Roblog

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  • Filed under: creativity

    Sleeping beauties: the evolutionary innovations that wait millions of years to come good

    Andreas Wagner, in an extract from his new book, details the evolutions – in both biology and human culture – that lay dormant for years before suddenly encountering the conditions in which to become successful:

    “These and many other new life forms remained dormant before succeeding explosively. They are the sleeping beauties of biological evolution. They cast doubt on many widely assumed beliefs about success and failure. And these doubts apply not just to the innovations of nature, but also to those of human culture.”

    This reminds me of the theory of the “slow hunch”, which Clive Thompson wrote about last year. #

  • Filed under: organisations

    AI and coal mines

    On the cusp of the widespread adoption of AI, which organisations will successfully adopt it and which will fail? As ever, there’s a lesson from history.

  • Filed under: ai

    The Internet Is Suddenly Full Of AI-Generated Hip-Hop

    A couple of months ago a video did the rounds of David Guetta, who’d used AI to conjure up a realistic-sounding sample of Eminem. It was interesting, but also pretty meh: it sounded like Eminem, sure, but the lyrics were nonsensical and it all had a slightly uncanny feel about it. It felt like the jobs of rappers were safe for now.

    Then, a couple of weeks ago, hip-hop duo Alltta released the song Savages, and everything changed. It illustrated how far things have come in just a couple of months, but also how incredible human-AI collaborations could be: it features lyrics by rapper Mr. J Medeiros, delivered in the unmistakeable flow of Jay-Z, backed by a genuinely good beat. It’s amazing and scary in equal measure.

    Over at BuzzFeed News (RIP), Chris Stokel-Walker takes a tour through some of the recent developments in AI-generated hip-hop, and delves into the legal issues that are looming:

    “While a consensus is forming that generative AI is potentially troublesome, no one really knows whether hobbyist creators are on shaky legal ground or not. pieawsome said he thinks of what he does as the equivalent of modding a game or producing fanfiction based on a popular book. ‘It’s our version of that,’ he said. ‘That may be a good thing. It may be a bad thing. I don’t know. But it’s kind of an inevitable thing that was going to happen.’”

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  • Filed under: social-media

    In a way, this is how it should be

    Brian Feldman on why the slow-motion shambles that is Twitter feels like a throwback to the old web:

    “My current theory of Musk is that he’s a guy who did a lot of coding many, many years ago and it made him very rich and confident, and so nobody who still works at Twitter has the energy to correct him when assumes, ‘If we go into the <img> tag and change twitterbird.png to doge.png, we’ll have ourselves an epic prank.’

    “Being able to sense someone messing with a website in real-time, moving the menu items around and forgetting to close an HTML tag here and there, is a neat feeling. It feels scrappy. I don’t mean to excuse any of this and I feel kinda bad for people who still rely on Twitter. But as someone with no skin in the game, I am enjoying the process, if not the result. I honestly prefer the dynamism of a guy who keeps changing the layout of the world’s most expensive MySpace page to sites of comparable scale promising me a new, inconsequential feature.”

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  • Filed under: culture

    The age of average

    Alex Murrell perfectly joins the dots on so many threads of modern culture, and why they’re all so… samey.

    “So, there you have it. The interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants all look the same. The buildings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we drive, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities and taglines all look the same.”

    Murrell’s argument is that, in an increasingly homogeneous world, there’s a greater opportunity than ever to do something different – greater returns to distinctiveness, if you will. But I wonder whether that’s really the case. The bland world Murrell describes is one of our own making: algorithms serve us content, and we engage with the blandest bits; market research firms ask us our opinions, and they turn out to be pretty bland too; Airbnb offers us the world and we choose to stay in identikit apartments. Does the world really cry out for distinctiveness and diversity? Or is that only the predilection of art directors and aesthetes? #

  • Filed under: ai

    Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500,000 group chat messages

    Izzy Miller trained a large language model – similar to GPT – on the entire history of his friends’ group chats, which had been running for years. He then hosted an interactive version of it for his friends, so they could all chat with the AI versions of themselves. It worked surprisingly well:

    “This has genuinely provided more hours of deep enjoyment for me and my friends than I could have imagined. Something about the training process optimized for outrageous behavior, and seeing your conversations from a third-person perspective casts into stark relief how ridiculous and hilarious they can be.”

