The Braindump Blog

A friend shares the UK National Careers Service’s job description of an astronaut with me. I’m slightly underwhelmed with the salary to be honest.

“You could work away from home” seems something of an understatement. No WFH for a spaceperson :(

🎶 Listening to Sweet Justice by Tkay Maidza.

Tkay is a Zimbabwean-Australian rapper who recently(ish) released her second full album, 7 years after the first.

This was the first album for a long while that I learned about by virtue of hearing it on the radio, just like it’s the 1990s. Sweet Justice itself is a multi-genre extravaganza, apparently themed on the idea of breaking up with one’s own past, leaving the negative influences behind.

This (taken from some random Discord if I remember correctly) might be a little simplistic in some cases. And perhaps it even plays into the more ludicrous conspiracy theories around the WEF. Nonetheless it remains a constant source of astonishment to me how many big and important problems humanity at least has a good idea of how to solve but seemingly chooses not to.

For the most part I suspect that comes more from us having inadvertently created structures such that we are disincentivised from doing so - especially at the individual level. Rather than, for instance, pure malice.

1 mobile phone gets stolen every 6 minutes in London, back in 2022 at least. That year 90,864 got stolen, almost 250 a day.

To be fair London has a lot of people in it - around 9.5 million at the time - and hence lots of phones available for the taking.

Just when I imagined I couldn’t learn anything new about the often dreadful conditions that many of the people doing some of the most important and oftentimes challenging work imaginable - caring for other people and their needs - are subject to in the UK, I learn that the sector may be increasingly infused with actual slavery.

From The Guardian at the end of last year:

Post-Brexit restrictions on the free movement of workers from the EU have contributed to modern slavery becoming “a feature” of the care sector in England the Care Quality Commission has told MPs.

The Care Quality Commission made 4 referrals about modern slavery in the period of 2021-22, vs a predicted 50 by the end of the most recent year.

Unseen UK, an organisation that runs a modern slavery and exploitation hotline, reported that over 700 care workers called in 2022.

Unseen’s chief executive, Andrew Wallis, says the current approach has led to a rise in “labour abuse and exploitation” and is “a disaster” for many workers. “Very vulnerable people are being cared for by very vulnerable people,” he adds.

The University of Nottingham Rights Lab produced a report in 2022 that detailed what makes the conditions especially of migrant “live-in” care workers - those who stay in their client’s home around-the-clock - particularly vulnerable to these conditions.

1. Employment status, business models, and the role of intermediaries
2. Information asymmetry between care workers and intermediaries
3. The emotionally and physically intensive nature of live-in care work, blurring of boundaries between work and private life
4. Barriers to exercising rights at work: sick leave, time off, redundancy/notice, health and safety at work
5. Individual risk and resilience factors

This isn’t the only driver by a long margin, but I can’t help but think that any scheme that makes your right to live in a country dependent on you doing whatever your employer demands of you is ripe for abuse. This of course isn’t limited to the care sector.

TIL: Ireland’s Dublin Airport holds an annual “Blessing of the Planes” ceremony.

Once a year, ever since 1947, a priest works their way through the airport giving the planes a “festive blessing from God”.

From CNN:

…[Father] Doyle was shown carrying a chalice of holy water onto the airfield, accompanied by another priest, as well as airport police.

As the job got busier though - more planes = more blessings - some shortcuts have had to be made. It got moved to Christmas day, when no flights take place (meaning some staff have to go to work that day), and it’s changed from 1 blessing per plane to a single general blessing.

It’s not restricted to Aer Lingus' Saint-named planes as it once was; even Ryanair gets a lookin.

The annual blessing these days is ecumenical and covers the general fleet.

📚 Finished reading: Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov.

This was a fascinating and, at times, darkly hilarious read. The narrator tells the story of his life after meeting Gaustine, a mysterious intermittently-present therapist who develops a new treatment for Alzheimer' disease.

The treatment involves recreating the environment of their past for the period during which the patient felt most at home and secure, the period their body remembers most clearly irrespective of their state of mind.

It’s very successful, leading to the opening of many such clinics with rooms that replicate the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and so on in perfect detail.

