The Braindump Blog

Currently on consecutive day 9 of wearing my Christmas jumper.

Quiver Quantitative tracks and shares a lot of stock trading information to enable reporting on and the utilization of trading strategies that might previously have been relatively hard to put together for mere retail investors.

For example here’s a dashboard showing which US politicians are buying which stocks. Apparently following what they do has been quite profitable in recent times.

I built a trading bot that buys stocks that are being bought by politicians. It is up 20% since it launched in May 2022. The market has been flat during the same time period.

Other datasets include spending on lobbying, which companies the folk at r/wallstreetbets are talking about , or Google Trends search interest trends in various companies.

(None of this is a personal recommendation to adopt any of these strategies of course!)

Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications - US senator

I don’t think this is surprising, but it’s now “official” that because push notifications from iOS and Android all have to go via Apple and Google it means that those companies are in a position to know which users are getting which notifications. And thus also to provide that info to people that ask them for it.

…the records that governments can obtain from Apple and Google include metadata that reveals which apps a person has used, when they’ve received notifications, and the phone associated with a particular Google or Apple account.

Several government agencies, both inside and outside of the US, have successfully requested this info. Apple claims that until Senator Wyden brought this topic up they were forbidden from sharing any information about their ability to do this, let alone how often it happened.

TIL: When playing fruit machines, legally it’s the person who presses the button that gets the winnings rather than the person that puts the money in, at least in the US.

So I guess be careful who you let have the fun of spinning the reels no matter how deep in you are to a gambling session. Otherwise you risk the fate of Jan Flato:

Jan Flato put $50 into a video poker machine at Florida’s Seminole Hard Rock Casino, and had his lady friend push the button for good luck.

…

Flato’s money and Marina Navarro’s hand won $100,000, but Flato didn’t get a dime.

They are no longer friends.

The last of the big tech giants recently released its version of a large language model generative AI assistant - Amazon’s somewhat dystopia-sounding “Q”. Not to be confused with OpenAI’s supposed-to-be-secret super powerful AI model codename Q*.

Amazon Q is aimed at businesses, especially those that already use Amazon technology as part of their operations, rather than entertaining your desires to hear robot-generated fan-fic. Perhaps more of a rival to Microsoft Copilot than ChatGPT.

By connecting it up to your existing data sources:

Business users—like marketers, project and program managers, and sales representatives, among others—can have tailored conversations, solve problems, generate content, take actions, and more.

Somewhat predictably, just 3 days later it hit the news due to leaked documents suggesting that it is “experiencing severe hallucinations and leaking confidential data”.

Being an data analyst type of person I am a fervent believer in the below concept, but until now I didn’t realise it had a name.

Per Wikipedia, Twyman’s law states that:

Any figure that looks interesting or different is usually wrong.

That is to say if you think you found something mind-blowingly interesting or revolutionary in your data, the sad truth is that most often you just made some kind of mistake. Whilst we should of course approach each situation with an open mind, the same default principle might be adopted when reviewing the work of others.

Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies

Rolling Stone isn’t holding back in their obituary of Henry Kissenger, who died last week at the age of 100.

As US national security advisor and secretary of state to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Rolling Stone tells a story which situates the responsibility for the deaths of millions of people on Kissenger.

It’s always valuable to hear the reverent tones with which American elites speak of their monsters.

One major part of this was his role in deliberately undermining the potential for an earlier agreement to finish the catastrophic Vietnam war, seemingly on the basis that it might make it harder for his preferred candidate to win the US presidency.

Every single person who died in Vietnam between autumn 1968 and the Fall of Saigon — and all who died in Laos and Cambodia, where Nixon and Kissinger secretly expanded the war within months of taking office, as well as all who died in the aftermath, like the Cambodian genocide their destabilization set into motion — died because of Henry Kissinger.

For it seems like power was Kissenger’s primary motivation. Power for himself, for his President, and for America, at any cost.

The point was American geopolitical dominance, something measured in impunity and achieved by any means necessary.

The world is on track for a “hellish” 3C of global heating, the UN has warned.

Apparently our current efforts to combat global warming have us on track for a 3 degree increase in global warming by the end of the century.

I feel like the news is always the same, only the number of degrees increases point by point, in a very unreassuring manner. Which is fair.

I’m just going to assume next year’s report lets us know that we’re en-route to 3.5 degrees, and finds an adjective somehow even more unnerving than “hellish” to some up our future lives. Even achieving net zero by 2050 would still result in a 2 degree increase, a scenario that was described in rather doomy terms just a few years ago.

