Observations from a Hill

What's wrong with this picture? In fact, what's at all  right with this picture, for [Deity of your choice]'s sake? What appears to be an image of Jonny Ive and Sam Altman introducing the world to a bloodshot eye in a box, is self-evidently the product of a rather crude AI representation of the two of them. What on earth is the takeaway from this, and what does it bode for their future collaboration? Well, first off the bat is that poor old Jonny Ive appears to have suffered rather more badly than I did in a table-saw accident, having apparently lost most of his fingertips. The one remaining, apparently complete digit has an obvious genetic defect, in that the [only extant on either hand] fingernail would seem to be comprised of soft flesh rather than keratin. Both of them also have gazes that suggest they suffer from strabismus, or that they have been smoking something rather too strong for their constitutions, rather akin to Elon Musk's actual appearance half the ti...

I've always marked the various phases of my life as individual lives in themselves, one leading to another and sometimes intersecting back and forth through time via the conduits of experience and relationship. When we first moved to Wales in 1980, on my taking my place on the postgraduate course in Linguistics that I'd won that year, we lived in a number of rented cottages before we eventually bought a house here. Each of these moves netted us new friends and acquaintances, culminating in the social circle we dubbed the 'Gerlan Bohemia' of the early/mid eighties [blog posts passim] centred mainly around the arts, music and of course, food and drink. One of the consequences of living a life fragmented thusly is people come and go, touching on yours briefly and then they're off into a different orbit altogether. People who were the young children of friends at the time grow up in yet different worlds to you, sometimes to re-impinge on your trajectory at a future time...

It can't simply be coincidence that concurrent with the travails of the UK's National Health Service, so many otherwise great healthcare systems around the world are suffering similarly. Once held to be the very bedrock and a clear indicator of a civilised society, there seems to be a global decline in public health services. The cause is the elephant in the room that no-one seems ballsy enough to tackle head-on: capital. Capital: and its deification to the status of modern religious faith in recent decades, the allegedly inviolable markets and ultra-wealth-inequality characterised as somehow normal. Simple as. Think back to the 'bad old days' of decent labour representation, fairer wage structures, proper taxation, and yes, a health system that functioned beautifully and integrated well with social care. What has caused this shift from the twentieth century into what now seems closer to the eighteenth for the vast majority of the population? Capital. But of course Mar...

Once again, courtesy of my mate Steve, a quote from a BBC piece on the issue of AI potentially becoming, or even already being 'conscious'. Prof Murray Shanahan, principal scientist at Google DeepMind and emeritus professor in AI at Imperial College, London:  "We don't actually understand very well the way in which LLMs work internally, and that is some cause for concern,". I would have thought that such a lack of understanding of the nature of an entity's workings places it in a relationship with us somewhat akin to our understanding of the inner workings of species other than our own: indeed, our understanding of the inner workings of each other. No-one can truly understand or inhabit the mind of another. If we have created some sort of entity that we ourselves don't understand, doesn't that imply this third party's 'consciousness' by default?  A very good question. A philosophical question. A moral question. A theological question. We ha...

So Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI is "...completely unbothered" that he might be less intelligent than his AI. As Guy Keleny puts it most succinctly in his letter to today's FT: 'AI is either stupider than people or smarter. If stupider it is useless, if smarter terribly dangerous. Where's the upside?'. I tend to agree, particularly with regard to the race to develop a General AI model, which is fraught with all manner of potential demons, practical, moral and political. But as to very vertical, use-case-specific models? I feel that much useful work can be done here [blog posts passim]. The main issue surely has to be the sheer expenditure of electrical energy that AI, along with crypto and the cloud, consumes? There has to be an upper limit on it, for practical as well as environmental reasons, one would reasonably think. The law of diminishing returns has to influence things in the long run, with long-term profits eventually being outstripped by the running c...

Today's awful weather amplifies my strong urge to take a rain check from the news at the moment, which generally is simply anxiety-inducing gloom and doom, right across the board. Frankly the state of the world is just depressing. I know it's always going to be less than optimum, let alone perfect, and probably always has been, but I do seem to remember periods in my long-ish life that were slightly less fraught. Again, the rosy spectacles might be responsible, but I'm not so sure. This last decade-and-a-half has just been plain weird, as far as I'm concerned. Of course, some things never change, such as the seemingly destined-to-be-eternal conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. Much like the Postmasters' continuing struggle for justice here in the UK. Having got so far as they did in getting recognition that the Post Office had fucked them over for so long and at such great personal expense to them, they now are struggling against the tide of Civ...

