Tales from the Bitface

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:19:15 +0000

Hari Seldon as an undercover Sigmund Freud?

It’s a long time since I read any of the Foundation trilogy, but this article, describing it as a ‘Jewish Masterpiece’ suggests Freud as partly a model for Seldon:

The Foundation trilogy doesn’t really focus on whether or not the galaxy will be saved. What it does, like Freudian psychoanalysis and Jewish textual practice did before it, is focus on how the past can best be mined to solve the problems that spring up in the present. Both methods prize talk and debate … Asimov’s priests are men of intellect who talk and puzzle and debate over questions and explanations and theories and counter theories and false leads and red herrings much the same way students in a yeshiva talk and puzzle and debate.

It’s an interesting piece, well worth your time, especially in these disturbingly anti-Semitic times. And it makes me want to read the books again.

Identity Is The Crisis, Can't You See?

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 22:58:30 +0000

I recently read Alembic Offerings, by hippieish writer Erik Davies. It included this line, which intrigued me:

I cut my teeth in the post-structuralist 1980s, more interested in difference than identity.

It reminded me of how I had long been confused by identity politics. That is, for years — possibly decades — when I heard the term ‘identity politics’, I had supposed it to be about individual identity, about how each of us is different.

Which means I must have actually been confused by some of the things I read that used the term, since it means almost exactly the opposite.

My misunderstanding came from the idea of proving one’s identity, of identifying yourself, showing identity documents. Identifying a suspect, even. They all mean demonstrating that a person is a specific, unique individual.

Whereas identity politics is about memberships of groups.

It feels like a linguistic shift. I am a member of several groups, but none of them uniquely identifies me. Even the intersection of all of them doesn’t do that. So why does the politics of group membership get tagged with the term ‘identity’?

Well it turns out the Latin root of the word relates to similarity:

mid 16th century (in the sense ‘quality of being identical’): via French from late Latin identitas, from Latin idem ‘same’.

to quote the Mac OS dictionary. But different fields use it differently. From Wikipedia’s Identity (social science) :

Identity is the set of qualities, beliefs, personality traits, appearance, or expressions that characterize a person or a group.

Identity emerges during childhood as children start to comprehend their self-concept, and it remains a consistent aspect throughout different stages of life. Identity is shaped by social and cultural factors and how others perceive and acknowledge one’s characteristics. The etymology of the term “identity” from the Latin noun identitas emphasizes an individual’s “sameness with others”. Identity encompasses various aspects such as occupational, religious, national, ethnic or racial, gender, educational, generational, and political identities, among others.

But in its Identity (philosophy) we find:

In metaphysics, identity (from Latin: identitas, “sameness”) is the relation each thing bears only to itself. The notion of identity gives rise to many philosophical problems, including the identity of indiscernibles (if x and y share all their properties, are they one and the same thing?), and questions about change and personal identity over time (what has to be the case for a person x at one time and a person y at a later time to be one and the same person?).

So the politics version appears to come from the social science use of the word, unsurprisingly.

Funny old word, identity. I think, like Erik Davies, I’m more interested in difference than identity, in the group-membership sense.

Claim Chowdering Gruber's Claim Chowder

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:13:58 +0000

John Gruber makes a ridiculous assertion, or so it seems to me. In criticising Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI startup Anthropic’s claim that ‘AI, and not software developers, could be writing all of the code in [their] software in a year’, Gruber takes things the other way:

It may well be true that 90 percent of the lines of programming code that are written today, Friday 13 March 2026, will have been generated by AI. If anything, it’s probably a higher percentage.

This seems like nonsense to me. Certainly AI-generated code is being created, and some of it released. But I work in software development, in a real company making real software that moves people’s money around. There’s some experimentation going on, people will use it to try things out, or better understand things, as I mentioned a few weeks ago. But there are millions of lines of code out there being written and managed every day by real humans.

And when you’re working in a highly-regulated industry like the payment card one as I am, or medical systems, say, it seems unlikely to me that we will ever let significant applications into the world if they were not written by humans.