As time goes on though it’s not only patients with Alzheimer’s disease that want to attend these clinics, these ‘time shelters’. People of all kinds are drawn to re-experience their favoured period of the past, a place-in-time that they remember - accurately or not - as being a safe and happy time to live. Anything to take a temporal break from the stress and angst of modern-day life.

The movement expands way beyond the medical. Nostalgia increasingly permeates everything. Radio stations from decades past are re-set up. Newspapers from 30 years ago are reprinted, as though the events 3 decades past are today’s news. Politicians of course see the potential for using this nostalgia to the end of their own electoral gains and get in on the act.

Whole towns from past eras are re-built in something close to their original form. Eventually entire countries have referendums on which decade was their golden one, which perceived era they should legally and culturally return to.

Different countries naturally see different periods as their most glorious days, leading to a set of time rather than location based international alliances. As well as, I suppose, time-travel-adjacent experiences when crossing borders between them.

State sponsored re-enactments of historical events become the norm, although down that route some danger lies.

Just the now-triggering word ‘referendum’ makes it hard not to see some satirical intent regarding a referendum my own country held now 8 years ago where some people consider a good amount of voting preference may have originated from a longing for (semi-mythological) times of yore. A time when Britain ruled the waves, when men were men and women stayed at home, that kind of thing. But the book’s treatment of this theme is done in a way that never grates.

The novel won a Booker Prize last year. I’m not surprised. Embedded within the story is a wonderful mix of philosophy, politics, ethics, history, psychology, sociology and more, although it is never hard to read. It has moments of hilarity, moments of darkness, moments of poignancy. Very recommended.

Computerphile takes us through some of the technical issues found with the Post Office Horizon computer system that led to several sub postmasters' lives being ruined via false accusations of fraud.

It seems that many of them came from the failure of the system to maintain ACID principles.

From Wikipedia:

In computer science, ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) is a set of properties of database transactions intended to guarantee data validity despite errors, power failures, and other mishaps.

The speaker is Professor Steven Murdoch, who also wrote a blog post about this that contains examples of the faults he’s talking about taken from the judgement report of the 2019 legal case of Alan Bates and others vs Post Office Limited.

It’s not only books, music and product listings that are being created, or contaminated, by generative AI content. It’s entire websites in some cases.

This report might be considered ancient given the pace these things move, but nonetheless: back in May 2023 NewsGuard identified almost 50 “news and information sites” whose content was almost entirely written by year-or-more-old generative AI technology. Why? Well, as with everything, it’s driven by the enshittifying business model we’ve settled on for much of the internet. It’s always the business model.

Artificial intelligence tools are now being used to populate so-called content farms, referring to low-quality websites around the world that churn out vast amounts of clickbait articles to optimize advertising revenue, NewsGuard found.

This motivation is nothing new. We’ve all become all too familiar with click-bait content farms over the past few years. It’s just that traditionally they tended to have at least some involvement of a human. Generative AI’s tendency to create fluent bullshit seems almost perfectly aimed at automating those poor folks' jobs, for better or worse.

And how were NewsGuard so confident about the origin of the content on those sites? Well, at least in part, it comes from the now increasingly ubiquitous technique of of looking for ChatGPT-style error messages that made all the way through the “publication process”, if that’s not too grand a word for the resulting low-effort word spew

The articles themselves often give away the fact that they were AI produced. For example, dozens of articles on BestBudgetUSA.com contain phrases of the kind often produced by generative AI in response to prompts such as, “I am not capable of producing 1500 words… However, I can provide you with a summary of the article,” which it then does, followed by a link to the original CNN report.

They provide a screenshot of an absolutely perfect example. “The News Network” had an article with this curious headline at one point in time.

There were also some rather more subtle clues as to the AI source in some cases, their article goes into more detail.

That was then. More recetnly they’ve assembled a newer list of 634 AI-generated sites that each meet all of these criteria:

• There is clear evidence that a substantial portion of the site’s content is produced by AI.
• …there is strong evidence that the content is being published without significant human oversight…
• The site is presented in a way that an average reader could assume that its content is produced by human writers or journalists…
• The site does not clearly disclose that its content is produced by AI.

In evaluating this we should remember that by virtue of their underlying method - largely involving searching for common large language model error messages that accidentally made it to publication - they’re only going to find the least careful, most egregious examples of this kind of exploitation. For every entry on lists like these, I imagine there are several others not yet enumerated, even without counting the semi-AI semi-human content farms that are deliberately excluded here.