  Tonight's post comes courtesy of my mate Steve, who pointed me in the direction of a nineteenth century photographic - I would say, pioneering - artist, of whose existence and work, I'm ashamed to say, I was hitherto totally unaware. One Henry Peach Robinson, born in Ludlow in Shropshire, and a founding member of the Birmingham Photographic Society. Obviously a photographer of a painterly sensibility, he sought to overcome the severe dynamic limitations of the chemical photographic processes then available to him by the ingenious use of multiple exposures of the same scene, each taken to expose for the different light levels throughout the subject he was trying to capture. In the image shown, he achieved perfect exposure of all the layers of the subject from close to mid and out to the far distance, capturing shadow, mid-tone and highlight detail throughout the entire image; which, given the technological limitations of the day would have been impossible to capture on a singl...

The continuing saga of the UK retail cyber attacks, in particular the M&S one, which has seen a £750mn hit to its share price since it had to go offline to sales, was touched on in a piece by Claer Barrett in this weekend's FT, highlighting not just the knock-on effects of the attack on its investors' responses, but also the potential future effects on its brand and the loyalties of its customer base. As she rightly points out, the brand's demographic base is people in the middle to upper age bracket, who are probably somewhat less fickle and volatile in their shopping habits than younger age groupings. But the company's somewhat tardy response to the event and in getting their systems back in order reflects a kind of 'late-to-the-party' approach in engaging in twenty-first century retail practice in the first place. The relatively poor take-up and management of their loyalty card, and also only relatively recent deployment of self-service checkouts that are...

Pictured, the underside view of the chess table top, with the boss that mates with the pedestal via the threaded hole in the centre, alongside my first-past-the-post idea for making a hinge piece to convert the thing into a tilt-top table. I've fixed a length of 15mm dowel to a mule made of an off-cut of old melamine-faced chipboard [seen resting in the crosscut sled to be rebated on the table-saw]. I just need to fix some runners to the sides of the mule so I can safely cut a half diameter flat rebate in the dowel to later screw it to the face of the boss nearest in the picture. I figured that boring a hole through the boss to take the dowel would be a ball-ache, so I came up with the idea of offsetting the hinge to the edge. I know I could cut the rebate by hand with saw and chisel, but I just, as usual, want to try something different. If it works, it works; if it don't, it don't. I'll keep you posted on progress...

How does a modestly-funded scientific climate study turn into a conspiracy narrative, joining the 'theory' that governments across the world have been seeding the skies with various chemicals toward nefarious ends, via so-called 'chemtrails'? How is it that those of a certain mindset are promulgating the absurdity that the UK government, at the Prime minister's direct behest, is '...trying to block out the sun...' via the use of these fictitious agents [clue: aircraft have been leaving contrails in their wake since the start of the jet age, in the form of water vapour] in some apparently evil scientist attempt to forestall the effects of climate change that these self-same 'theorists' deny exists, and that itself is a government conspiracy? [ source : "The 'Secret Plan' to Dim the Sun", by James Ball in this week's The New European] The answer, of course, is that complex macro-organism: the online 'community'. Social me...

Pictured, the old and rather beautifully battered chess table top undergoing its transformation from toffee-apple confection to honest patination. You can see the weird 'varnish' someone rather stupidly chose to slather the thing with [to what end?] at the top of the image. It appeared to me to have been given a coat of shellac in some misbegotten fever-dream of a restoration idea. Wrong on so many fronts, let alone the aesthetic one. As you can see, the removal of this crud reveals a perfectly honest table that wears its history on its sleeve. It's never going to look like it did when the original maker constructed it, but I really don't care about that: it is what it is, and the wear and tear of its use over the decades, along with its weathering and damage, just gives it character in my book: there's something rather endearingly Gormenghast about it. After finishing peeling the orange muck off it, I gave it a rub down with wire wool and an initial coat of beeswax...

Geological time exceeds human time by several orders of magnitude: cosmological time exceeds that by several more. The expectation - from a human perspective, based on our intuited knowledge of the Cosmos - is that time and space itself - will simply cease to exist at some point. Which begs the question 'what next?'. Following on from last night's ruminations, this would also seem to be a quandary of somewhat profound proportions: does anything follow from nothing? Did everything arise from nothing in the first place? Which, after all is the accepted theory of the origin of everything. Who knows? This is my point: these 'certainties' are all of our own creation; the human intellect has synthesised them from the internal logic of our brain's need and ability to seek out and find patterns outside of ourselves in order to cope with the world in which we are perforce required to operate and survive. All else follows naturally: art, music, literature, science and te...

