Observations from a Hill

Earlier today we visited the boys over on Ynys Môn, and one of the topics of conversation was AI, a subject difficult to avoid these days. But I put forward my thoughts that after the speculative market bubble bursts - as it inevitably will - the perceived existential threat that a lot of people imagine to be posed by the technology will simply evaporate, and AI per se will simply slot into our global toolbox of technologies to be used in the pursuit of our quite mundane needs and requirements. Every disruptive and apparently revolutionary technology in its day appears as a threat to the societal status quo, provoking often violent reaction to its implementation. This scenario is true of any radical technological innovation: at first disbelief, then astonishment, followed by a gold-rush to exploit it for all its worth in the markets. This is where the kick-back starts; where the disquiet at the potential for negative societal impact begins. Outrage against the machine on both moral and...

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare

OK - to go some way to explain last night's apparently psychotic improvisation - I offer the following. I was riffing on the theme of a couple of significant anniversaries this year: the 100th. of Quantum Mechanics, and the 25th. of the death of Douglas Adams. There are two Douglas's that feature in the improvisation [it was made up as I wrote it] and a third which deserves a mention on a personal level. The thread of the thing was composed on the fly in the manner of a Round Britain Quiz puzzle, using the kind of cryptic allusion common to crossword setters the world over. Pictured above, some of the references laid out in Scrabble tiles. The full list is larger than this, but I'll leave it to you to work out the rest: it's all internally consistent, and follows some manner of logic which I can see clearly; which is to say I wouldn't have bothered with it otherwise. Douglas Adams famously wrote 'The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy' "Trilogy...

I was hoping someone might have spotted the allusion in the title of last night's scribble: I deliberately didn't pose the the question directly, as it might have broken the superposition between statement and inquiry and led immediately to a stable state and the answer, or rather even the question itself. What is the strange loop that links Bach, a sofa in a state of infinitely variable fixity with a staircase, and early personal computers? Which piper played the tune that oversaw my three-day thesis-writing binge in 1978, via the medium of my old valve radio set? Where is the leopard indeed? And what do Nina & Frederik have to do with it? [clue: nothing immediately apparent, that's for sure]. I'd hazard that Q might have had some input, had Bond been involved, albeit at a rather macro level at the scale in question, but c[?] almost certainly would have a massive [inertial] impact here. Effecting a cause is always problematic in a space which doesn't yet exist ...

I've just been watching a YouTube - yes, I know - about getting about as close as is possible to bare-metal programming as it's possible to get without descending to the depths of what is now ancient history in computing terms: namely the early-mid 1970s. This example was essentially demonstrating that it is possible to produce "useful" programs without the presence of a high-level operating system and programming languages, at BIOS [basic input output system] level, using assembly language to address the hardware directly. Obviously the degree of sophistication at which you can work at this low level of abstraction is pretty primitive by even the standards of twenty or thirty years ago, but useful stuff can nevertheless be achieved, even if the example in question was a version of an 8-bit arcade game of the 1980s. Having had some personal experience of programming at such a low level myself [blog posts passim], back in 1979/80, a lot of what was demonstrated in thi...

I've scribbled very recently - and many times before - about the need for systems redundancy to provide resilience for the unforeseen. I should really take heed of my own advice once in a while, and being wise after the event really isn't good enough. I was about to pen today's little note when this bloody old MacBook decided the internet didn't exist any more. WiFi? Fine and connected, thank you very much: router working OK? Affirmative once again, confirmed by my iPhone, the TV and my Linux-powered MacBook Air. So, I tried the tack of booting up the old bugger into its Linux partition on the second drive. Still no joy: so I just turned the damned thing off, swore loudly at it and vowed to sling the thing into the garden at the earliest opportunity and let the moss turn it into a feature. Somehow, this veiled threat had some cosmic effect whilst I was firing up the Linux machine to check all else was well, and when I'd calmed down and revisited the old thing, all h...