Very lazy AI content has already contaminated our supply of books and music. Now two great forces of enshittification - dubious use of generative AI and Amazon - have collided to produce bizarre listings for physical products.

How do we know this for sure? Well, aside from using common sense, The Verge searched Amazon for the phrase “OpenAI policy” and found a whole bunch of products for sale whose name was little more than a ChatGPT-style apology. Presumably no human - or at least no human who reads English - was all that involved in creating the listing. Some of the product photos don’t look exactly real either.

This was one of my favourites:

The “About this item” isn’t very human either. I’m so excited at being able to buy something to complete [task 1], [task 2] and [task 3] when I didn’t know that even $2000 chairs were used for more than one common task.

Amazon seems to have taken down most of the offending articles now, but it was fun of a kind while it lasted.

One of the conspiracy-minded folks' least favourite organisations, the World Economic Forum, has released its annual report on their perceived biggest “global risks” to the world.

What is a global risk?

“Global risk” is defined as the possibility of the occurrence of an event or condition which, if it occurs, would negatively impact a significant proportion of global GDP, population or natural resources.

They believe that misinformation and disinformation is the biggest risk in the short term.

Emerging as the most severe global risk anticipated over the next two years, foreign and domestic actors alike will leverage misinformation and disinformation to further widen societal and political divides

There are certainly a lot of elections coming up for us to worry about being affected by this kind of stuff. And many other domains in which incorrect or misleading information will make the world a much worse place to live in.

In the long term, it’s mostly environmental risks that they believe will cause the most severe risks. Number 1 is extreme weather, which has already devastated quite some lives.

Here’s the ranking from their report:

At least 64 countries, plus the EU, are due to hold elections this year. Between them, they represent about 49% of the world’s population in theory. More than 2 billion voters could prospectively head to the polls.

Although the presence of an election doesn’t necessarily imply that the contest will be free and fair. It does seem like a reasonably safe bet for instance that Vladimir Putin will win in Russia irrespective of what happens between now and then. The North Korean outcome also doesn’t feel all that hard to predict.

Alongside Russia, Ukraine is also due a presidential election, although whether it actually will happen given the state of war is yet to be settled.

Time assembled a list of major elections due in 2024, alongside a map highlighting where they are on the globe.

Here’s the basic list, ordered by the population of the country concerned, most to least:

• India
• European Union (for the European Parliament)
• USA
• Indonesia
• Pakistan
• Bangladesh
• Russia
• Mexico
• Iran
• UK
• South Africa
• South Korea
• Algeria
• Ukraine
• Uzbekistan
• Ghana
• Mozambique
• Madagascar
• Venezuela
• North Korea
• Taiwan
• Syria
• Mali
• Sri Lanka
• Romania
• Chad
• Senegal
• Cambodia
• Rwanda
• Tunisia
• Belgium
• Dominican Republic
• Jordan
• South Sudan
• Czech Republic
• Azerbaijan
• Portugal
• Belarus
• Togo
• Austria
• El Salvador
• Slovakia
• Finland
• Mauritania
• Panama
• Croatia
• Georgia
• Mongolia
• Uruguay
• Republic of Moldova
• Lithuania
• Botswana
• Namibia
• Guinea Bissau
• North Macedonia
• Mauritius
• Comoros
• Bhutan
• Solomon Islands
• Maldives
• Iceland
• Kiribati
• San Marino
• Palau
• Tuvalu

📺 Started the mammoth mission of watching all available ‘classic’ Doctor Who episodes, 1963-1996. The BBC has made them available to anyone with a British TV license on iPlayer.

You too can enter the “Whoinverse” here to see tons of episodes old and new, spinoffs, documentaries, all that good stuff.

📺 Watched Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

I’m one of the nearly 15 million folk so far who have tuned into this surprisingly impactful drama-based-on-fact about the battle between ex sub-post-master Mr Bates and his compatriots against the once-respectable British Post Office.

It reveals the ongoing story of what’s now considered to be one of Britain’s worst miscarriages of justice.