I just want to offer some random ruminations tonight, issuing from a few things I've encountered in various places, regarding consciousness, language, mathematics, philosophy, AI and other such stuff, over the last few days/months/years: mathematics is the continuing process of our unearthing ineluctable truths and abstractions about existence: an inner archaeology of the mind that can explain the enormously large, cosmological, phenomena; the manageably macroscopic 'classical' world and the inner workings of matter itself at the quantum level: but which came first, the mind or mathematical truth? we posit theories about the nature of existence and our place within it, based on the mathematics our own minds have 'unearthed' from those, again humanly posited, ineluctable truths. the concept of 'mind' itself has troubled us since time immemorial, and still takes us to task in the twenty-first century. What is certainty? is our accumulated knowledge of the Univ...

  Got the capital back on the clock case today: made it removable as there is so much much work needed to replace all the missing bits of decorative woodwork and veneer. There's actually probably too much to completely replace, and I feel that much of it can be left as patina through sheer age. As you know I like things to wear their history on their sleeves, so to speak; so I think the restoration will be partial, taking that philosophy on board. However, there are some things that have to be addressed for purely structural reasons, so a degree of bullet-biting will come into play. I'll need to source some appropriate wood and veneer, so a bit of trawling around the internet will be in order. It will of necessity take time, but in the interim, at least the beast has its hat on, you might say, and at least looks vaguely complete. Keep you posted...

Today we went up to have a look at Bwlch Y Groes; a long-abandoned slate quarry above Waunfawr. A pleasant 3-4 Km walk across what, in the wet season, would be pretty boggy ground, to view a small, now water-filled hole in the earth. Not the sort of thing a lot of people would choose for a day out, but what the heck: we enjoy getting out into our landscape, and the industrial heritage of our working-class forebears is writ large in these hills and vales. Something to be proud of, but also a lesson to be learned from our history...

Pictured, today's junk-shop pick up: a rather lovely if slightly knackered chess table [the chess set is my old boxwood set from the eighties, although it itself is much older, probably dating to the early twentieth century]. The table, I would guess, is at least a hundred and fifty years old, and was in its day a nice piece of furniture, with some tasty marquetry; which has suffered the travails of time, damp and heat by the look of it. Anyhow, it wears its scars with pride, and I like that in a piece of old furniture. My guess is that it was originally a tilt-top table meant to stand in a hall somewhere, but someone a very long time ago decided to fix the top in position. I'm tempted to reverse the process, and return it to its original status. But whatever I do, the first thing will be is to take off the weird - and very thin - layer of lacquer [?]  that someone deemed fit to spread all over the top, and reveal the faded wood underneath, so that I can get a good dose of bees...

Pictured, centre-stage, our latest acquisition/project: a long-case clock, with appropriately local [Llangefni] branding. In my estimation late Victorian; might even be a bit older than that. We were told that it was just the case with only the face and no innards. But for thirty quid; what's not to like? A nice decorative conversation piece that suits the room, so all good. Turns out the movement is still in there, minus weights, pendulum and two of its hands, admittedly, but these can all be sourced via eBay or similar for a future resto-project: I'd need to call in the expertise of our mate John, who trained as a clockmaker, but we'll see how it pans out. The decorative woodwork is a little world-weary and will require some gentle restoration of missing bits: some of them came in a bag with it, but I'll need to fabricate at least a few of the missing decoration from my stock of old hardwood furniture bits, but that will be on hold until I have a full compliment of op...

  Again, I intended to make comment about the stuff that I read in Monday's FT about the stupidity of capitalists and government, and indeed I watched some very good YouTube footage of an interview with the estimable George Monbiot this afternoon which just amplified my views on the subject. However, I'm just going to offer - and I promise I will return to said subject - a reflection on rebirth, sort-of. Although I didn't mention it at the time: last Wednesday, to be precise, I had a slight contretemps with my table saw. My thumb lost the contest. Mea Culpa: I simply lost concentration for a fraction of a second in a dodgy situation of my own making. It could have been a whole lot worse, but it was a pretty traumatic injury to my digit, nevertheless; leaving me minus a large chunk of my thumb pad through approximately a millisecond's inattentiveness. Being me, I triaged the situation myself, decided that the wound, whilst pretty radical, had not quite reached the bone a...