Maybe I’m being naive, at least by saying ’ever’: if there’s one certainty it’s that things will change. But the idea that we’re already above the 90% AI-generated mark? Sure, Anthropic are likely to be at that level. They build these tools. Eating your own dogfood and all that. But for normal, day-to-day development? It just doesn’t ring true to me.

Plus, of course, software development is about a lot more than writing code. But that’s a discussion for another time.

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 23:52:16 +0000

Good piece by Jonathan Freedland about the disastrous state of the war in Iran. I know I said I felt supportive at the start, and I still want to see the Islamic Republic’s regime fall, and Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis with it. But sadly it isn’t likely this can make that happen.

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 22:57:06 +0000

🎥 Small Prophets is Mackenzie Crook’s new comedy-drama. We watched the first episode tonight. Looks like it’s going to be really good. Interesting similarities to Ricky Gervais’s After Life, in that you’ve got a sad man living alone because he’s lost his partner, and visits his elderly dad in a care home.

I think it’s going to be very different, though, both from that and from Crook’s earlier Detectorists. We watched both of those in the last year or two. I was surprised how much I enjoyed Detectorists when I finally came round to trying it.

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:24:13 +0000

In more ‘AI’ nonsense, Grammarly is giving bad advice and tagging writers’ names to it, without paying the writers or even getting their permission.

I tried Grammarly a few years ago and hated it, but that was long before the LLM boom. This is beyond unethical.

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:01:00 +0000

I find it deeply weird and surprising to read of authors claiming as ‘mine’ images they requested, or copied and manipulated using ‘AI’. The kind of claim quoted in the linked piece, that ‘it’s all mine.’ When it plainly isn’t.

Writers, you’d think, ought to understand that words have meanings.

Purity Poetry

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:30:44 +0000

A great post from Ian Betteridge, called Zen fascists will control you…. Dead Kennedys fans will recognise the title as a quote from ‘California Über Alles’, their single and album track from 1979. Ian builds on it to write a history of the various movements, ideas, cults, that have believed or supposed that humans can be improved or perfected, by diet, exercise, drugs, physical enhancement…

Or by following the word of an ’enlightened’ leader, for example.

He sees the overarching theme as purity:

This is the thing about the politics of purity that makes it so durable, and so dangerous: it doesn’t require malice. It requires only the conviction that you know what clean looks like, and the will to impose it on others, for their own good.

Both the counterculture and the authoritarian right are obsessed with purity. The targets differ wildly — the body, the race, the culture, the blood, the food, the mind. But the cognitive shape is identical. And that shared shape is the on-ramp. It’s how you can get from granola to fascism without ever feeling like you’ve made a wrong turn.

He traces the idea through Joni Mitchell singing ‘we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’ to the Human Potential Movement and the Whole Earth Catalog, to est, and from there to the modern biohacking idea¹, and billionaires trying to extend their lives using the blood of young people.

You can draw a straight line from est to the productivity cult of contemporary tech culture, to the biohacking movement, to the particular flavour of self-optimisation that has become the dominant religion of the Silicon Valley overclass.

And connects it to the Nazis:

The line from the organic farm to the death camp is not straight. It requires many other things to be true simultaneously. But the fact that it is possible to draw the line at all should give us pause, every time we find ourselves in the presence of someone who is very, very concerned with purity — of whatever kind.

It’s an excellent piece, and the guy’s a great writer. So it slightly surprises me that, after he writes:

somewhere in the feed, the purity logic is still running, clean and patient, waiting for the next person to decide that they have woken up. That they are clean.

he doesn’t extend his argument to the state of the modern ‘woke’ idea. Detached from its origins in Black US culture, its adherents demand such a strong acceptance of all parts of the ‘omnicause’, that any disagreement about one tenet of the belief system can lead to ostracism. Purity politics at its purest.

Or so it seems, at least. And indeed, Ian appears to insulate or distance himself from such an attack in his first footnote:

I should make this clear up front: when I talk in this essay about “purity politics”, what I’m not talking about the kind of instant condemnation that happens on social media platforms (Bluesky, I am looking at you). That’s interesting, but it’s not what I’m interested in right now.

Those attackers on Bluesky sound like exactly the type of hyper-woke folks I’m thinking of.