📚 Finished reading Upgrade by Blake Crouch.

I read and enjoyed “Recursion” by the same author earlier this year, so was enthusiastic to try this, his latest novel, out.

It’s set in a somewhat dystopian but very recognisable world of the presumably near future. We haven’t solved our environmental problems, in fact parts of Manhattan are unusably flooded amongst other such places. But technology has advanced a bit, in particular our ability to edit genes.

Although gene editing was outlawed following a misguided attempt by top scientist Miriam Ramsay to enhance the resistance of rice to a particular blight. Best of intentions maybe, but there were of course unforeseen consequences which led to a mass starvation, hundreds of millions of deaths, and a ban on genetic engineering. Miriam killed herself.

The ban is enforced by the Genetic Protection Agency, where we find out protagonist, Logan Ramsay, working. Logan is Miriam’s son, who seems to be working there more out of a sense of guilt for the impact his mother had on the world - he himself was involved enough to go to prison for a while - than a love for the job.

One day, a raid goes wrong and he’s exposed to an unknown virus. The symptoms are agonising at first, but he recovers his health soon enough. And more besides. Suddenly he feels stronger, more intelligent, more sensitive, with a better memory. He can even beat his daughter at chess. Until, imprisoned for genetic self-engineering, he no longer has the opportunity to.

Then a figure from his past life turns up, also stronger, fitter and cleverer than either of them had suspected. The problem is that they strongly disagree what they should do about it. The potential consequences of the decision could hardly be higher.

To get to the bottom of that requires resolving several deep ethical problems. What risks do we have the right to take in the name of a potentially better future? And even what does it mean to be human? Not that you’ll need an ethics PhD to understand the situation, honestly it’s mostly an action thriller, substantially less intellectually demanding to me than the last work of fiction I read was. But the conundrum is real, and adjacent to one that humanity is already facing.

I’m not yet sure how I felt about the end of the epilogue, but was fully engrossed throughout the main story.

📚 Finished reading The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul.

This was one of those books that are so fascinating that when I attempt to highlight the interesting bits I find myself highlighting the whole book. I’d heard good things about it and it certainly delivered.

It’s on a topic that’s of great import and interest to me - essentially how to think “better”. It also share a thesis that wasn’t entirely intuitive to me in a way that suggests some practical avenues one can easily change one’s behaviour in order to improve the output of your cognition. What more could be asked?

The general idea is that our society has fixated far too much on the idea that the individual brain is the sole locus of thinking, of cognition, of creativity and problem solving.

It’s the “brain as computer model”, as though we each have a self-contained isolated CPU in our heads that performs our thinking at whatever speed and quality nature saw fit to bestow upon us. That would suggest that aside from sitting at a desk an individually focusing on formal education and training courses, perhaps we could improve our brain’s performance by learning new ways to think about things within our brain, some lifehacks, engaging in brain training or supplementation, but that’s about it. Intelligence is a “fixed lump of something in our heads”, and we design our home, schools and workplaces around that idea

But the author contends that this is all wrong. Modern research has shown that the brain should be thought of more as a magpie. It creates its output out of the materials it finds around it. Thinking uses resources external to the brain, and the nature of the materials available affects the quality of the thinking. Intelligence, as properly considered, isn’t fixed, but rather a “shifting state” that depends on the level of access you have to resources outside of your brain and your ability to leverage them. This book gives you the knowledge to try and improve both of those for yourself and those around you.

And this is essential work! Modern day life involves absorbing a ton of information, often in abstract forms that we had no reason to evolve to be good at, so we aren’t. Many of the challenges and tasks that face us are extremely complex.

It isn’t for nothing that the amount of journal papers and patent applications that have a single author is dwindling over time. At some point much “interesting” work may have exceeded the natural capability of almost anyone’s individual brain, no matter how ensconced in an ivory tower it is.

The book is grouped into three main sections, each of which deals with a different sphere in which we can consider extending our mind.

The first is using our bodies, rather than our brains to help us think. We are more than brains on a stick. The second is adapting the environments we reside in to enable improved thinking. In some ways the trend in recent times has been to engineer ever worse environments for thinking as time goes on. And the last is to leverage our social natures, to “think” with our relationships to other people. Groups of people can be more than the sum of their individuals, particularly if proactively designed to work as such.

The argument is that at present we’d be much better served in spending time figuring out how to improve our capabilities in using these external resources than undergoing individual training to improve some personal skill.

