London Village Retvrn

Last week was San Francisco. This upcoming week? London. For a day (and Bicester for a couple more days). It’s a whirlwind tour, and hopefully we’ll be back properly for a longer period of time sooner than later. But this time, for Valentine’s Day, Tammy and I will be seeing Los Campesinos! in London…probably the first time I’ve seen them in the UK since 2010 or 2011. And a train ride there and back! What else could I really ask for, really?

First made-up story at 3am when demands were made to read a book in the dark. I have a feeling that Rev. W. Awdry would not have approved of Thomas Delivers Spent Nuclear Fuel Rods To A Previously Undisclosed Station on Sodor, but hey, Maeryn seemed to think it passed muster before passing out.

And Sneakers 4K Is Coming Out In April!

A sometimes strange, but mostly good visit to San Francisco. Although I probably shouldn’t drink again until the second half of March at the very least.

Once again, I felt broadly safe in the downtown and Mission areas (and anywhere else I went, really). One altercation early on Monday morning, but that was about it. However, you can’t deny that the city centre has taken a big hit from Covid and shows no real sign of bouncing back. Even more vacant shopfronts than my previous visit, with even It’s Sugar having bailed out of the old Forever 21 location…and it seems that the Macy’s that has been there since 1929, and has roots going back to 1866 (!) might be shutting down. The San Francisco Centre, stripped of the Westfield branding, is now a downtown mall with less than 25% occupancy and the haunted air of a place that feels like The Caretaker should be piped over the PA system. Not the healthiest, let’s just say.

Of course, we’ll always truly remember San Francisco this way:

(Of course, when I got home, I was greeted with smiles. And then directed to sit in the reading corner, because I had fallen behind in the daily task of reading all the books)

52 Quintillion Versions! Some Are Even Good!

After managing to miss showings of it by weeks or even mere days when it has been screened in either cities nearby or those I’ve been visiting (missed it by days in SF twice, even), thanks to the global livestream yesterday, I finally got to see Eno, the 85-ish minute, “different every time it’s shown” documentary on Brian Eno (obv.)¹

And…well. Having seen two of the 6 generations of the film over the past 24 hours, I can’t help but think there’s a great 160 minute cut hiding across the different generations. Which is not to say it isn’t good…but because the spine of the documentary remains fixed, with digressions here and there (maybe you’ll see Eno take the piss out of Bono while they’re recording Pride, maybe you’ll see some footage of Roxy Music, maybe you’ll get the admittedly amusing ‘repetition’ Oblique Strategies card that threatens to replay the entire previous sequence, etc), I don’t think it will hold up to that many repeated viewings, because the versions just don’t seem to be different enough. Which makes me think that a longer, more traditional cut would have been better after all. At least Eno comes across well; not taking himself seriously, or just seriously enough, yelling at the YouTube ads when they get in the way of him showing music, or giggling over the insanity of the Windows 95 startup brief.

(things I didn’t see in the edits I watched, but I think exist in other versions: an old interview with Sandi Toksvig, which I am curious about, because I wonder if it’s something from No. 73, and in the second edit, there’s a brief flash of the PAUL MORLEY KLAXON, so obviously, I was sad I didn’t get to see the full thing. Curiously, there were only a few flashes of the ‘so famous, it got parodied at least twice’ performance of Virginia Plain on TOTP, instead mainly using footage from European music shows…)

I think this would break the way of how Eno and Hustwit viewed the concept, and his feelings towards generative art in general, but I would prefer a way of being able to turn the “cybernetic dial” and get even 60 minutes of Eno talking about Stafford Beer, or the “Horny Eno dial” to get an edit that is much more in the vein of various diary entries from 1995. Being able to either consciously or randomly alter the complete documentary structure around concepts would make it a more attractive offering. Or just give me three hours of footage to watch.

Having said all that, the Q&A FaceTime thing afterwards last night gave me an idea of using embedding models with the Bluesky protocol that I will have to try and build in the next month or so. And who knows, this time I might actually finish something.

Anyway, off to San Francisco in the morning for a week. If you see me, why not say “haven’t you been promising a tech blog for quite some time now, eh?”

Target Audience Of One

Song of the week, but it may take you less than one second to realise this is 100% Ian Back On His Thing Again. Maybe even less if you see the thumbnail.

This week, I began the Year of Dentistry. Which along with everything else, apparently comes with a brace of pills that you shouldn’t take anywhere near alcohol…even three days after, according to the pharmacist. So, we’ll be starting those after I get back from San Francisco, then…

Only one model trained this week, but ideas forming for more experiments in ‘test-time inference’ for embeddings. And a slow realization that despite its hipness towards the end of last year, I was essentially doing it at the start of 2024 with my tree-search jailbreaking techniques. I wish I had had the time to add the Monte Carlo Tree Search system on top, but alas.