    The post contains lots of technical details, if you have the urge to do something similar yourself. #

  • Filed under: politics

    The mystery of Morocco’s missing king

    Morocco’s king has become increasingly absent over the past few years, to the frustration of the nation’s bureaucrats. A potential cause? His friendship with three Moroccan-German kickboxing brothers. Nicolas Pelham tells the bizzare story in The Economist; it’s illustrative not just of Morocco’s fraught post-colonial history but of its place in the Arab world, too.

    “Five years ago, an unusual image appeared on Instagram. It showed Mohammed VI, the 54-year-old king of Morocco, sitting on a sofa next to a muscular man in sportswear. The two men were pressed up next to each other with matching grins like a pair of kids at summer camp. Moroccans were more accustomed to seeing their king alone on a gilded throne.

    ‘The story behind the picture was even stranger. Abu Azaitar, the 32-year-old man sitting next to the king, is a veteran of the German prison system as well as a mixed-martial-arts (MMA) champion. Since he moved to Morocco in 2018 his bling-filled Instagram feed has caused the country’s conservative elite to shudder. It’s not just the flashy cars, it’s the strikingly informal tone in which he addresses the monarch: ‘Our dear King,’ he wrote next to one photo of the two of them together. ‘I can’t thank him enough for everything he has done for us.’”

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  • Filed under: social-media

    The Influencer Industry

    Emily Hund’s new book examines the organic origins of influencer culture: the world of blogging that emerged in the late noughties.

    “Before there were Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, or TikTok trends, there were bloggers who seemed to have the passion and authenticity that traditional media lacked. The Influencer Industry tells the story of how early digital creators scrambling for work amid the Great Recession gave rise to the multibillion-dollar industry that has fundamentally reshaped culture, the flow of information, and the way we relate to ourselves and each other.”

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  • Filed under: knowledge

    The decisions of dictators

    Autocrats, trapped by the dynamics of power, often make awful decisions. Why is that?

  • Filed under: toys

    Why Lego won (YouTube)

    Lego wasn’t the first stacking brick aimed at kids, but it became overwhelmingly dominant. Why? Phil Edwards explains. #

  • Filed under: gambling

    How to beat roulette

    A long read from Bloomberg on a Croatian gambler who seemingly cracked roulette, winning millions at casinos across the world apparently without cheating.

    “It wasn’t the amount of money at stake that made the Ritz security team anxious. Customers routinely made several million pounds in an evening and left carrying designer bags bulging with cash. It was the way these three were winning: consistently, over hundreds of rounds. ‘It is practically impossible to predict the number that will come up,’ Stephen Hawking once wrote about roulette. ‘Otherwise physicists would make a fortune at casinos.’ The game was designed to be random; chaos, elegantly rendered in circular motion.

    “When the Croatian left the casino in the early hours of March 16, he’d turned £30,000 worth of chips into a £310,000 check. His Serbian partner did even better, making £684,000 from his initial £60,000. He asked for a half-million in two checks and the rest in cash. That brought the group’s take, including from earlier sessions, to about £1.3 million. And Tosa wasn’t done. He told casino employees he planned to return the next day.”

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  • Filed under: philosophy

    The paradox of Alan Watts

    There’s a P&O advert airing at the moment with a voiceover of Alan Watts spouting platitudes about following your dreams. The choice of Watts for a luxury cruise ad was a decision I found odd, given Watts’s reputation (in my mind) as a schlocky new-age huckster. Gus Carter agrees, in some entertaining detail:

    “Watts’s philosophy is difficult to define. He spoke in aphorisms, linguistically clear but conceptually fragmented reflections on the contradictions of human experience. He rejected the idea of the individual and spoke of the ‘European dissociation’, the feeling of oneself as an outsider in a hostile world. Instead, he argued, we are all the universe and any sense of one’s own desires or exertions are merely an expression of the singular universe unfolding.