Many years ago, in 1999, the Post Office brought in a new computer system called Horizon that it insisted the people who managed each branch of the post office - typically self-employed franchise partners known as sub-postmasters - use to do their accounting, stocktaking, reconciliation and other such financial type stuff. It was developed by a private company, ICL Pathway, who was owned by Fujitsu. Some version of Horizon is still in use today, although I hope it’s not quite the same version for reasons that will become obvious.

For at least some post office branch managers, the day’s takings would frequently fail to reconcile. The computer would tell the person in charge of the branch, the sub post-master, that they appear to have less money on hand than they should do. Their contract stated that they had to make up any shortfall, so Post Office HQ would insist that they pay back the difference out of their own pocket.

The discrepancies could amount to thousands of pounds a day, and so some of the post-masters were understandably reluctant to do so. Many could not even if they wanted to - these are not typically particularly rich people. Some insisted that the computer must be wrong, that there must be bugs in the system. There’s an example of a person who called the helpdesk 90 times and but no useful help was provided.

But when these folk complained about the obvious issues with the computer system they were told that this isn’t possible, the computer is always right and they are always wrong. And besides, they’re the only one who is reporting these problems and no-one other than them has access to the system so it’s obviously something they’re doing. The “something” could include theft.

Both of these claims naturally turned out to be overt lies, although the sub post masters had no way to know that at the time.

And so the Post Office, which has special prosecution powers, started charging them with theft, false accounting and other such charges. All in all, they spent 16 years charging roughly 1 of their formerly respected employees a week, leading to 700 prosecutions. Nearly 300 other sub post masters were prosecuted by other bodies for similar crimes.

Some of these prosecutions resulted in the person accused going to prison. Others were financially or emotionally ruined. They lost their income and life savings. Their communities became distrustful of them. Stress, health issues, family breakdowns occurred. Some plead guilty for lesser offences, taking the offered plea bargain even though they knew they were entirely innocent, too terrified to risk being found guilty of a more serious offence. In a few unbelivably tragic cases the accused postmasters took their own lives.

Rather than hundreds of employees suddenly deciding to become criminals, it it of course turned out that the Horizon computer system did have issues. Worst yet, the Post Office lied about what it knew, disempowering and confusing each of hundreds of complainants in telling them that they were the only one, lying about the capabilities of the system. It went out of its way to not help the post office staff who called the Horizon helpline when the figures didn’t balance, and later to do everything it could to deny the falsely accused, sometimes falsely imprisoned, victims the information they’d need to prove their innocence. Sometimes they explicitly lied to the legal authorities.

The general story has been known to some extent for a while. Concerns were raised by MPs on behalf of their constituents in 2012, more than 10 years ago. The group “Justice for Sub-postmasters Alliance” was set up 3 years before that to sue the Post Office over his issue. In fact Alan Bates, the titular hero of this documentary, first wrote to his Post Office bosses to raise concerns over Horizon fully 24 years ago, in 2000.

To be honest, without looking into it very much I’d foolishly assumed it was a classic story of institutional incompetence and bad technology, of simply trusting the machine too much and having inadequate processes to set things straight. But this documentary strongly suggests that there was far more than that going on. There was deliberate attempts to mislead and victimise the sub postmasters, to smear their names, to lie to them, in order to protect - what? - money? The good name of the Post Office? The ability of the former Post Office CEO to be given the great honour a CBE - becoming a “Commander of the Order of the British Empire” - back in 2019 for “Services to the Post Office”? But whatever it was, it was at the expense of hundreds of innocent people’s lives and wellbeing.

Whilst there has been a rather low-key government enquiry into this matter going on since 2020, it’s only been in very recent times, since this documentary highlighted the injustice so vividly, that the government seems to have made it an actual priority to make some effort to clear the names of and compensate the victims of this corporate malfeasance.

It’s too late for the 59 who already died of course. And it’s hard to know exactly what compensation could make up for the destruction this has caused to many of their lives in the. But this is no excuse for not doing our best to compensate the victims and hold the perpetrators to account.

Trump team argues assassination of rivals is covered by presidential immunity

Not the most reassuring headline I’ve ever seen.

Adam Grant writes about empathic stress. This is the numbness that can manifest when you feel empathy for people who are in obvious distress whilst simultaneously feeling that there’s nothing you can do to help them.

