Status-Q

My friend Turi King is perhaps best known for the DNA analysis identifying Richard III's remains when they were found in that Leicester car park. She also hosts the BBC TV series DNA Family Secrets, with Stacy Dooley.

Her recent book, "The Secrets of our DNA", is a very readable way to learn about the history of DNA analysis, what can and can't be done at a crime scene, how many children Thomas Jefferson actually had, and the role DNA analysis played in the recent lives of O.J. Simpson and Angelina Jolie, to name just a few. I say it's readable, though I'm actually listening to the audiobook (which Turi narrates very nicely) on my daily dog-walk.

So I know a lot more about DNA then I did a few weeks ago, but I was still pleasantly surprised by an article John Naughton linked to recently. It explains how you can learn about historical livestock diseases from medieval documents... but perhaps not in the way you'd expect!

Not having watched any live TV for... well, not since the last millennium, probably... we are often a bit slow to catch up on the really good TV series. But this has the advantage that we can binge-watch things that have stood the test of time!

And so it was only this year that we got around to watching Detectorists, which had been recommended by various friends since its 2014 release. And not long after doing so, we watched it again...

Anyone else who is a fan of the series may remember that the main characters would generally meet up at the 'lunch tree' to discuss their finds of the morning. Well, our find of this morning was the tree itself, a short walk from the delightful Suffolk campsite where we had spent the night.

It doesn't take much to make us happy campers!

I appreciate that the proportion of my readership who possess an ePropulsion electric outboard motor maybe rather small, and that my latest YouTube video may therefore have rather, shall we say, niche appeal.

But the rest of you could, if you wanted, watch a couple of minutes to see how pleasant it is pottering up and down the River Great Ouse without the noise of internal combustion!

Spotted at our local Waitrose.

Having entered the frothing, bubbling water of AI very gingerly in the early days, I'm now plunging in on a rather frequent basis! I do, however, take plenty of precautions:

• I never use Google's 'AI Overview'. In fact, I have a browser plugin that carefully stops me seeing it in my search results. Google's Gemini has traditionally been rather poor when compared to the competition, and I'd much rather use a system that I select, that's not paid for by advertising, on the occasions when I actually want to use one.
• For anything vaguely important, I never trust what it tells me without checking it. It can be a great search engine, but always ask for externally-verifiable sources.
• I pay for Claude - the £15+VAT per month subscription - and that has been plenty for my needs so far.
• I don't run anything directly on my machine with general access to my computing world. If it's working on my own code, data or documents, I run it in a container where I allow it only to see the bits of the filesystem it needs, with a firewall which stops it talking to the outside world except to places I explicitly allow. (For those interested, I'm a big fan of using 'dev containers' in VS Code and always run it within one of those. It keeps everything nicely encapsulated.)
• I don't do very 'agentic' things. I ask it to do something and wait for a response. An 'agent', as a crude approximation, is when you say 'Do this and keep working on it or retrying it until you succeed'. In other words, 'Carry on without me'. Though powerful, this can also become very expensive very quickly!

Despite (or perhaps because of) my caution, I've recently been very impressed.

Claude is, of course, now exceedingly good at almost anything software-related, and that's my main use. Paul Dix, the CTO of InfluxData, wrote an article this week entitled "The End of Programming", in which he talks about the relative scale of machine-generated vs human-generated code that we're already seeing, and this is only the start. I'm starting to feel that I retired at almost exactly the right time; that the demand for 'artisanal software' may well become a niche thing soon!

But, going back to Claude, I've also been impressed when asking it non-software things like, "Here's a PDF listing publicly-accessible boat slipways. Could you plot them on a map for me?" Actually, an even more useful variant of this was in the spring, when we were travelling through France in our campervan. We wanted a veterinary practice that could issue an EU pet passport to our UK-resident spaniel, and we had a web page listing a large number of possibilities, along with their addresses, in French towns we had mostly never heard of. The list was unsorted, but plotting the addresses on a map made it easy.

Or, this weekend, having a wife who needs to file tax returns in the US as well as the UK, I've been asking it complex questions about the likely US tax implications of various recent and upcoming financial plans. It's been far more knowledgeable about transatlantic tax than either our UK advisor or our US accountant. What it told us is likely to be painfully expensive, but not nearly as much as if we had gone on for another decade without knowing it. (A hint, if you know any US expats living in the UK who haven't yet discovered this: ISAs are not tax-free for them.)

Imagine the manual labour involved in, for example, taking a dozen UK account statement PDFs, extracting the list of investments bought and sold from each one, working out the gains in each case and how long each investment was held, taking into account that the gains need to be worked out in US dollars using the exchange rate appropriate on the day of each transaction, so a UK loss is sometimes still a taxable US gain... and then summarising all of the results in a nice Excel spreadsheet... You see why I'm a fan.

So my big worry now is this...