Three sets of general principles arise. The first concerns the “habits of mind” that we should adopt to improve the output of our thinking.

• Offload information from your brain whenever you can. This could mean anything from writing down your thoughts or “socially offloading” them to other people.
• Transform information into artefacts, ideally physical ones. Interact with them, tweak them, show them to other people.
• Be proactive in altering your inner state. Take some physical exercise before trying to learn something. Synchronise with others before you attempt group work. Spend time in nature if you have an upcoming creative task.

The second set of principles uses our understanding of what the brain evolved to do in order to grasp how mental extension works.

• Aim to “re-embody” information. Allow your body’s interoceptive signals to influence your choices. Use physical movement to enact concepts. Focus on your gestures and those of others.
• Re-spatialise information when possible. Our brain processes information via mental maps. Use memory palaces, concept maps and the like to leverage that evolved capacity.
• Re-socialise information. We process it better when we involved others. Teach others what you know, learn from them, imitate, argue, debate and tell each other stories.

Lastly we have a set of principles based on “what kind of creatures we are”.

• Deliberately create cognitive loops. Use your body to help you think, then spatialise the information, then run it through the brains of other people. Keep looping it through each realm, again and again.
• Create “cognitively congenial situations”. Issuing orders to your brain is a strategy often destined to fail. Instead, create environments that draw out the desired result of your thinking. Explain things to your peers, share stories, create a meaningful private space, walk in nature. What you do should depend on your cognitive goal.
• Embed extensions in your day-to-day environment. This can range from arranging “identity cues” in your workspace through to deliberately cultivating a transactive memory system with your colleagues.

I guess the main takeaway is that the best thinking does not generally occur when you are sat still on your own in a bland, neutrally-lit grey office of the sort often designed to aid thinking via being “distraction-free”.

But other people, other environments, other ways of being, your feelings and emotions are not always distractions to good thought. Far from it. Often thoughtfully seeking them out and leveraging them to extend our minds can produce far better thinking outputs, much more suited to the modern world, than the environments we’ve historically designed.

The title of the book seems to be a shout-out to Clark and Chalmers' paper “The Extended Mind”, which is referred to in the text. In that they argue in a somewhat similar vein for the “extended mind thesis” - namely that the mind isn’t limited to our brains, or even our bodies. Rather that external items in the physical world - a diary, a computer - can be considered as part of the cognitive process and as such as extension of the mind.

My full notes are here.

🎶 Listening to GUTS by Olivia Rodrigo.

Everyone’s favourite childhood High School Musical character to present-day singing a wildly popular song about getting a driving license artist, Olivia Rodrigo, is back with a new(ish) album in 2023.

It’s at least as good as her first one. There’s a variety of styles on show, plenty of pop-punk , with some big piano ballads and a smattering of rap. Much of it riddled with the self-doubt, insecurity, anger and clever disses about idiot men that seem to be part of a lot of the newer music I chance upon these days. Sign of the times I guess.

Her first album was also pretty great but everyone’s already heard it so you probably already knew that.

📚 Finished reading The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. I remember this book got pretty rave reviews when it was published in English (and probably before - but I can only read English). Obama liked it. George R. R. Martin, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerbergtoo. But don’t let that put you off, plenty of people with less wealth and, depending on your point of view, megalomaniac desires like it too. It also won a Hugo Award in 2015.

I left it some time, trying to wait until I felt like I’d the opportunity to really dedicate time and focus to appreciating it fully. Naturally that time never came, but thankfully I gave it a go anyway. And, predictably, also loved it.

The subject matter is pretty attuned to my interests. We start with 1960s Chinese politics, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. Our protagonist is unfortunate enough to watch her father die in a struggle session. She herself is arrested for suspicion of not being a good enough Communist. The prospective penalties are severe.

By the end we’ve worked our way through alien civilisations, conspiracies, detectives, spies and, metaversey-stuff, with some nice doses of science and philosophy. Inexplicable phenomena abound; why are a bunch of scientists killing themselves? What condition is causing someone to see numbers wherever he looks? What actually is the purpose of the strange military installation? Or the VR game that seems to have appeared out of nowhere?

But what always fascinates me most of all are authors’ ideas about the weird ways that human society might react when very important, very unprecedented, situations occur. Some of the ones herein might seem unlikely at first, but then again very little can be more wild that the IRL emergence of the QAnon cult and its troubling downstream effects. Would Pizzagate sound realistic had it only appeared in a sci-fi novel?