Any ideas on fun places to visit in SF? Part of me feels like I should once again do the 90s thing and go to DNA Lounge, but in my head, I am still not cool enough to be there…

Please Stand By

Well, I did eventually dig myself out of the snow.

But for a number of reasons, I don’t have anything this week. See you next time, space cowboy…

The Ghost of a Train Station

I now have LL Bean slippers. It is only a short time before I talk about “vacationing in Maine”. (Actually, it’s an attempt to find a pair of slippers than can last six months without me somehow boring a hole through the sole. Maybe a slightly-upscale quality brand might get us there. But my toes are merciless, apparently)

Anyway, new year, incoming winter storm, car won’t start (even before the storm hits), I landed on my ankle funny early on Saturday, and we’re all out of eggs in the area (one last betrayal by Biden, I’m sure). Overnight temperatures will nudge -20ºC by the end of the week and I’ve already eaten about 90% of the chocolate my family brought over. It’s an impending disaster!

It is definitely not a disaster at all, but I was a little sad standing in the ticket hall for the Cincinnati Museum Center on Tuesday morning. It once used to be a cathedral for trains, and it looks amazing. A masterpiece of Art Deco with a 100+ foot high ceiling that makes you think you’ve stepped into an episode of Batman: The Animated Series. It used to handle 15-30,000 passengers a day. Given that the entire complex could have been lost after it closed in 1972, it’s hard to be too churlish about its current state as a museum, but the sense of ‘this could have been the future’ hangs over you through every moment of being in the rotunda.

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Happily, the museum is a good one, if a little different to the ones I’ve grown up with over the years. The V&A does not have an artificial cave system, for instance! Nor does the Ashmolean have an expansive toddler area with Duplo stations and magnetic walls. I think we barely saw half of the museum proper, but not to worry as we have passes for the rest of the year. I haven’t even seen the giant mouth yet!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to get my snow shovel ready…

Can We Have A Do-Over?

Well, here we are, all the lads. Right at the end of the year, and the house has tonight slimmed down from a surprisingly-still-comfortable six (admittedly, one of the six is very small, but she does make her presence felt) to a somewhat lost-at-sea one. I have spent the day by myself in the usual manner: ineffective tidying up, staring at a computer screen for more than I really should, observing model runs more than is strictly necessary on a day off, and wondering just what dark magic I pulled in November to get $1/gallon of petrol at Kroger this morning.

As promised, for once, the list of books I read in 2024 is up. You’ll see that it’s a list that is dominated at the top and tail by series, and feels a lot more genre-bound than the last couple of years. The year started with me finding out that Games Workshop was finally about to end the Horus Heresy after something like fifteen years, which meant I spent Christmas and the early new year going through the Siege of Terra cycle¹. And then there was a gentle couple of months going through Ballard books I haven’t read yet, finally finishing the Arthur Maclean collection, and the Rosemary Tonks reissues that are available in the US (I’ve had to grab hold of actual physical copies of the others from the UK). But then, aside from a detour into the Palin diaries, Stafford Beer, and Owen Hatherley’s wonderful journey around DC and New York, come August, I fell into a Donald Westlake-shaped hole.

I remember enjoying William Goldman’s adaptation of The Hot Rock, so the Dortmunder books were an easy sell. What happened was this: I’d get an email saying one of the series had been reduced to $2, and I’d buy the next in the series. This took me all the way up to the end of Good Behavior (I’m very surprised this hasn’t been turned into a film — breaking into a NY skyscraper to rescue a young nun who is under a vow of silence via a series of increasingly convoluted approaches seems a great mid-range film. Although those don’t really exist these days…). And then the offers dried up and instead it directed me to the Parker books…waves at November and December. Honestly, I’m not even sure if I liked them all that much; they’re absolutely taut, but possibly just a little too clipped and tight. But then you can read one in a night…and I often did. And then Amazon decided to offer the last 16 books in the series for $22 or so. I couldn’t really say no at that price. I have forced myself to stop at the end of Butcher’s Moon (after which, Westlake didn’t write any more Parker novels for twenty years), but expect January 2025 to be rife with them, particularly as I’m going to be flying to San Francisco at the end of January.

So that was the year in books. A decided lack of nonfiction. TV? Well, I have a half-written rant about Adam Curtis’ The Way sitting in my note drafts for most of the year. Did it feel like a CBBC drama from the late 80s with a few “Curtis trademarks” applied on top? Absolutely. The thing is that I think that’s a good thing, unlike almost everybody else. And while I really can’t defend the “Welsh Catcher” bits, the swingers opener in episode 3 I will absolutely die on a hill for:

“Why are there swingers? What does this have to do with the plot??”