There’s potentially a lot of that going around at the moment; the ongoing wars, the ongoing pandemic, the ongoing environmental destruction, the other ongoing catastrophes of everyday life.

It might look to an observer like the emapthicaly stressed person just don’t care - after all they’re not ‘doing’ anything. But it’s a perfectly normal reaction when the pain of real empathy meets the frustration of being unable to help.

Giving to charity feels like a drop in the ocean. Posting on social media is a hornet’s nest. Having concluded that nothing they do will make a difference, they start to become indifferent.

This phenomenon is one of the potential darker sides of empathy, a human ability that on the surface seems like it should be wholly positive (although many researchers disagree that it is, for a variety of reasons). But when empathy can’t result in meaningful action it can end up as distress, pain, depression.

Instead, Grant suggests we focus on compassion over empathy. What’s the difference?

Empathy absorbs others' emotions as your own: “I’m hurting for you.” Compassion focuses your action on their emotions: “I see that you’re hurting, and I’m here for you.”

Don’t try to feel other people’s pain, but rather overtly notice that their pain exists and offer some sort of comfort.

The comfort doesn’t need to be something that solves the problem, that stops the cause of the pain. It can just be an acknowledgment that it exists.

The most basic form of compassion is not assuaging distress but acknowledging it. When we can’t make people feel better, we can still make a difference by making them feel seen.

Exercising compassion as opposed to empathy, particularly in the face of helplessness is thought to be generally healthier for you - you might even come away feeling like you did something good - and better for the person in pain.

Elsewhere, I wrote about the ongoing battle between between human creators and AI trainers.

On the verge of entering ‘Unbelievable’ - a magic show in the West End.

It was written by Derren Brown but, as is made exceptionally clear throughout the booking process, is not performed by him. Rather a group of 7 magician / musicians / performers are here to do the baffling.

I recently had the pleasure of going to the “Power Up” exhibition in London’s Science Museum with a friend with whom I share a serious history of Mario Karting and Partying.

Power Up is a celebration of all things video-gaming. Or a very fully featured arcade dedicated to (mostly) home gaming systems.

They’ve got their hands on 160 consoles and PCs from over the past fifty years, video gaming of course being still a fairly young artform.

Each of them is set up with a pre-ordained game and sufficient controllers to relieve one’s youthful gaming experiences, no matter when in calendar time your youth actually was.

This was the first time I ever got to play something akin to the original version of Pong - Atari’s first video game and one of the earliest in general, having been first released in 1972.

The version on offer here was on the no-longer famous Binatone TV Master 4 Plus 2 console from 1977. It has very sensitive weird dial-like controllers which move the bats up and down as you play a real basic but extremely difficult (for me) game of virtual tennis or one of the other 6 - yes six! - modes.

Fortunately the games were pre-loaded so one doesn’t have to sit through 15 minutes of screeching tape noise in order to get to playing Fantasy World Dizzy, here on 1984’s Amstrad CPC 464, complete with cassette tape drive. This, fellow kids, was from the era before 99p instant gratification app stores were a thing.

` Some of the more iconic franchises - Sonic, Mario - had their own sections allowing you to experience the character in question over time. Including surely one of the world’s most perfect platformers ever, Super Mario World.

Note though that for the various versions of Mario Kart - playing the Gamecube’s Double Dash was our personal highlight - you head to the multiplayer section.

For the slightly more modern, more hardcore, gamer with better reflexes than I can ever hope to have there’s an ongoing 16 player Halo tournament. Wii bowling and one of the dance like no-one’s watching style games are also available for those who prefer their action more physical. A big bank of PC games are also on show for those who prefer the non-console life, although I didn’t really understand how to play most of them.

The last vestiges of Christmas lights, outside Kings Cross station, London.

I recently visited the final residence of Sigmund Freud - the extraordinarily famous father of psychoanalysis, he of the id, ego and super-ego. It’s now the Freud Museum.

Freud believed that human behaviour is largely determined by unconscious motivations that originate in one’s childhood. In particularly those that developed as a result of encounters with love, loss, sexuality or death. He developed a talking therapy that aimed to help patients understand and deal with any adverse impact that their resultant unconscious was having on their lives.

