Warwickshire honey fungus [by Birmingham]

a journal of the plague, sword, and famine year

Read Brent Weeks’ The Way of Shadows, a rather traditional tale of an orphan boy learning assassin’s skills from a master, within a crime guild organisation tolerated by a feudal structure itself ruled by a below-par king, with the usual dilemma between dedication to the (gory and amoral) job and love+friendship+loyalty constraints. Both collide when the love+friends+kingdom come under actual threat from a neighbouring total-evil kingdom. Some aspects of the dilemma are interesting, other are not and weaknesses in the scenario abound. The final climax of this first volume is quite disappointing, but cannot be discussed as a sequence of major spoilers. I wonder whether the following volumes will see some improvement. And Gone to Dust by Matt Goldman, a somewhat enjoyable detective novel but… lacking a proper level of surprise, with whiffs of Marlowe emanating from the central character, Nils Shapiro, an annoying tendency to brand name dropping, detailed descriptions of itineraries that should bore even the locals, and the of-so-convenient! recourse to Somali terrorism in the middle of Minneapolis, to solve the day. Plus a painful insistence on how foul Winter is in Minnesota…

Had a week of Venetian fare at Da’a Marisa, the de facto cantine of Ca’Foscari! And a sampling of neighbouring cannoli, not always successful and not competing with the cannoleria I visited in Milano, which made me cook a batch myself for Easter weekend. With the result that the tubes were reasonable but the ricotta filling too liquid.

Watched the last season of the BBC series His Dark Materials, while wondering whether or not the third volume of the Book of Dust would ever appear. And Kill Boksoon (길복순) which is a manga style movie playing on the hardship of being a single mother when working full time as a contracted killer! Very light (and gory) if rather funny.

même pas peur [not afrAId]

Both the Beeb and The New York Times are posting tonight about a call to pause AI experiments, by AI researchers and others, due to the danger they could pose to humanity. While this reminds me of Superintelligence, a book by Nick Bostrom I found rather unconvincing, and although I agree that automated help-to-decision systems should not become automated decision systems, I am rather surprised at them setting the omnipresent Chat-GPT as the reference not to be exceeded.

“AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity (…) recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.”

The central (?) issue here is whether something like Chat-GPT can claim anything intelligence, when pumping data from a (inevitably biased) database and producing mostly coherent sentences without any attention to facts. Which is useful when polishing a recommendation letter at the same level as a spelling corrector (but requires checking for potential fake facts inclusions, like imaginary research prizes!)

“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”

The increasingly doom-mongering tone of the above questions is rather over the top (civilization, nothing less?!) and again remindful of Superintelligence, while spreading propaganda and untruth need not wait super-AIs to reach conspiracy theorists.

“Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable (…) Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in”

A six months period sounds like inappropriate for an existential danger, while the belief that governments want or can intervene sounds rather naïve, given for instance that they lack the ability to judge of the dangerosity of the threat and of the safety nets to be imposed on gigantic black-box systems. Who can judge on the positivity and risk of a billion (trillion?) parameter model? Why is being elected any guarantee of fairness or acumen? Beyond dictatures thriving on surveillance automata, more democratic countries are also happily engaging into problematic AI experiments, incl. AI surveillance of the incoming Paris Olympics. (Another valuable reason to stay away from Paris over the games.)

“AI research and development should be refocused on making today’s powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal. In parallel, AI developers must work with policymakers to dramatically accelerate development of robust AI governance systems.”

While these are worthy goals, at a conceptual level—with the practical issue of defining precisely each of these lofty adjectives—, and although I am certainly missing a lot from my ignorance of the field,  this call remains a mystery to me as it sounds unrealistic it could achieve its goal.

appel du 18 juin

a journal of the plague year [confined reviews]

Watched TV series His Dark Materials produced for the BBC, which is much much better than the earlier film, as the actors are all fabulous—first and foremost Lyra, but also Ma Costa, the Gyptian Muter Courage—, the gypsy community is given a much stronger role, the characters are deep and complex, as eg Mrs and Mr Coulter, both ready to sacrifice kids for the greater “good” without appearing as absolute monsters! The special effects are a wee bit deficient as often with BBC productions but not enough to make a case. Although I sort of cringed each time a bear moved!