We’re told that so far “the entire history of humanity has been fortunate” - hard as that is to believe in current times - but sure, perhaps there’s a way in which that’s true in comparison to what is on the agenda here.

The book is not difficult to read despite the depth of the intellectual topics. It’s full of big, awesome, imaginative, and occasionally explicitly philosophical ideas that consumed my brain for a while. I’m sure it’ll stick in my mind for a good long time.

It’s the first book of a trilogy. There’s no way I’m not going to read the others at some point after both the enjoyment this one brought and the way that it ended.

There’s also a TV show version of it expected to come to Netflix next year.

Remember the halcyon days of circa 2019, when OpenAI were too nervous to release GPT-2, yes, two, on an unsuspecting world?

…OpenAI said that it would only be publishing a “much smaller version” of the model due to concerns that it could be abused. The blog post fretted that it could be used to generate false news articles, impersonate people online, and generally flood the internet with spam and vitriol.

A lot changed in a few years.

2 generations of GPT later and now anyone who has $10 to spare can access the latest greatest GPT-4 - which has recently learned to ‘see, hear and speak’ in-between its only-increasing potential to ‘flood the internet with spam’ and ‘generate false news articles’, which it is indeed doing to at least some extent.

I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing. Well, except the spam and fake news parts - these days there exist several extremely low effort websites that have leveraged it for exactly that purpose. After all, rich companies hoarding rare resources is rarely the most obviously optimal way to benefit humanity as a whole.

Some in the machine learning community have accused OpenAI of exaggerating the risks of its algorithm for media attention and depriving academics, who may not have the resources to build such a model themselves, the opportunity to conduct research with GPT-2.

Perhaps slightly Ironically, they seemed a lot more about putting the Open into OpenAI back in those days, philosophically at least. What as far as I know is their original manifesto is still there on their site.

OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.

We’re hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution. As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world

Now we have proprietary secrets - ‘OpenAI’s GPT-4 Is Closed Source and Shrouded in Secrecy’ says Motherboard - as well as exclusive deals with anyone who has a few billion dollars to throw their way.

📚 Finished reading The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling by Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross.

Most everyone that’s been in charge of designing a large database has recommended this to me as a good summary of how to think about the structure a data warehouse.

It teaches the Kimball method - you might notice that’s one of the authors' surnames. So if you’ve come across terminology such as ‘type 2 slowly changing dimension’ or the facts and dimensions used in dimensional modelling et al. then it’s very possible that your interlocutor has read this tome.

Whilst I’m more an analyst than an engineer, I have dabbled in the latter and this book will be good guidance on how to think things through going forward.

A key aspect, and one I’m grateful for, is to focus on making the data easy to understand and analyse in downstream tools, even if it requires substantially more effort - both technical and diplomatic - up front.

It’s been helpful to me to understand why systems I use are set up like they are - e.g. a distinct absence of using null value where I’d initially thought it’d make sense to use them. It’s also a refresher on basic patterns one can use to enable common analysis requirements like ‘how many times has this value changed over time?’ or ‘what would the results look like if they were remapped to the historical structure of the organisation?’

It’s written rather prescriptively - follow this rule or regret it forever! I have been told by practitioners that sometimes it’s necessary, or at least preferable, to break the occasional rule in reality but that their recommendations are good ones for the majority of the time.

It’s also organised slightly confusingly in that most of it is divided up into chapters seemingly aimed at various specific business applications e.g. e-commerce or insurance. But they’re at pains to say that you shouldn’t just read the one that’s most similar to your organisation or the task you’re trying to accomplish as you’ll not understand it fully without all the context provided in the earlier chapters that from their title don’t seem relevant to you. So I’m not entirely certain why they structured it like that in the first place.

But that aside, it’s invaluable reading for anyone designing databases or using other people’s databases that are designed this way.

Remember when the Conservatives thought they were the party of law and order? Hilarious.

I’m not thinking here of the numerous illegal cringe-parties the government and its associates held during the Covid-lockdown. Although do watch the docu-drama “Partygate” if you want to increase your level of annoyance at their doings even beyond whatever it currently is. But here I’m thinking about rather more structural stuff.

Like how our former Home Secretary tried to coerce the police to ban certain peaceful protests on the topic of Palestine. The police said no, mainly on the basis that there is no law that would let them do so despite her suggestion that waving a national flag might be illegal - obviously Union Jacks would be exempt. She wasn’t at all embarrassed, but rather wrote a rant basically about how the police are too woke in a national newspaper which, thankfully, eventually, at least in part, got her fired.

