Desert island albums #5: Pink Floyd — Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

Only eight and a half years after the previous entry in the series …

As a quick survey of the present top ten singles will show, popular music is hardly an area where the cream reliably rises to the top. The Allmusic biography of the Beatles astutely observes that “they were among the few artists of any discipline that were simultaneously the best at what they did and the most popular at what they did.” It’s distressingly rare that those two things coincide. Still, there are times when the world gets it emphatically right. Even if you don’t particularly like disco music, there’s no denying that Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the world’s best-selling album, was sensationally well put together. It’s hard to imagine that style of music being done any better.

A beautiful and catastrophic AI failure

I am very sceptical about the current trend of “generative AI” and pretending that they represent anything like intelligence. (Previous posts: one, two, three, four, five, six.)

But recently I stumbled across a mistake so lovely that I wanted to immortalize it here. It’s on Quora, a Q&A website where people ask questions and other people answer them. In this case, someone asked:

What does “Indeed much more rational, but rather less like a ball” mean?

Free markets

A lot of people seem to be tricked by the term “free market” into thinking it means “a market free from regulation”.

But any unregulated market stops being free very quickly due to monopolies and other inefficiencies. Billionaires and megacorps love this misunderstanding, because freedom from regulation allows them to increase their wealth through various kinds of market failure.

Image from here.

But really, a “free market” means a market where everyone is free to compete on a level playing fields. And the only way to have a free market that remains free is to regulate it.

Some of my best work

I’m especially happy with the charring on the crust of this one.

 

The disturbing experience of Go Set A Watchman

Go Set a Watchman is the most interesting book I’ve read in a long time, but not entirely for good reasons. For anyone not up to speed this is the “sequel” to Harper Lee’s only prior novel, the absolute classic To Kill a Mockingbird, but it quickly became apparent after it was published that this is in fact the first submitted draft of the book that became Mockingbird, before editor Tay Hohoff spent two years with Lee drastically reworking it into the form we all know and love. Among the giveaway clues are that a few passages appear in identical form in the two books — or, to put it another way, a few passages from Watchman survived the editorial process and made it into Mockingbird intact.

What I’ve been reading lately, part 51

Eric and Ernie — Morecambe and Wise

A biography of the comic duo, who will be familiar to anyone who grew up in Britain in the 1970s. It’s written by the principals themselves, and chronicles their earliest days as would-be entertainers, how they met up at a talent show, the failure of their first TV show and their subsequent successes. I found this both fascinating and endearing.

One common thread in many biographies and autobiographies is that we see a lot of the subject’s early struggle, then seem to pass straight into the phase of greatest success, without ever quite understanding how the transition happened. The key moments, and even the years in which they happened, seem to get short shrift, so that the subject appears, as if by magic, in its Ultimate Form. That is true of Eric and Ernie, to its detriment.

Categorical logging

Somehow — I am guessing the pervasive influence of log4j may be at the root of it — we find ourselves in 2024 with a culture of logging that has a strictly linear sequence of six increasingly verbose levels: FATAL, ERROR, WARN, INFO, DEBUG, TRACE. Every time your program logs something, it specifies a level — for example, logger.info(“starting service”) — and that message is included in the logs whenever the logging level is set to WARN or higher.

What I’ve been reading lately, part 50

Hallowe’en Party — Agatha Christie

I’ve got so far behind with these posts that I can’t remember much at all about this book. I do know that a girl is murdered at the halowe’en party by being drowned in the apple-bobbing tub while lots of other people are in the next room, but that’s about it.

What I can tell you is that I enjoyed it as I was reading it, without ever for a moment thinking it was actually good.

Children of Men (2006) — and — what is a great film?

I’ve been laid low with Covid for the last few days. (I hate it. The isolation from my family is the worst part at this point. But at least the isolation seems to be working.) It’s left me mentally wiped out and unable to do more than the very slightest bits of work, so I’ve spent most of the time reading and watching TV and films. Today I watched the 2006 film version of P. D. James’s novel Children of Men.

Every dependency is a vulnerability

Not so long ago, we all got comfortable with the idea that great chunks of the programs we were writing should be implemented by libraries pulled in from third parties — using CPAN, Maven, NPM or what have you. It was the reuse we’d always dreamed of. Happy times, right?

Not so much, I now think.