Observations from a Hill

I was thinking of adding a rider to last night's post on agentic AI, but I think I'll leave that till later, as I've been kind of thrown into a little fugue on things past, prompted partly by memories raised from my mental depths by this afternoon's visit to the newly re-opened Tryfan [the pub formerly known as The Llangollen, or more usually just The Llan in days past], a reformed "boozer" that appears to be open for business with the rather sensible - to my mind - attitude that you have to be actually open for people to come in and buy drink and food - radical, eh? - and at predictable hours of the day and evening. It's early days yet, but they've started the Spring/Summer season by declaring themselves properly open from noon till late, seven days. They are also serving decent real ales alongside the usual trendy gassy stuff, to boot. Long may it continue and spur on the competition to step up their game: let's get the High Street going again; B...

Again, thanks to the day's Financial Times for the spur that goaded the night's post from this tired old brain. A piece in 'Work & Careers' on agentic AI, defined by Wikipedia as:  '... [ In the context of  generative artificial intelligence ,] ...  AI agents  (also referred to as  compound AI systems  or  agentic AI ) are a class of  intelligent agents  distinguished by their ability to operate  autonomously  in complex environments. Agentic AI tools prioritize decision-making over content creation and do not require continuous oversight.',  points out that more companies are talking up this technology than are actually currently adopting it, with 'business leaders' [what a misnomer that term is] waffling on about strategies for its deployment and exploitation, despite little to zero experience of it; described in the article as akin to '...trying to teach your kid how to ride a bike, but you've never ridden one...' . Whic...

I'm indebted to this weekend's FT for the text snippet from 'Lunch With The FT' [interview in a Tokyo McDonalds with Chinese dissident commentator Li Ying] that gave me the title for tonight's post; which should absolutely be taken as in the imperative sense: as edict rather than desire. To my mind this directive sums up where we are in the advanced [?] capitalist ethos in which twenty-first century man-and-woman-kind finds itself; either at the hands of laissez faire arms-distance neo-liberals, as in "The West" or under the grip of the over-weaning controls of state capitalism such as obtains in modern day China; with all points in between pretty much just shades of the same. Pay, consume and move on with alacrity: you're taking up retail space.  Needs and desires shortened into data-compressible chunks as small as possible to serve the needs of The Great Stone-Eater itself [blog posts passim, and courtesy of the late Alex Harvey] in its quest for eve...

  Very lazy diary post tonight, as I'm totally frazzled for no real apparent reason. Leo's birthday supper this evening, so a family gathering here in Fairview Heights. Lots - and lots - of garlic in tonight's meal, so no fear of nocturnal vampire attacks, methinks! I'll leave it at that because I'm not five minutes away from crawling into my pit for the night...

Just watched a lovely encomium to Keith Floyd on YouTube this evening, which made us reflect on the very influence this bloke had on us - food wise - during the 1980s and 90s, a legacy that obtains to this day. I can't begin to count how many thousands of great meals that we and our friends cooked and shared with each other over those decades, but suffice it to say that Floyd's enthusiasms and flamboyance had a very big influence on us all and our cooking. One of the things that stand out about the man was that he was prepared to wing it and improvise, and often to - publicly - fail: jazz, mes enfants! - something that has always been dear to my heart. Very often you've just got to go with the moment and rely on native instinct come hell or high water. I once told my photographer cousin that I could operate a Sony broadcast quality Betacam camera for a video shoot for Toyota, only to get him to stop en route to the shoot so that I could rehearse what I'd only just read...

I wrote the other day about The Great Bishop's Castle Power Outage - actually it lasted little more than an hour, but brought the town to pretty much a standstill - which made me think: how much survival resilience do we actually have, here in the second quarter of the twenty-first century? Answer, practically none. As soon as the power goes down, pretty much every aspect of our lives goes down with it. Which is actually kind of worrying. We were subjected to a freak power outage in the mid-nineties, when we lived in Brynbella, down on the A5, on the outskirts of Bethesda, at Christmas. An ice-storm - a very rare phenomenon in the UK - had taken down every wooden power pole across the tops from Aber. We were amongst a very small number of properties that were still fed with electricity from this very old circuit across the mountain. Suffice to say, we were without power from Christmas Eve, through Christmas Day and beyond: we gave up and drove to the Midlands to stay with parents o...