OK, he’s mainly talking about the danger of these beliefs from today’s super-rich; but they need foot soldiers. Mobs can be as dangerous as rich individuals.

Which I see doesn’t have a proper Wikipedia article, but there are various related links at that page, and if the proper article is ever written it should go there and this footnote will be obsolete. ↩︎

The Olympic Park, the V&A, and Bowie

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:42:59 +0000

The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) is in Kensington in West London. At least, its original and main site is. It has others. The newest (I believe) is in the Olympic Park, over in East London, quite near me. They call it the V&A East Storehouse, and it’s in a building that I think was the broadcast centre in 2012, and afterwards was a shared-use office-for-hire sort of place, I believe.

I guess that business must have dried up, because the museum takes up the entirety of the building now, from what I can tell. And it’s a really intriguing way of presenting parts of their vast collection. It’s a bit like an Ikea warehouse. On tall shelves, over three floors, items are arranged in seemingly random order and mostly without grouping, and minimal information. There’s a web site and QR codes so you can look things up, at least as to a title, description, and date.

I like this way of seeing a museum’s collection. The randomness leads to interesting juxtapositions: you might get a 14th century mahogany chest next to a 1960s electric guitar; a Piaggio scooter, decorated by a modern artist, sits with ancient pottery, and so on.

There’s a good article about it at Visit London, with photos that give a flavour of it.

Our main reason for going there was the permanent collection of David Bowie’s archive. Only a tiny fraction of his huge collection is on display, but it’s worth a look. Mostly photographs and letters and such, and some costumes and the odd guitar or synthesiser.

My favourite thing was a rejection letter Bowie received in 1968, saying he wasn’t quite right for the label. Which was Apple Records! Can you imagine what it would have been like if Bowie had joined the Beatles’ label?

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 23:23:18 +0000

Glasgow Central: Building collapses at station as fire causes major disruption - BBC News

Oh no! Glasgow Central! Also my brother and sister-in-law are here and heading back there tomorrow.

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 23:07:42 +0000

To the Arcola theatre in Dalston this afternoon, for Ukraine Unbroken, a set of five short plays about Ukraine since Russia invaded in 2014.

Powerful, moving, a reminder of a time we lived through and that the people of Ukraine are still living through it.

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:52:59 +0000

In a world of lies, we need the BBC more than ever, the headline to Polly Toynbee’s article says. It continues: ‘This week could be our last chance to save it,’ which makes for a very long headline, if a very good point.

My favourite quote is this:

The right’s peculiar patriotism seeks to demolish British achievements the country is most proud of: our public broadcasting and our NHS.

The truth is, those kind of people are loyal only to the country of commerce, of corporations, of capital.

The government’s questionnaire on the BBC’s future is here. We should all respond.

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:41:17 +0000

Started watching The Miniaturist Season 1 🎥. Very strange household they’ve got there. Big on atmosphere, costumes, and interiors. Not sure where the story’s going to go yet.

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 22:41:07 +0000

Currently reading: Red Menace by Joe Thomas 📚

This is the sequel to White Riot, which I read a surprising two-and-a-half years ago. Ongoing Hackney cop, criminal, and political shenanigans, starting on the day of Live Aid.

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 23:04:05 +0000

Netflix’s Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials 🎥, written by Chris Chibnall, was excellent. Really compelling story that kept us mostly guessing till almost the end.

I don’t know what Agatha did with it, or intended to do with it, but I see what Netflix and Chibnall are doing. They’ve set it up beautifully for an ongoing series. And I for one look forward to it.

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 20:52:47 +0000

We’re in the middle of watching Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials 🎥. Two episodes down, and the last one to watch tonight.

That Bundle is a great character. And Superintendent Battle seems a bit useless and annoying so far. I haven’t read any of the books about him.

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 23:26:01 +0000

Oh, damn, I just read in Ansible: Dan Simmons has died. The Hyperion Cantos are some of the best SF of the late 20th century.

Here’s his Encyclopedia of Science Fiction entry.

Sad. So it Goes.

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:27:25 +0000

Sometimes even the best software lets you down. This morning I dropped a quick note in Obsidian about something I wanted to blog about. This evening it’s gone. Not on my phone, not on my Mac.