Pictured, Clematis blooms on the arch, this evening: the warmth of spring seems to be with us at the moment, unlike last year's El Nino-marred weather. Let's hope for a more temperate climate this year. I was going to mention something else that struck me from yesterday's Financial Times regarding the obvious and complete disjunct between government and business - in a global sense, but not including last night's focus, China - but I won't, because as you can see from the above, to quote the late, great Stevie Marriot: '... it's all too beautiful...' Talk later...

Despite all Trump's lying, posturing and 'economic' gaming, guess who holds all the cards that he so dearly thinks he holds? China, that's who. While America has been lurching back and forth between their two incompatible governmental [im]possibilities for the last fifty years, egged on by the rise and now the gradual decline of neoliberal globalist capitalism; the Chinese have learned, as only a society with such a deep and sophisticated cultural & political history as their's could, to transcend their increasingly embattled twentieth century position on the global stage, whilst the rest of the world blithely chose to ignore what was happening there. Whilst everyone else's eye was far from the ball, China rebuilt it's economy and infrastructure quietly and competently against a background of political pariah-hood; gradually taking advantage of the always on internet economy and lack of any real, formal trade constraints to position itself as the globa...

On our way back from visiting the boys yesterday - they live at the top end of the island of Anglesey, just shy of the most northerly town in Wales - we were stopped in our tracks by the sight of a Red Kite [Milvus Milvus] being harassed by a brace of buzzards: at one point the Kite was literally no more than thirty feet away from us; utterly magnificent. Unfortunately, as usual, we were so mesmerised by seeing this fabulous bird - and at such close quarters - that we completely forgot to get a picture of the event [stock photo pictured]. What is gratifying though is that we are seeing a gradual increase in sightings of the bird this far north. A wonderful and erstwhile maligned creature, it's a very welcome addition to the avian fauna of Gwynedd and Ynys Môn. Hope to more and more of them in the coming years, although the buzzards might not agree with that sentiment!

Beer and FT Magazine crossword on the terrace, Chez Fairview Heights, heno. The first glimpse of the proper arrival of Spring here, although the air out of the sun still carries with it enough chill to suggest another layer of clothing: 'ne'er cast a clout till May is out' still holds true this year, but the otherwise fine and calm weather still brings a cheer to auger the cessation of hostilities of Winter. It's been a busy couple of days here for us, so I'm going to leave tonight's scribble at that. Hopefully tomorrow will be a more relaxing day and a genuine rest from the hurly-burly. Catch you later...  

It looks like Steve Wozniak - aka 'Woz' or 'The Other Steve', co-founder of Apple and its original magister of tech and programming - remains on the side of the angels, committing a new space company of his making "...unlike the others...", 'Privateer Space' to 'clear up' space junk from near Earth orbit. As always, Woz sees the ultimate point in tech - to benefit mankind, rather than simply extract as much money as possible from it by selling 'lifestyle'. In the middle years of his relationship with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, as the company's revenue and stock increased, he was often at odds with Jobs over the company's direction, and he left Apple behind in 1985, the year after the Macintosh computer which he, Jobs and Jef Raskin, among many others, had developed, had been launched with the legendary Super Bowl advert in 1984. Where he and Jobs differed was on user expandability and programmability of the machine. Jobs wante...

Today is the 80th anniversary of VE day, and we duly observed two minutes silence, even though we were sat in the car outside the pharmacy at the Medical Centre this morning.  A brief time of reflection in the humdrum of life. Also, today we hear of a UK trade deal with the US, and the announcement of a new Pope. India and Pakistan appear close to military conflict and in today's New Statesman, Jeremy Bowen laments the situation in Gaza in his piece 'The War to End All Peace'. Global business as usual? Who knows? The observance of VE Day is as far as I'm concerned, a given: we really cannot forget the consequences of nationalism and expansionist aggression. My take on the Starmer/Trump thing is that the Labour government are in a very uncomfortable place: this was - and the Labour Party and we all knew it would be - a very bad time to take the reins of government; only to be amplified a thousand percent by the re-election of Trump to the White House. Schmoozing the Car...

Well, it's currently the eve of VE Day+80; the eightieth anniversary of the cessation of hostilities in Europe in the Second World War, ending five years of all-out warfare instigated by the expansionist aspirations of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Having had family both directly and indirectly involved in that conflict, as I would guess most of us alive in the UK will have had, I feel it's incumbent on us all to at least reflect on the import of the event and remember those who gave up their lives in defeating the tyranny that threatened Europe then; but also to reflect on the global situation in which we find ourselves today, with a belligerent nation, also with expansionist ambitions, at war in Europe at present. The parallels between now and then are there to see, and many are talking about the 'appeasement' of Russia and Putin by Donald Trump over Ukraine, offering to cede territory without the traduced party's involvement. Let's face facts: Putin respects...