• Why does everything have to be a telegraphed part of the plot? Have all these revivals and spin-offs rotted your brains?

• Does the opener serve a purpose? Why yes, it allows a relatively natural conversation to talk about what’s going on rather than an infodump between just two characters (i.e. the sister and her husband)

• It also uses the swinger scene in an attempt to be clever. How successful the attempt is, I’m not sure: but yes, it’s an adult post-watershed drama on BBC1. But it’s a ‘sophisticated’ drama, so we’re playing with more risqué themes…but as well as having that cake, the show knows despite all the ‘sensitive’ filming in the world, the scenes in something like Sense8 are really at a core level just as salacious² as Barbara Windsor’s bra popping off, so it tries to eat the cake as well. And hence the juxtaposition with Carry On Camping and Benny Hill. It knows, you know, and it’s generating an auto-critique of itself while also building on the AI theme of the programme. It is at least trying!

• Also, everybody standing outside the big sod-off Grand Designs window staring in at them is funny.

Anyway, even if it was terribly uneven, I will go to bat for a show that explicitly rejects its premise and ends with a demand for new stories³.

Right, I will spare you all from my retrospective on Reality Bites, except to say that Ethan Hawke’s character totally voted for Trump in the 2024 election and nothing you say will convince me otherwise. Happy new year everybody…

21st Century Dentistry

Your old dentist retires and eleven months later, you go to the one he’s transferred you to. I was always fond of my old dentist. Now, I had chosen them simply because they were in my network and they were really close, but every time I went, I’d be charmed by the late 1970s/early 1980s vibe of the entire place. They did have computers and modern dentist tech, but the intercoms were chunky 1970s numbers with Eurostile typesetting, the interiors were vintage Midwestern, and they had a massive bank of active pigeon holes stuffed with patients’ details. It was an interesting time-capsule.

Contrast this with my new dentist, where everybody wears a uniform, the average age of staff skews about 30 years younger, LEED lighting and white surfaces everywhere, and “AI assisted” X-Ray scans, plus a full 3D model of your teeth built with a very rectangular wand shoved in your mouth. Very different.

But…while my previous dentist didn’t complain a lot about what was going in with my teeth, the new group has some opinions. Quite extensive opinions. Like “we’ll need to work on your mouth one quadrant a time over the next year, things are so bad” sort of opinions. I had rocked up at 12 noon, expecting a quick-ish 20 minute appointment…and I didn’t leave until 14:00. I was so hungry. But also afraid of eating anything ever again.

(the worst part is them all nodding sagely as they hear my accent, and that sinking feeling as I realize I’ve conformed to the British stereotype of terrible teeth. But I didn’t know! I’ve been going to dentists in the US since 2011 and not one has really said anything until now!!)

Anyway, trying to put all of that aside for the next nine days. The family is here, Maeryn is having a great time, work is over for the year, and we’re settling in for Christmas and the new year. Next week: probably an overview of books read this year to wrap everything¹

Why not just eat the butter without all the baking?

I made my first batch of mince pies this weekend¹. Which means, as I think about it, I’ve have eaten an entire 227g block of butter this weekend. It’s…probably best not to dwell on that.

We’re entering that quiet lull; a Saturday spent trying to clean up the house a little, then I’ll be on my own for a couple of days as I clean carpets and make up a new set of beds…and then my family arrives on the 18th. Which means I’m basically considering myself on holiday from that evening, even if I do have two more days of work left. Admittedly, on the last day, I plan on reviving the old British school custom of “Bringing in Games on the last day of term”, which is a bit more of a challenge when you work for a remote company.

Back to tidying up…

The American Equivalent of 'Which Was Nice'

This week, another little part of my Britishness fell away. The dressing gown from British Home Stores that I’ve had for an indeterminate amount of years (probably at least 15), described by Tammy as “looking a bit ratty when I first met you,” has been replaced with a brand new gown. From L.L. Bean. You honestly can’t get more “middle class liberal American dad” than that. I might as well just tear up my British passport.¹

One thing I didn’t mention about Thanksgiving last week is that it is also Lucidwork’s busiest time of the year. We power the search behind some surprising big brands, and my goodness, did we facilitate a lot of sales over the sale period. I probably shouldn’t yet put a figure on it, but we’d be in with a shot at a cabinet position in the next administration if it was all ours. I had somewhat forgotten just how much I like being involved with search — sure it’s not saving the planet, but the idea of actually making the Internet navigable and giving you what you want to find? It ties back to me getting onto the net back in 1997 and finding all the tricks to make Infoseek and AltaVista produce good results…and now I’m doing it behind the scenes²

All this and reconnecting with an old university friend? Not a bad week at all, to be honest…