Can I remember what the idea was? I cannot.

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:18:20 +0000

I know we’re not supposed to celebrate the death of another human being. But what else can you do when it’s Khamenei?

I mean, do you think anyone one didn’t celebrate Hitler’s death in 1945?

I just hope the Iranian people will be able to rise up and free themselves after this. Sadly, history does not hold many examples of this kind of thing working out.

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 18:36:07 +0000

It feels very strange to be supportive of the USA attacking a middle-eastern country (or any country). Even more so when it’s Trump in charge. But the chance this could bring down the Islamic Republic — that evil, terrorism-exporting, citizen-murdering regime — is much to be hoped for.

Of course, it won’t be as simple as that. Things never are. The desire to find simple answers to huge, complex questions, is at least partially the cause of many of our problems today.

But still. The idea that the Iranian people might have the chance to overthrow that monstrous regime: that is huge.

📚 Books 2026, 4: Caledonian Road, by Andrew O'Hagan

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 21:24:49 +0000

I really enjoyed this. It’s set in London (mostly), in a later year of the pandemic (2022, probably), and across just over a whole year. The characters are people from the upper-middle to upper classes, and some of the lowest classes in society, including criminals and illegally-trafficked people who have to work for them.

Some of the blurbiness on the cover describes it as a ‘state of the nation’ novel. It doesn’t quite seem like that for me (though I don’t know if I could give you an example of one that is), not least because the main characters exist at a fairly rarified level of society. They are things like academics, authors, journalists, MPs and lords. Or else they’re would-be drill rappers in street gangs. There’s nobody who’s just normal; whatever that means.

There are so many characters that O’Hagan provides a list of them, a dramatis personae, which I approve of.

Anyway, it’s very good, and I read it much faster than I expected to, which is usually a good sign.

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:10:07 +0000

Ed Zitron’s latest, On NVIDIA and Analyslop, is very good on the current state of some financial stuff related to ‘AI’. It’s also good on how much more complex software development is than the ‘vibe coding’ believers would tell you:

Software is a tremendous pain in the ass. You write code, then you have to make sure the code actually runs, and that code needs to run in some cases on specific hardware, and that hardware needs to be set up right, and some things are written in different languages, and those languages sometimes use more memory or less memory and if you give them the wrong amounts or forget to close the door in your code on something everything breaks, sometimes costing you money or introducing security vulnerabilities.

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:14:23 +0000

Fuckin hell, Apple Music! This is just what I was talking about a few weeks ago. ‘Camera’ and ‘(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville’ just aren’t going to play, for no reason.

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 23:40:28 +0000

A quick note just to keep up my streak of having posted every day this year. Is that stupid? Maybe. Will mentioning it jinx it? Time will tell.

Class Distinction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:29:50 +0000

Over on BlueSky, Andrew Hickey of the excellent A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs podcast shares a post about the modern British class system, by someone who goes by ‘John Bull’. I think I used to follow him on Twitter. The post says:

Class in the UK is pretty easy to understand.

Top 1% of wealth = upper class
Bottom 1% = working class

Everyone else self-defines as “upper-working class” regardless of actual income.

They will think one of the other groups are “scroungers”. But never both.

Which is at least partly intended as humorous, I think, and so exaggerates for effect. But it may not be far from the truth. Except… I don’t recall ever having heard the term ‘upper working class’ before.

The class that does traditionally get split is middle: upper middle class, lower, middle class, these are (or were) common enough terms. And sociologists use (or used to use) the letter system, which had ABC1, C2, C3. Possibly others, but I don’t recall. I assume A–C map to the traditional upper–working range, which means they split the working class up, but not the middle? I don’t know.

Anyway, I tweeted¹ at Andrew saying I’d never heard the term, and he replied he had, a lot. Someone else in the comments also said they hadn’t heard it.

All to say nothing in particular, except I’m thinking that traditionally it wasn’t just about either wealth or income, but titles. You couldn’t be upper class without a title. But now I’m wondering if the so-called nobility sit (or sat) above even the upper class.

If there’s a special verb for posting on BlueSky I haven’t heard it, so I’ll stick with the old workhorse. ↩︎