Before long, the AI providers are going to have to start charging us what it actually costs them to provide the service. (Well, presumably a fair bit more than that, if they want to make a profit!) I'm making the most of what I can do with Claude now because I suspect that, before too long, my £15/month subscription is going to turn into something I can no longer afford in my retirement. The current offerings are just a loss-making gateway drug to get us hooked.

The alternative, of course, as everywhere else on the Internet, will no doubt be free services which make money from you and your data by including product placements, subtle political biases, or downright advertisements, and by selling your data to others. And because it will cost them a lot more to provide the service than a Gmail, Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp account, so the exploitation of the user -- that's you -- will need to be a lot more profitable...

There are many of you, gentle readers, who are kind enough to allow Status-Q posts to be sent directly to your email inboxes. (There's a link at the top right of the web page, for anyone else interested!)

In the past, this has been done using Mailchimp, but I've had reservations about this for some time, partly because I had very limited control over how parts of the message were formatted, and partly because it required you to hand over your details to a third-party company whose record is not entirely untarnished. (I know at least one reader who unsubscribed because he had concerns about Mailchimp.)

Well, as of today, I'm switching over to a new system, where the outgoing mails come from an instance of the rather good Open Source package ListMonk, which is running on my own server. No doubt there may be some teething troubles, so please bear with me if so, but now I should at least be able to fix them!

I notified all the existing subscribers that this was going to happen, and if this still appears in your inbox... the new system is working!

Well, I didn't get to see the eclipse this evening because dinner was on the table and there was a big tree in the way, but I gather it was much like previous eclipses, of which I've seen a few.

I did do a quick search on my blog in case I'd written about them before, and found a somewhat-related post from 2009, which I had forgotten. I'll re-post it here in tribute to a certain Ms Gaynor Hopkins, better known as Bonnie Tyler...

We've probably all seen the recent news about one AI company accidentally hacking into another AI company, but this is a lovely new, rather more down-to-earth, story from ABC News:

"Andrew asked his personal assistant to book him a spot in one of his gym's coveted morning classes. It was a task he thought was well suited to this particular assistant because the booking form was online and because his assistant was not a person — it was artificial intelligence (AI). 

But Andrew was shocked by what happened next. 

His AI assistant found a way to book the gym class months further in advance than the gym allowed, thanks to a vulnerability it discovered in the booking software.

Then it went further, kicking someone out of the waiting list who was ahead of Andrew — something it was not asked to do. "

Basically, he was running OpenClaw -- a seductive but stupidly risky move in itself -- and it discovered that the booking software had an API which it could use to request an appointment. He was then number four in the queue. He asked if it could get him an earlier slot, and it discovered that the API calls for deleting other people from the queue had no authentication checks... something it could only really discover by trying it out, and so it deleted the person who was first in the queue, and proudly let Andrew know...

It's a good article and worth reading to the end.

One question raised is who would be legally liable for actions taken by an AI on your phone -- something that might well depend on the jurisdiction in which the event took place. Do you know which legal jurisdictions your AI might be working in? Suppose it did something just slightly more important than a gym class booking, like deleting somebody's holiday?

This is a lovely site from the National Library of Scotland. It lets you view two maps side by side, and you get synchronised scrolling, zooming; even your cursor is tracked on both images. You can pick from a range of maps, on either side.

I've spent a lot of (enjoyable) time simultaneously exploring places I know well in a couple of different centuries.

Now, has anybody got a time machine, so we can do the same with Street View?
I (or at least ChatGPT) can provide an appropriate vehicle for inconspicuously doing the photography.

"Democracy", Winston Churchill famously said, "is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." He didn't claim to have originated it, though, and actually, to give more context, he was speaking in the House of Commons on 11th November 1947 when he said:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’

If, like me, you know next to nothing about political theory, and a rather limited amount about American history, then I can recommend Noēma magazine's America at 250 & Beyond, by Nathan Gardels and Nicholas Bergruen.

It's a long, but very readable, piece, explaining how the American political model arose largely from the Founding Fathers' suspicions about democracy. Churchill was in good company.

James Madison, the fourth U.S. president [...] famously declared: "Democracy is the most vile form of government … democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." John Adams, the second American president, wrote: "Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

So they put in place various measures to deal with the problems democracy had exhibited up to that point, especially in the Roman Republic. The article then goes on to discuss whether these safety measures continue to be successful and appropriate, in the modern world. Government by the people has many problems, for example:

The public is not stupid. But busy with work, life and family, it is, by and large, ill-informed. 

One of the advantages of having 50 States with a reasonable amount of independence over their local politics is that some of them can work as petri-dish experiments for systems that might be adopted more widely. At the start of the 20th century, it was Wisconsin:

Theodore Roosevelt remarked that Wisconsin had become “literally a laboratory for wise, experimental legislation aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole.”

The world became more complex as a result of the industrial revolution, and some of Wisconsin's lessons were adopted to help cope with it.

In the 21st century, that laboratory role is perhaps chiefly being performed by California. Might experiments being tried there help fix America's current challenges with democracy?