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.”
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.”
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?
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. #
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.”
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.”
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. #
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.”
Nate Jones on the phenomenon of the “nepo baby” – the children of Hollywood stars who fill the current ranks of celebrities:
“Long before TikTok got ahold of these descendants, scholars had been studying our obsession with multigenerational stars. Austrian academic Eva Maria Schörgenhuber argues that celebrity children function as living links to a shared pop-culture history, connecting us to a nostalgic vision of the past. You can see this keenly in the types of nepo babies the culture does not have a problem with. Stars like Minnelli, Mariska Hargitay, or Freddie Prinze Jr., who all had a parent die in tragic circumstances, garner respect, not scorn, for following in their footsteps. The same way the Kennedys went from nouveau-riche boot-leggers to inhabitants of a fairy-tale castle, so does the passage of time transform a nepo baby into someone ‘from a famous family.’ Few today care that Michael Douglas, Laura Dern, or Tracee Ellis Ross had celebrity parents. The same principle holds true for someone like Dakota Johnson, who reps multiple generations of Hollywood legends and is thus exempt from the tasteless striving that defines celebrity children of a more recent vintage. Paradoxically, the nepo babies we like best are often the ones who are most privileged.”
Why do crypto exchanges struggle with basic accounting, or fledgling social networks with content moderation? They’re both examples of what feel like simple, solved problems but are actually devilishly complex – and that complexity is often the incumbents’ best defence.
Another bit of self-promotion, if you’ll indulge me. As part of the general mood that’s in the air at the moment, focused on moving away from the internet’s various large walled gardens, I’ve decided that having my photos exist only on Instagram isn’t really much fun. And so I’ve started a little photo blog, focused on my home city of London.
I’m going to use to it for photo essays about the city, its people, and how it changes over time. There are a few up there already, on London in Lockdown, the Queen’s funeral, the recent Iranian protests, and the final years of Smithfield Market. #
I stumble across a lot of interesting oddness on the internet and in books, most of which will never make it into blog posts here on Roblog. So I’ve decided to set up a mini, daily, “Today I Learned”-style blog that captures it. It’s called Tiller.
Posts will be daily (well, almost), short, and hopefully interesting. So far I’ve got some things about stunts with crocodiles, shockingly filthy blues songs, and trade union blacklisting in the construction industry, so they’ll also be pretty eclectic. #
A short (8-minute) documentary about the last trams in India: those of the 149-year-old Kolkota tram system. It’s on its last legs, down to 12–15 trams from its height of 300, and there are suggestions that the government of West Bengal will shut the service down.
Activists are fighting to save it, both as a symbol of Kolkata’s history and heritage and as a cheap, environmentally friendly and low-congestion method of transport in what is an increasingly crowded and polluted city. #
Dan Hancox expertly captures the vibe of Facebook’s boomer nostalgia groups, that yearn for a vague and unspecified time period when men were men, health and safety legislation didn’t exist, and you had to ask your parents for permission to leave the table after your tea. On the face of it, they’re quaint and a little absurd, but they reveal quite a lot of what’s rotten in the English collective psyche:
“When we talk about the past, we always reveal something about the present. It is hard to imagine a more intriguing or overlooked body of evidence for assessing recent British social history than these Facebook groups: they have given us something like a more chaotic, 21st-century version of Mass Observation. They may not be ‘representative’ in any quantifiable way, but the sample size is vast, and these memes are a canvas for a whole range of contemporary insecurities and collective memories. History is written by the winners, but anyone can share a post on Facebook.”
Architectural Review has a great piece on Peter Barber, the revolutionary architect who has designed and built some of the most forward-thinking social housing in the UK.
Barber himself is a product of an era in which social housing was prioritised and popular:
“Barber was a student in 1979, the year when the proportion of the British population living in council housing peaked at 42 per cent (today the figure is approximately 8 per cent). Britain’s first few council houses were built in the 1860s… but it was only in the aftermath of two world wars that central government ramped up funding – first in 1919 and then again in 1945 – for council-house building to gain real momentum. Completions peaked with around 150,000 homes built each year.”
His work is a direct challenge both to the Thatcherite view that social housing is inevitably unpleasant, shameful, and unliveable, and the modernist view that social housing should be built on a towering scale.
I particularly like the bright-white, Mediterranean-inspired Donnybrook Quarter in Bow…
…and the stately brick car-lessness of this development on the Becontree Estate in Dagenham, which cleverly built on a cut-through between two roads while maintaining the pedestrian access:
Palmer Luckey, inventor of the Oculus Rift VR headset, has designed a headset that will kill its wearer if their character in the video game they’re playing dies:
”When an appropriate game-over screen is displayed, the charges fire, instantly destroying the brain of the user…
“At this point, it is just a piece of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design. It is also, as far as I know, the first non-fiction example of a VR device that can actually kill the user. It won’t be the last.”