It comes to quite something when we have to rely on the shattered remnants of the British police of all organisations - a large contingent of which have recently been officially determined to be “institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic” and seemingly pretty terrible at actually solving crime - to be the last desperate hope against an illegal trampling of our civil liberties, to be the “woke” ones. But credit where credit’s due, I applaud their actions in preventing a crime taking place in this case.

Now the courts ruled that the obviously illegal plan to ship off applicants for asylum to other countries was indeed illegal. Despite the fact that it seems very plausible that his latest Home Secretary described the plan as “batshit” in the past, Sunak once again isn’t embarrassed. Instead he’s trying to find some way to get through dubious new legislation that “allows” him to ignore the court’s decision, or pander to the worst of his party’s instincts to exit the ECHR, as well as presumably any other legislation that has a chance of protecting the outgroup, of binding the ingroup.

What some of his party say is up there in terms of incitement to the famously irresponsible “Enemies of the People” Daily Mail front page a while back. The police believe that Braverman’s comments on the protests were an important driving factor in the violent attacks that far-right protesters - note that this was a group that she wasn’t trying to ban - went on to perpetuate against them.

Further back of course there was all the Brexit stuff. Boris Johnson tried to pro-rogue Parliament to avoid mere democracy getting in the way of whatever his favourite idea of the time was at the time. This was deemed to have been illegal.

More recently, when the quagmire of the Brexit they’d “negotiated” continued to become ever more apparent, some of the Conservative party - including their leader - decided that they’d unilaterally invent some nice new legislation so that they could ignore the deal they’d already signed up to regarding trade with Northern Ireland. Even their own ex-leader, Theresa May, said the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill was illegal under international law.

There was a time when they also claimed to be the good at the economy. Haha.

In a finding that may not surprise anyone who endures reading this blog, a recent study found that “Humans will trade pain for useless information”.

The useless information in question was the implications of the results of a coin-flip. Participants would get a reward based on the result of a series of coin-flips. But by default they weren’t told what exactly the prizes associated with heads or tails were until after the fact. Importantly, it was set up to ensure that the participants knew that they would receive the exact same reward irrespective of whether or not they knew the values of each side in beforehand.

Participants were then offered the chance to know what the reward associated with each side of the coin was in advance, but at the cost of having pain inflicted on them - a “flash of heat” applied to their arm. When the pain was set to low, about 3/4 of participants requested to receive the pain and learn in advance about the rewards, information which has no obvious utility given the setup. Even when the pain was set to maximum participants would choose to undergo it nearly half the time.

One theory the researchers have as to why this occurs is that as humans we’re just generally deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty.

This willingness to endure pain in exchange for noninstrumental information may stem from a deep-seated aversion to uncertainty, Bode says—to the point that some people are willing to go through physical discomfort for a few scraps of solid information. “Not knowing is really painful,” he says.

As noted in the original article, pain isn’t the only adversity we’re willing to go through in order to learn about something we know can have no effect on or bearing to what happens to us. Previous studies have shown that people are prepared to pay money or put in unnecessary physical effort in order to learn in advance how a lottery would pay out in a way that could not possibly affect how much they’d win.

Never trust a social network you don’t own, lesson number 999.

After a period of disuse, Facebook has permanently locked me out of my account for something I definitely didn’t do.

Some time ago - I guess a long time ago - I deactivated my Facebook account. I haven’t really missed it all that much. Anyway, yesterday I decided to reactivate it so as to download all the photos I’ve ever uploaded to it for safe storage, along with any that I’m tagged in that I might like to revisit one day. The latter isn’t a native functionality as far as I’m aware but browser extensions like this one purport to enable it.

This should of course be easy. From their docs:

If you’d like to come back to Facebook after you’ve deactivated your account, you can reactivate your account at any time by logging back in to Facebook or by using your Facebook account to log in somewhere else

However, upon logging in to reactivate the account I was met with this message:

My account has apparently been permanently disabled for contravening their spam policy. And because it had been over 180 days since they decided to do that - which I had seemingly no way of knowing had happened given my account was temporarily deactivated - there is no way to appeal the decision.

Obviously I haven’t been spamming anyone given I deactivated the account but there we go.

At the very least, given I’d explicitly suspended my account so wasn’t logging in, I’d have expected to have received some kind of robotically generated email to let me know of the supposed spam crime within the 6 months window that would have allowed me to appeal if I cared enough.