Freud’s theories paint a picture of human beings as internally conflicted, governed by unruly instinctual impulses rather than by reason, and generally lacking self-knowledge.

Famously, patients would lie on a couch whilst undergoing their analysis. The couch itself can be still be seen in the museum.

His final home was in 20 Maresfield Gardens, London.

Until 1938 he lived and practiced his profession in Austria. But when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938 he found himself in grave danger. Being both Jewish and a radical thinker he was surely destined for a deadly fate had he not managed to successfully seek refuge in the UK.

I saw the scientific society I had founded dissolved, our institutions destroyed, our printing press taken over by the invaders, the books I had published confiscated or reduced to pulp, and my children expelled from their professions.

Unfortunately his sisters were not so lucky in terms of getting out, with each of them succumbing to death in Nazi concentration camps.

But Sigmund made it to England in 1938. He lived only about one year more, dying in 1939. One of his daughters, Anna Freud, herself a practitioner of psychoanalysis who went on to develop the field of psychoanalytic child psychology, then resided there until her death in 1982.

It was Anna that set in motion the conversion of their last residence into a public museum, wherein now you can visit both the Freuds' treatment rooms in something akin to their original glory. Sigmund’s love of antiquity is apparent with his various collections dotted around his office.

He appears to have had a particular interest with the Acropolis of Athens.

I always find it interesting to understand the thresholds involved in being in the various economic strata of UK residents.

This 2019 analysis from the IFS that looks at the top 1% of British income tax payers finds that:

• To be included you’d have needed a taxable income of £160k or more.
• Given a substantial proportion of UK adults don’t pay any income tax - 43% - the threshold would be £120k if you included them.
• The top 1% are disproportionately male, middle-aged and based in London.
• People enter and exit the top 1% regularly. A quarter of those who are in the top 1% of income tax payers one year are not there in the next.
• That fluidity means that 3.4% of all people born in 1963 were in the top 1% sometime between 2000 and 2016.

It must be said that given that the analysis using income tax records it probably misses out some of the wealthiest folk. Anyone who has wealth or sources of income not subject to income tax wouldn’t be included. As would anyone who should be paying their income tax either in principle or in fact but has used the fleet of well-paid financial advisors available to the super-rich to evade their responsibilities for doing so.

Also the analysis is from 2019, so it seems very likely given the turbulent years between then and now that some of the numbers would have shifted since then.

From CNBC:

Google is considering a substantial workforce reduction, potentially affecting up to 30,000 employees, as part of a strategic move to integrate AI into various aspects of its business processes.

Mostly affecting the folk who work in ad sales according to the rumours, so it’s not exactly the case that the specific folk who created these systems have been replaced by them (in fact demand for AI gurus is sky-high, as are the salaries in some cases) - but it doesn’t seem impossible that that day will come.

An incredible 1 in 50 Londoners are homeless - and that’s a figure from August last year so I wouldn’t be amazed if it had increased.

It was also an underestimate of the true problem at the time as the figure included only the roughly 170k people for whom their council had managed to place them into some kind of emergency accommodation. So anyone who is sleeping rough or on their friend’s couch isn’t counted.

Lots of them are children. On average it’d be like one child in every school classroom is homeless.

The driving factors are of course economic.

Councils, always dramatically underfunded in terms of what’s needed to resolve this and so many other issues, are constantly breaking their legal obligations in this sphere. Most of them appear to feel that they have no other option.

Following the catastrophic sell-off of public housing in recent decades, lower income folk - and indeed local authorities - have been increasingly reliant on the private rental market. But this kind of housing supply in London has dropped dramatically. There’s been a 41% reduction in the number of properties available for rent since the Covid-19 pandemic.

At the same time, Local Housing Allowance has been frozen since 2020. Rents have continued to increase - as have so many other prices as part of the current cost of living crisis. The LHA was previously sufficient to allow someone to rent the lowest cost 30% of rentals on the market. Last year a study showed that it’d only cover the cheapest 2.3% of London listings on Rightmove. This really doesn’t work out well when across the UK even in 2022 over 10% of private renters were reliant on LHA.

All this is of course we even consider the condition and suitability of some of this housing.

My most listened to albums, 2023.

(at least from the times when I remembered to use apps that can scrobble to last.fm)