    “In one lecture, Watts explains: ‘As you cannot conceive, possibly, of the existence of a living body with no environment, that is the clue that the two are basically one… You are both what you do and what happens to you.’ It is a strange argument: you can easily imagine an environment without humans. How is it then that nature and human experience can be described as one and the same? But his pronouncements aren’t designed to be logically analysed. It’s a philosophy of vibes.”

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  • Filed under: sustainability

    Counterproductive Sustainable Investing

    An interesting paper by Samuel M. Hartzmark and Kelly Shue outlining a counter-intuitive aspect of ESG investing.

    The ESG consensus is that you should invest in companies that do good, and not invest in companies that do bad. If you do that, you’ll make it harder to do business for companies doing bad things (by raising the cost of capital for them). That’s then a good incentive for those companies to behave better (and therefore access more, cheaper investment).

    But Hartzmark and Shue argue that this is counterproductive. If you invest in an already-good business, there’s much less scope for them to improve in absolute terms. And if you don’t invest in bad businesses, you make it hard for them to make big investments (which means they won’t create new technologies to reduce emissions), and you put pressure on them to make money in the short term in order to survive (which means they’ll do bad things like mine more coal or produce more diesel engines).

    ESG investing effectively makes bad companies worse, without making good companies better – because it lacks a mechanism for rewarding companies for absolute reductions in impact. #

  • Filed under: finance

    Why is finance so complex?

    A superb (and apposite) essay from Steve Randy Waldman, writing in 2011, on why finance is necessarily complex and opaque, and why removing that complexity and opacity is impossible and undesirable:

    “This is the business of banking. Opacity is not something that can be reformed away, because it is essential to banks’ economic function of mobilizing the risk-bearing capacity of people who, if fully informed, wouldn’t bear the risk. Societies that lack opaque, faintly fraudulent, financial systems fail to develop and prosper. Insufficient economic risks are taken to sustain growth and development. You can have opacity and an industrial economy, or you can have transparency and herd goats.”

    The “faintly fraudulent” aspect reminds me of Dan Davies’s brilliant book Lying for Money, which I wrote about last year. A certain amount of fraud in a society is desirable; completely eliminating fraud would also completely eliminate all other forms of commerce. #

  • Filed under: architecture

    Crystal Lake Pavilion

    A beautiful building, designed by Marc Thorpe, that appears to float over the surface of Crystal Lake in New York.

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  • Filed under: ai

    Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT and AI

    The great linguist Noam Chomsky outlines his frustrations with the buzz around generative AI: principally, that it might obscure the wonder of humanity and our incredible real intelligence.

    “The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.

    …

    “Indeed, such programs are stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution. Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case – that’s description and prediction – but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence.”

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  • Filed under: organisations

    On Relational Infrastructure

    Sam Rye with a fascinating comparison between the informal, emergent relationships that become established in organisations and the mycorrhizal networks that link plants within forests.

    “Much like when we began to understand the web of mycelial connections were fundamental to the health of the forest, illuminating relational infrastructure can help us see why leaving relationship building to happen in the coffee breaks is a terrible idea.”

    (Thanks Flo!) #

  • Filed under: technology

    Can We Trust Search Engines with Generative AI?

    The buzz this week has been about Microsoft’s launch of its AI interface to the Bing search engine. Simon Willison, among others, has documented the frankly insane responses that people have managed to coax out of it; it’s clear that, from a safety perspective, this AI really isn’t ready for prime time.

    But how does it fare on accuracy? Nick Diakopoulos of Northwestern University fact-checked some of Bing’s answers – and the results aren’t pretty:

    “But, when it comes to accuracy it’s a different story. I found factual inaccuracies in 7 of the 15 responses (47%). There were also several responses that provided references for a sentence which did not include evidence of the claim in that sentence. Sometimes the claims were accurate, and other times not accurate, but either way there’s a sort of unwarranted credibility conveyed, where the citations to news outlets give a trust signal, but don’t actually support the claim made.”