The good news is that it was still possible to export my content; that’s the 1 button that’s still available even with the block. Although, it comes to you in a single big intricate zip file that may take some time to dig through. But if I had a desire to start using my Facebook account again - something that temporarily deactivating your account is explicitly supposed to allow - then that opportunity is gone.

As is my social graph of course. The photos are in the zip somewhere, along with a pretty useless list of all the comments I ever made stripped of context - who knows what it was that I loved so much 7 years ago!? But the connections between me and my friends are gone. I’m not aware of any social network you could upload that kind of data to even if your friends all agreed to sign up to it. Mainstream social networks are silos.

Also naturally it only exports the content I uploaded. So photos by me; but not the photos of me that someone else uploaded, tagged me and shared that I’d probably have liked to keep, let alone photos of friends or family, old or new.

This isn’t all that terrible from my personal point of view. I’ve little interest in using Facebook and I probably have better-quality backups of most of the photos. But some people might fairly be quite annoyed or upset in this situation.

As always the lesson to take away is that if you ever post anything to a social network you might ever care about, always keep a copy of it safe somewhere you control. And if you value your social graph, well, I’m not sure that there is a solution other than being sure to have some other way to contact your nearest and dearest.

Similarly with your interactions; the to-and-from flow of any meaningful conversations you had or any threads that meant a lot to you. You’ll be able to export your ramblings, but without the context of what you were responding to. We all know how annoying hearing only half a telephone conversation is. Again given the private and proprietary nature of the service, it’s hard to know how you can personally mitigate this. Perhaps it’s time to act like it’s 1997 and start printing out everything you found fun on Facebook?

I’m obviously an outlier because I haven’t been using my account for a long time. But other people find themselves unable to access their Facebook accounts for all sorts of reasons in ways that are much more upsetting to them. There are endless discussions online about it, Reddit is a good place to start if you want to find examples.

Here’s this phenomenon making national news last year - I assume it’s not an April fool despite the publication date.

…despite not being an avid user, finding her account locked was still upsetting: “All of the images from my university years and family occasions are on Facebook

“I will no longer have access to 15-plus years of content, which is genuinely sad

“It is also quite stressful not knowing what the issue is, and having no recourse to resolve it. To be given no warning and then no way to access our own data is mindboggling.”

Of course no-one has a legal right to have a Facebook account. It’s a private company entitled to make its own decisions outside of basic legal requirements. Personally I think a lot of people might be better off without an account. But, believe it or not, Facebook truly is a positive experience for some people. And its sheer size and scope creates a kind of monopolisation such that as much as you’re able to “export your data” - which is certainly a good and important thing - there is often little of use that the average person can do with that data.

You can’t simply replicate everything you’d made the effort to create in Facebook at home or in a competitor’s site. Even if you could, you wouldn’t be able to force the people and organisations you want to talk to to move over to someplace new, which is what you’d have to do considering Facebook is not a federated social network.

Being locked out forever would be especially upsetting for those people for Facebook is where their community is, whether this is how their family prefers communicate, where the organisations they have to deal with post or where their support groups are. Innumerable organisations - everything from book clubs to government agencies to medical services to advocacy groups and beyond - seem to have chosen Facebook or one of its equally siloed competitors as a primary place to communicate to their members. It’s a risky thing to do when you do not have the final say as to who is able to participate.

Sam Altman, the famed head of OpenAI seems to have been fired.

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.

The reason given seems so generic and vague that it feels like it’s either concealing some unspeakable sin, or that the AI has already escaped and chatGPT 5 is outputting its concept of a bland corporate press release in order to cover up what it actually did to its creator.

🎙️ Listening to Sherlock & Co. podcast.

Meet Dr. John Watson, an army medic who had to leave military life after suffering an unfortunate field injury. He ends up joining the seemingly infinite hordes of folk who are trying to scrape a living together via becoming podcasters. Specifically in his case a true crime podcast.

Sure enough, soon a mutual friend introduces him to Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is bit of an odd-bod in the social realm but has uncanny powers of observation. They end up renting a flat from Mariana, who works for Hudsons estate agent. And suddenly Watson has a lot of stuff to podcast about.

These are the tales of Sherlock Holmes, each one acted out in radio play format, retold as though from the modern era. Gone are the letters of inquiry from Dukes. Instead we hear of the Insta posts from cringey male-feminist influencer wannabes. A little less reading through the day’s newspapers, a little more trying to geolocate a Facebook video, Bellingcat style.

