremony, a parade, and several inaugural balls.

Lots, but not all, of it is coming from all those tech billionaire man-babies with their newfound adoration of the forthcoming president, along with their dear friends from the crypto-currency “business”. Disgusting is as disgusting does. Why would these supposedly successful, independent gods of capitalism burn their money at something so awful? Well, I guess it’s possible some of them genuinely like him (or his dancing cringe-tweeter frontman, Elon). Otherwise, I can only imagine it’s pure fear that if they don’t debase themselves both financially and publicly then maybe they won’t make quite as many billions of unnecessary dollars next year as they otherwise would.

Per Brendan Glavin of OpenSecrets:

“They don’t want to be on the president’s bad side,” said Glavin. “If he is upset with someone or upset with a company doing something he doesn’t like, he has no qualms about just coming right out and berating them in public.

“I think that really comes into play much more this time than in [the] past with different presidents,” he said. “I think past experience is dictating some of the actions in this.”

Or as Statista notes in their article accompanying the above chart:

In stark contrast to 2017, when Trump was met with scepticism, corporate America is playing nice with the president-elect ahead of his second term. Tech giants Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft as well numerous other companies and the CEOs of Apple and OpenAI have made large contribution to Trump’s inauguration fund in an attempt to curry favor or at least not get on the bad side of the man known for holding grudges and not shying away from favoritism.

A rich man’s selfishness knows no bounds; likewise his cowardice. I can’t remember who first came up with the following pearl of wisdom, but I stand behind it 100%: what even is the point of having f*** you money if you never say f*** you to anyone? Or at least to no-one where doing so might just make the world a generally more bearable place for far more people than it could possibly hurt.

Somewhat to my surprise, it seems that the Tiktok ban has actually happened for our US friends - at least for now.

This is, I understand, is what our transatlantic cousins see when trying to access the site today:

I’m afraid the now-standard tech-billionaire-style Trump sycophancy implied in the message does nothing more than make me hope the ban lasts extra long, as emotional and irrational response as I know that is. Although Trump is thinking about undoing it on Monday, if he gets to it.

It’s especially galling as, let us never forget, it was Mr Trump back in 2020 that first decided he was going to ban Tiktok on the basis of its foreign ownership being a threat to national security. At the time it wasn’t clear exactly if or how this was possible, but that’s of course not the sort of thing that stops words coming out of Trump’s mouth.

A lawyers at the ACLU heralded this as A Good Thing:

“President Biden is right to revoke these Trump administration executive orders, which blatantly violated the First Amendment rights of TikTok and WeChat users in the United States,” she said.

A year later, the Biden administration actually rolled back the Trump executive order that would have carried this out, in lieu of a new executive order that aimed to more generally “address the risks posed by ICTS transactions involving software applications that are designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied by persons that are owned or controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary” .

It’s surely a threat that no-one can seriously doubt is a real one, wherever you personally fall on the issue of a Tiktok ban. I mean, there’s enough damage done by similar technology in the US when similar sites are not technically owned by a foreign adversary.

For what it’s worth, Tiktok still works over here in the UK, and as far as we know there are no plans for a similar ban.

“We won’t be following the same path as the Americans unless or until… there is a threat that we are concerned about in the British interest, and then of course we will keep it under review,” Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones said.

📚 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.