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  • Filed under: film

    Marcel The Shell With Shoes On

    A charming new film from Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate, that’s out in cinemas now. From Mark Kermode’s review:

    ”While subjects as dark as separation and death may be faced head-on (a reading from Philip Larkin’s The Trees had me in tears), there’s a comedic quality that reminded me of Aardman’s sublime Creature Comforts animations – a joyous juxtaposition of quotidian, vérité-style dialogue and fancifully inventive visuals that hits a tragicomic sweet spot.”

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  • Filed under: technology

    Introducing the AI Mirror Test, which very smart people keep failing

    James Vincent on why we keep failing to understand the sentience of generative AIs – why, in effect, we keep failing the “mirror test”:

    “The mirror is the latest breed of AI chatbots, of which Microsoft’s Bing is the most prominent example. The reflection is humanity’s wealth of language and writing, which has been strained into these models and is now reflected back to us. We’re convinced these tools might be the superintelligent machines from our stories because, in part, they’re trained on those same tales. Knowing this, we should be able to recognize ourselves in our new machine mirrors, but instead, it seems like more than a few people are convinced they’ve spotted another form of life.”

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  • Filed under: organisations

    Coordination without communication

    Imagine you had to meet someone in New York City. You couldn’t communicate with them in advance; you only knew that you had to meet them somewhere in the city at some point on a particular day. Where and when would you choose to go, in order to maximise the chances of meeting them?

  • Filed under: agility

    The Perils of Prudence

    Abraham Thomas with a well-expressed solution to the apparent contradiction that startups require both stamina and speed:

    “If startups are a marathon, then staying power should count for more than speed. Conversely, if speed is the key, then why worry about stamina and resilience and the long haul?

    “One way to resolve this contradiction is to simply say, this is why startups are hard. You have to do both: go as fast as you can for as long as you can. Sprint the marathon.

    “But I think there’s a deeper resolution, and I found it in events from over a hundred years ago.”

    His examples are from the golden age of Antarctic exploration, and Scott’s and Amundsen’s competing attempts to reach the South Pole. #

  • Filed under: business

    What Companies Still Get Wrong About Layoffs

    As the tech industry in particular fires people in their tens of thousands, Sandra J. Sucher and Marilyn Morgan Westner explain something I’ve always felt intuitively about mass layoffs:

    “I’ve studied layoffs since 2009… the short-term cost savings provided by a layoff are overshadowed by bad publicity, loss of knowledge, weakened engagement, higher voluntary turnover, and lower innovation – all of which hurt profits in the long run.”

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  • Filed under: weird

    I ate 40 rotisserie chickens in 40 days

    A news story that, in true Ronseal fashion, does exactly what it says on the tin:

    “It began as a way to make myself a little uncomfortable, which I think is necessary in life. I wanted to return to simplicity – eat a cooked chicken every day, with no sauces, no condiments. I never imagined it would take off in the way it did. What captured people’s imaginations? A rotisserie chicken is very evocative: with even just the word, you can smell it, taste it, feel the grease beneath your fingertips. I like that it’s a simple, mundane thing.”

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  • Filed under: knowledge

    The Chinese Businessman Paradox

    A great article by Cedric Chin of Commoncog about the stereotype within the Chinese diaspora of the person who just “gets business”. Chin maintains that it has nothing to do with innate talent:

    “But the perception of ‘business savvy’ or ‘not business savvy’ as an inborn trait, unchangeable by circumstance, is hardcoded into our culture; an inalienable part of the ‘traditional Chinese businessman’.

    “I reject this notion almost as strongly as I reject the notion of pre-ordained destiny.”

    …but is rather the result of a particularly earthy and practical sort of knowledge, hard-won from trial and error. There’s a series of articles that explores this education and decision-making, and there’s lots of interesting gems within them. #

  • Filed under: technology

    The Twisted Life of Clippy

    The origin story of Microsoft’s Clippy, the animated mascot we all loved to hate in the ’90s:

    “These days, an annoying Word creature might seem eminently tolerable compared to the ghouls on Twitter. Now that Alexa’s in our bedroom and Siri’s in our hand, Clippy’s a throwback to what seems like a more benign digital age.”

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