Very fun, if you can tolerate the adverts. And a good excuse to read the originals again. So far they’ve re-done The Adventure of the Illustrious Client and The Noble Bachelor.

Demand continues to dramatically outpace supply in terms of getting access to the recent second-generation GLP-1 anti-obesity medications.

Inevitably a problematic black market has formed. The UK health agency, MHRA, warns us of the existence of at least hundreds of vials of entirely fake medication.

Some of the syringes being sold as containing semaglutide (Ozempic) or liraglutide (Saxenda) in fact contain insulin. This has led to some users getting ill enough to require hospitalisation.

To the extent that Novo Nordisk et al. appear unable to manufacture anywhere close to the amount that would match the demand perhaps some of this is unavoidable, if still upsetting. The Faustian bargain that sure, these companies might become dazzlingly rich - which they are, Novo Nordisk is now Europe’s most valuable company with a market cap larger than the GDP of the country it’s situated in, Denmark, not all that surprising when each course of these treatments retail at thousands of dollars in some places - but that it’s the only way to ensure that everyone’s demand is being met has once again not really been working out well so far in this case.

But for any unmet need that’s attributable to explicit or implicit gatekeeping or denying access to this medication to patients who could benefit from it, this example reminds us of what’s at stake when we don’t enable people to safely access medications that could dramatically improve or even save their lives.

📚 Finished reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

This is the book that has been acclaimed by some as the one of the first ever psychological thrillers, but I feel has also gathered a somewhat off-putting reputation as being difficult to read. Which I don’t think is deserved at all, at least not the translation I read. If you have any interest in it, be bold, give it a go.

We follow the life of young Rodion Raskolnikov, who lives a life of seemingly at least somewhat self-chosen poverty in Moscow. He’s something of an over-thinker, a philosopher of some kind. And so we find him pondering on whether or not he would be justified in murdering a mean old pawn-broker who has been less than generous to him and others in times of need in order to steal her money.

It’s no spoiler to say that between deciding that her life is immoral and overdosing on the writings of Hegel et al to the extent of considering himself as a candidate Great Man of History he manages to convince himself that it’s a reasonable, and perhaps even moral, thing to do.

…all men are divided into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary.’ Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don’t you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary.

This all goes down near the start of the novel. It doesn’t go quite to plan of course.

In what follows we watch him trying to come to terms with what he did and to deal with what will come next. He spirals down through life-threatening maladies, both physical and mental. The police are poking around, his family do their best to care for him but sometimes in ways he cannot abide, ways that will put them at too much risk even whilst he cannot find a single nice word to say to them.

As the noose of suspicion tightens we see his mind whirl between the possibilities of confessing all - perhaps the mental torment would at least end? - versus fleeing, leaving everyone who loves him behind - but what right has he to be loved? - vs the satisfaction - or is it delusion? - of getting one over on whomsoever he sees as his enemy at the time, interlaced with some contemporary politics and philosophical thinking

The frantic, frenetic, paranoid mind of a man who deluded himself into doing something he has no idea how to get away from, or even if he really wants to get away from it, makes for a compulsive reading experience.

📚 Finished reading We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins.

This is the story of how Elliot Higgins went from curious internet user, through to an increasingly renowned commentator on blog articles, to starting his own blog all the way through to running an increasingly large and influential organisation dedicated to open source intelligence investigations called Bellingcat.

Open source intelligence, or OSINT, is “the collection and analysis of data gathered from open sources…to produce actionable intelligence”.

Bellingcat, named after the fable “Belling The Cat” , has famously used this technique to investigate and produce damning evidence on many geopolitical episodes, including the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 crash, the poisoning of Putin’s enemies Alexei Navalny and Sergei Skripal, the unmasking of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville’s rally as well as various unpleasant and illegal incidents occurring in recent Libyan and Syrian conflicts . This book contains details of many of their increasingly complex and impactful investigations.

They also run training courses to let other folk learn their very transferrable, very versatile skills. They’re open about how, why and what they did. Transparency is one of the key tenets of their organisation. Knowing that there’s no reason for you to trust them beyond any other voice on the internet, they make a big deal of recording and sharing exactly what they did, what their sources were, what they inferred vs validated and all the outstanding questions that they couldn’t answer.

…an online claim is nothing more than a hypothesis, one validated only with backing evidence that others should be able to corroborate themselves.

Their motto became “Identify, Verify, Amplify”.

