The writing has been on this particular wall for over a decade, and smaller indie artists have known it for a long time. What interests me is that Jimmy Iovine is now saying it.

This article resonated very, very strongly with me, and particularly this quote:

“The reason that tech generally — and coders in particular — see LLMs differently than everyone else is that in the creative disciplines, LLMs take away the most soulful human parts of the work and leave the drudgery to you,” Dash says. “And in coding, LLMs take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you.”

I've listened to "Cross Road Blues" a number of times over the years. This really is an impressive new digitisation of a very clean and well preserved original.

And the letter he has written to the community of Apple users seems really very genuine and plausible, and I find myself wondering how many CEOs can really say the same sorts of things about their job. Obviously, being the CEO of Apple is a pretty one-of-a-kind thing, but still: how many of them feel a sense of outright joy that they get to do the job the do? As opposed to some of ghastly, competative grindset mentality or even just a weight-of-responsibility thing?

Perfect summary. Especially the "Party" one.

The World Bank abandon free market doctrine in favour of sensibly targeted government intervention. In further news, down is up, and dogs are now cats and vice versa. I jest, but this is both interesting and kinda-good-news.

I suspect I'm not alone in watching more Youtube that broadcast TV. But I do still get odd looks when I say I do that. I am relieved to find that merely makes me more mainstream than the person looking at me funny.

An AI research company is letting an AI run a shop. And it's hired staff. It's a fascinating research experiment, if, at the current level of the tech, more or less doomed to be no more than a weird curio.

Absolutely wild true-crime story from New Orleans. Fascinating read.

A comparison of the carbon cost of training AI models compared to many many others things. I have long wondered about this, and now I have a decent answer, and yes, it’s pretty much a red herring, unless you are already complete consumer goods renunciate. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but AIs are not especially unethical within the eco frame, and painting them as if they are is not an especially helpful argument.

A little sliver of good news – I await seeing if the infrasctructure he built can be dismanlted fast enough to prevent someone else just as bad filling his shoes at the next election, but I’ll take the fact that there’s even hope they might as as good sign for now.

Clearly, I needed to spend the afternoon listening to the Cocteau Twins. It's been quite a while, and the remain absolutely perfection.

There is no part of that headline that isn't magnificent.

To quote the article: "This is among the most operationally sophisticated supply chain attacks ever documented against a top-10 npm package". A very scary hack, if you're a developer. (For non developers: I would not like to guess how many websites will have axios in their Javascript – these days, there's a fair chance the answer is "most".). In practical terms, it's nothing for non-devs to worry about directly – the attack is focused on the servers that hold the javascript, rather than the users of the websites – but indirectly, the number of computers that might have been compromised is terrifying.