I was heading anyway for a lazy food post tonight as we were having belly pork slices with Greek potatoes [and token carrots], but to be honest the end result was not up to to scratch in my book, and I was personally responsible in part as the cook in question. There was a time when we routinely, naively, cooked belly pork strips into a form of biltong: tasty, but pretty bloody chewy. Over the years, I've learned how to cook the stuff properly, but tonight I dropped the ball in my haste to knock out a quick meal. The cardinal rule of any meat cooking is proper resting, and my timing with this one was way off: spuds over, meat needing 15 minutes at least to relax, etc., etc. Oh, and the meat itself wasn't exactly over-flavoured anyway: we now have very few butchers left around here, and so we tend to rely on the supermarkets for supply; not always reliable, though. A disappointment, but it qualified as fuel nevertheless: my next bit of pork belly will be a proper, local, skin-on...

I became aware this weekend of a musical project of simultaneously monumental and yet exceedingly simple aim. The singular point of the piece is and has been [it has to date been playing for over a quarter of a century] to produce a non-repeating musical work that will last for a thousand years, starting as it did in the first moments [GMT] of 2000, and finally arriving full circle and repeating itself as the next millennium ticks through [GMT] in 3000. I think I might have heard something about the project at its inception, but it's a long time ago, at least on the human scale, and it took a piece in FT Weekend Magazine this week to bring it back to my attention, had it been there in the first place. It's called Longplayer. I even downloaded the app of the project, which plays the piece in real time, with all copies of the app worldwide, synchronised together. It was composed for, and each loop performed on, Tibetan Singing Bowls; each loop forming one of a series of six, conc...

  Aannn'd Cut! Cheapo Japanese-style saw in use. The table lived, I'm happy to say, although it will need planing up anyway, but what the heck. To the left you can see the block plane I resurrected by from the pile of rust it was imminently about to become, which will be employed to very good use in the future. It's been a very busy couple of [family] days, with much shopping, cooking and driving; not to mention the eating and drinking bits, either; so I'm a bit fashed at present and in need of a good veg-out in front of the snooker or some such. So, I'll leave it at that for today and bid you nos da!

I got a small selection of cheap Japanese-style saws in the post yesterday [pictured], with a view to sawing the waste piece of pitch-pine fillet flush on Pop Alexander's old side table [see my post of the other night for details of the project], without causing too much disruption to the table itself. Japanese saws cut in the 'pull' direction [rather like Western coping or fretsaws do], which gives a greater degree of control over the cut, with less binding and stutter than the traditional Western 'push' cutting stroke. Also, at least one of these blades is capable of 'flush' cutting due to its having no 'set', ie, the teeth of the blade are not splayed but rather cut within the kerf of the saw back itself. As I say, these items were very cheap: they are indeed sharp, but I'll be testing them on some gash material before I commit them to the table itself. If it all pans out OK, I'll probably invest in some more substantial blades in the futu...

A spectre is haunting... America; and it isn't communism. It isn't radical Islamism. It isn't even capitalism itself. It's Christianity. A particularly pernicious, politicised Christianity. 'In God We Trust', One Nation Under God', etc., etc., are the tropes of a 'nation' that is the result of the colonisation of a foreign continent by a motley bunch of assorted European disaffects several hundred years ago. That much is history, and the native peoples of America are still struggling to cling on to what is, after all, their birthright. Whatever good was squeezed from the sour pith of colony in the middle part of the last century: civil rights, racial emancipation and equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ people of all stripes, is not now simply being eroded, but actually bulldozed over the cliff edge that separates human rights & freedoms, and the return of enslavement by difference. Difference of skin colour, race, gender or sexuality: a pick 'n...

If ever I hear someone in my earshot use the phrase "Oh she/he/they are young at heart..." I will personally stifle the very life out of them with a still-strong hand to the throat. I heard this phrase used tonight on a repeat of the portrait-artist-reality-TV-thing, in reference to Judy Dench of all sodding people: young at fecking heart! She's a titan of the theatre, film and TV, and that's all they could see in front of them: an old woman who is 'young at heart'. Anyone who employs this phrase to describe someone - anyone , and I don't care how fecking old the person referred to is - is guilty of being an absolute, patronising shit and should be slapped about the face with a wet fish forthwith until they see sense. Trite cliches such as this one are demeaning and frankly offensive to those so described: just like any other societal grouping, minority or otherwise - and us boomers are in the majority at present [yes, you'll be rid of us all soon eno...