The most fascinating aspect to me is around the tooling. We all splurge our data every day all over the internet. Most notably on social media of course but many of our daily transactions that we don’t explicitly share are in someone’s database somewhere - records of your phone usage, travels, identity, financial transactions, property ownership and a whole lot more. Sometimes this kind of data is publicly available legitimately for free or at a reasonable cost. Other times hacked versions are floating about the lesser known parts of the internet. On occasion the Bellingcat team seem to slightly deviate from the “open source” aspect of OSINT and hold their nose and resort to paying off employees of various organisations to share data with them.

Knowing what sources they’ve found useful in their work both enables you to conduct your own investigations as well as be a bit more aware of what you’re potentially unknowingly sharing. This is surely a recommended skill for anyone who’s been alive in at least the past decade or so. Some of the tools they’ve used include:

• Several Google products: Earth, Maps, Translate, Youtube, reverse image search.
• An app called SunCalc that lets you estimate the time of gday a picture was taken via the shadows in it.
• Search engines less known to the average British or American internet user, such as Russia’s Yandex.
• Online catalogue and databases of munitions, vehicles, property.
• Various specialist message boards, military sites like Janes or sites like Uxoinfo that describe unexploded ordnance.
• Hobbyist sites - e.g. plane-spotting or license plate websites.
• Wikimapia
• Dashcam videos that have been shared online
• Pixifly , allowing searching of Instagram by location and time (seems like this is now shut down).
• Panoramio for seeing geotagged photos users post.
• Any social media site you’re likely to have have heard of, and others you may not have - VKontakte, Odnoklassniki.
• Zello, a chat where users share audio clips.
• Digital Globe and other commercial producers of satellite imagery.
• Checkdesk - an app that lets people sign up to join an investigation.
• Syrian Sentry - an app where volunteers recorded planes taking off from military airfields.
• Europol’s “Trace an Object”
• Calling people up on the phone to get an audio sample that can be compared with other snippets.
• Leaked customer databases
• Open source phone databases. There are also apps that share phone numbers people have in their contacts list such as TrueCaller - key here is that people’s names appear as they do in individual’s contact books. And some people list agents working for secretive organisations with the organisation as part of their name!
• The many messenger apps that let you see if a given phone number is currently online.
• Leaked data from phone companies showing where a phone was at some point in time.
• …and many more.

Some of these may no longer exist in the form they were originally used in. But Bellingcat keeps an up-to-date list of tools they find useful in their investigations here - their “Online Investigation Toolkit”. It’s quite eye-opening.

For anyone who’s nerdy enough to be able to cope with running scripts or compiling code, they also develop their own in-house tools which are available on their Github repos to all and sundry. As they note in the book, there is a tension between being entirely transparent and open when building killer new investigative tools and the fact that many of them could be used for nefarious purposes by folks with bad intentions, so, you know, please use them wisely.

The Bellingcat method has endless applications. What unifies our work is a drive for accountability. We take scattered facts online and try to turn them into justice.

My fuller notes on this book are here.

Is Britain on the verge of introducing an age limit on baking?

Meta-owned WhatsApp confirms (once again) that adverts are coming to its app.

Code to enable this was already written at least 3 years ago but withdrawn at the last minute. So this isn’t the first time they planned to do this. I guess they just got less worried about annoying either its regulators or its users.

Only recently did I learn that those arcade claw machines where the game is to precisely navigate a claw over some stuffed toys or a priceless watch such that when it descends it grabs it and pops it in a chute for you to take away as winnings are literally impossible, rather than just extraordinarily difficult, to win most of the time.

It turns out that a given claw has different strengths at different times. Full strength will grab and deliver the prize if you navigated it exactly right. But at all other times the claw isn’t even in theory strong enough to hold the prize, so you’ve no chance.

How strong the claw can be, and often the claw is strong, can typically be chosen or changed by the owner as this extract from a manual that Vox shared shows.

Some claws may have several parameters. For example on occasion it might be strong enough to pick up the prize, but then then deliberately weakens and drops the object of desire just before it get over the retrieval slot, making for those ultra-addictive seeming near misses.

So really claw machines are not so different to “pure” gambling machines like fruit machines. Except you have to be both lucky and somewhat skilled. And they’re less regulated in some jurisdictions.

Based on that manual extract it sounds like there might be a viable strategy involving secretly watching other people playing with the claw until it’s been a while since anyone won anything and swooping in in the hope that strong mode is about to trigger. If you can live with yourself and really want that big fluffy toy teddy anyway.

Also as the owner can set the parameters of the machine, it’d definitely be true that machines in some places might “pay out” a lot more than machines elsewhere.