Read The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara trilogy by Terry Brooks, which I noticed standing on my son’s bookshelves. The original Shannara Trilogy was one of the very first fantasy books I read in English in my undergrad years (after Lord of the Rings of course and possibly The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant), which did not leave me with an everlasting feeling of superlative literature, to say the least. This avatar of the original Sword of Shannara trilogy did nothing to improve my feelings as the plot is lazy at best, with super-powered villains suddenly acting, last second deus ex machina rescues, endless internal debates, heavy hints at treacheries and double-treacheries, and, worst of all!, intrusion of 20th century technology, e.g., computers, AIs and robots, that the far future characters make sense of. Only suitable for a time of lockdown and even then… I should have left it on the bookshelf! Incidentally, one fight scene against a cyborg was highly reminiscent of the black knight scene in Holy Grail!

Watched by chance Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. For the first time. And was totally un-impressed. Highly pretentious construction falling flat from being a modern reconstruction of antique dramas, endless dialogues (which could have been cut by half if removing all the occurrences of fucking from them), boring and threadbare story, and artificial characters that essentially make no sense. I cannot fathom why this film is so highly ranked..! (And even less to witness it being compared with Rashomon!)

Read [part] of Jin Yong’s Legends of the Condor Heroes (射鵰英雄傳) but, lockdown or not, I simply could not finish it. Despite its fantasy approach to Chinese martial arts, which I usually enjoy (at least in planes!), and some proximity with the Judge Dee stories by van Gulik, the story felt very contrived and somewhat out of reach, plus [not yet] Genghis Khan being depicted in a fairly positive way [at least in the part I read]. Too irrealist for my reading buds, I presume…

Cooked plenty of new dishes, thanks to the delivery of weekly farmer boxes, from radish stems & buckwheat pancakes to celery roots purées, to fregola sarda (leftovers from ISBA 2016!) con acciughe, to chard gratins, to pea pod and cauliflower core soups, to flaxseed bread and buckwheat naans (as we ran out of wheat flour). We also managed to use and survive most of the out-of-date cans and bags that had stood forgotten in the back of our cupboard… Not visiting a supermarket for two months was actually most pleasant, living very nicely from the above mentioned farmer boxes and the occasional delivery from a cheesemonger, and supplementing weekly visits to the baker with attempts at home made bread.

Read Matha Well’s Murderbot diaries, my first read on a Kindle!, for free courtesy of Tor. Starting with All Systems Red, which won the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novella, the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Novella, the 2018 Locus Award, and the American Library Association‘s Alex Award. Very good if somewhat classical (Blade Runner anyone?!) trope of the rogue robot turned autonomous and human, so human! This is a sequence of novellas which means a fast-paced story and an efficient style. (Including a less exciting third novella, due to a lazy scenario.) More mind-candy à la John Scalzi than profound literature but quite enjoyable for a quick read during lunch or tea break! But which induced me to buy the first and incoming novel in the series,  Network Effect. (To be commented in a subsequent entry…)

Leading to (re)read the Interdependency trilogy by John Scalzi, the last volume in the series being just out. Very lazy buildup, in the traditional spirit of a few people driving the future of the entire Universe, with unlimited resources and unrestricted hacking abilities, but with funny dialogues, as usual with Scalzi. In this binge (re)read, I actually realised the frustrating intricacies of Kindle ordering as (i) I could not use my amazon.com account and hence none of my associate gains (ii) I could not merge several amazon.fr accounts and (iii) prices varied a lot between using directly the Kindle and ordering from amazon.fr…

And even growing some salads and radishes over the two months and eating them before the end of the lockdown, as the weather in Paris was quite mild most of the time. Although it meant a daily-basis fight with slugs. The arugula did not resist that well, though…

Reading Tade Thompson’s Rosewater for more than a month, having trouble keeping my concentration as the story goes in loops and not a particularly well settled plot. With a central idea of an alien race taking over humanity a few cells at a time. Which reminded me of Greg Bear’s Blood Music I read during the first year of my PhD. The book has some appeal, from being located in Nigeria 30 years from now to America having completely vanished from the map after Trump pulled the ultimate drawbridge. It won the 2019 Arthur Clarke Award after all! But I found it too hard to complete to even consider embarking upon the next two volumes on the trilogy…