There are two different views of how company culture forms: one top-down, and the other bottom-up. But are they as contradictory as they seem? And how do you change a culture once it exists?
Some beautiful explanations, visualisations and animations that form a beginners’ guide to complexity science. So much of what I talk about on this blog touches on these concepts. #
I love Helen Rosner, the New Yorker’s food writer, and this interview is great.
On the challenges that come with developing taste:
“I think of that as the cliff of connoisseurship. When you start paying attention to something, the margins become much, much, much smaller – you know, the more knowledge and expertise you have, the more experience you have. And these tiny margins start mattering more and more and more and more and more until you’re effectively communicating in a language that is unintelligible to anybody who is outside of your micro subreddit, or whatever it might be.
“And you know, it’s nice to be obsessed. It’s nice to find joy in knowledge and mastery and expertise.”
On the idea of “elevating” (typically non-European) cuisines (typically by making them more closely resemble European foods):
“Even if we accept ‘elevation’ as a term, and even if we sort of engage with the idea on its own, in its own context, I think that elevating is not the same as fixing. I think one way of thinking about elevating is saying, ‘Here’s something that you have perhaps failed to appreciate because of its context.’
“And so, when somebody is doing that with food… I think that that can be quite powerful. We can debate the merits of whether culinary diplomacy is successful… but it might be a way of reaching the culture, the moneyed people and saying, ‘Hey, pay attention to this thing that you’ve previously dismissed as food that does not rise to your level, and recognize that not only are you worthy of it, but perhaps we’re not even worthy of it, it is greater than you had previously imagined.’”
A charming behind-the-scenes look at Saturday Night Live’s team of cue-card writers. Their process is lo-fi, but it works better than technology: it’s more reliable, and it’s easier to fit to the beats and the physical needs of the sketches. (It’s hard to imagine wheeling a teleprompter around some of the tightly blocked, single-shot sketches that feature in the video.) #
People at the top of organisations often feel out of control. But in their attempts to impose measurements and targets, they only gain the illusion of control – and put their organisations at risk in the process.
Wesley Morris celebrates a type of art that America used to specialise in, but has stopped making: trash.
“I was 11 when Nuts came out, and it helped lead me into a committed relationship with a certain category of movie. The people in them seemed loonier, lustier, louder than we’re supposed to be. Their eyes were wild; their makeup ran. They had hair we were meant to know was a wig, because it was impossible hair. The paint chips for these movies might read: ‘wanton,’ ‘lust,’ ‘paramedic,’ ‘weak bladder,’ ‘mattress,’ ‘steamy,’ ‘do not cross,’ ‘pilot light,’ ‘them drawls,’ ‘brazen,’ ‘lit cig,’ ‘urinal cake,’ ‘Crisco,’ ‘bust.’ In being honest about this volatile, unkempt, uncouth, indecorous, obnoxious, senseless, malicious, unhinged and therefore utterly uninhibited side of ourselves, a certain kind of movie can make an X-ray of what else it is besides a story about some characters. It can identify the mess.”
Geoff Dyer, writing in Aperture, summarises the iconoclasm and revolution of photography in the 1970, an era I’ve always found fascinating.
“Photographers were busy taking photographs, making work, but interesting photographs are always being taken, great work is always being made, whatever the decade. In the ’70s, though, photography was being examined and defined in a way that harked back to Alfred Stieglitz’s pioneering inquiries into… ‘idea photography’.”
Beautiful paper-cut artworks by artists Julia Ibbini and Stéphane Noyer that recall the geometry of Islamic art and architecture and are made possible by computer-controlled laser cutters:
John Lanchester at his best, comparing the current government to live-action role-players:
“Until Liz Truss, no one had ever thought to try Larping as a system of government. But it turns out that we in the UK are living inside a full-scale Thatcher Larp, whether we voted for it or not. (For the avoidance of doubt: we didn’t. Check the 2019 Conservative manifesto for proof.) This unhappy discovery was something the country, and the financial markets, learned from Kwasi Kwarteng’s ‘mini-budget’ on 23 September, the latest catastrophic f***-up inflicted on the UK by an over-confident Etonian.”
This, Lanchester argues, is why the markets had such a catastrophic response to the mini-budget – because it made it unavoidably, unignorably clear that the government was fundamentally unserious:
“The uncosted new policy became, to markets, a signal that the new government is not serious and doesn’t know what it’s doing. Truss can wear as many pussy-bow blouses and sit on as many tanks as she wants, but while her policies continue to be uncosted, it’s Larp Thatcher, not the real thing. Markets don’t want a G7 economy to be led by people playing ‘let’s pretend’.”
With the release of Stable Diffusion and Midjourney this year, AI feels on the cusp of real capability. But who will wield that capability? Will it be controlled by a small cabal of companies with deep pockets and oceans of data? Or will it be something more accessible?