Tales from the Bitface

Fascinating piece about how George Eliot seemingly wrote about AI. I disagree with this assertion, though:

Put simply: intelligence is not the same as consciousness.

…

But, for the avoidance of doubt, they are not the same thing. My own (simplified) view is that intelligence is the ability to achieve goals and consciousness is the phenomenon through which we experience qualia …

To my mind and understanding of the terms, there’s no intelligence without consciousness.

Having the first Creme Egg of the year with my coffee. Actually probably the first I’ve had in several years.

A much-delayed summary of last year.

I read 26 books in 2024. One less than in 2023, but one every two weeks on average.

But only 98 posts, which is down on the year before. Here’s the monthly breakdown:

Light blogging year, then, but I’ve written quite a lot of fiction, so there’s that. To say nothing of things like the currently-1500-word essay on my thoughts and feelings about AI, wherein I try to understand those things. That might appear here one day. I hope so.

I read about this some four years ago on Jack Deighton’s blog. It sounded interesting enough that I tried to order it via Pages of Hackney. But they told me it was out of print.

I couldn’t even find it on Amazon; no Kindle version. So I left it.

Until just recently, when I had cause to by some second-hand books from World of Books. Something made me think of this one. Quick search, and there it was.

And it’s even weirder and more fun than I imagined from reading Jack’s review. It’s a series of short stories, with some interconnections, about various classical composers (plus some philosophers). But it’s all deeply surreal. You’ll find Beethoven living in present-day Edinburgh, for example.

What’s it all for? I don’t really know. But they’re great little vignettes, easily digestible, and lots of fun.

Artificial Intelligence is facing a crisis: humans are consuming far too many precious resources that AI needs to thrive. Every sip of water you take and every light you turn on could be sustaining the AI systems that uphold your digital conveniences.

Maybe not the thing that bothers me most about AI, but something that does bother me.

I haven’t really picked up on blogging properly since this year started. I didn’t, for example, write a summary post about last year’s entries, as I generally do. I’m also behind on books updates. The other day’s post was about a book I finished very early in January.

In fact, I’ve been kind of off the whole thing since November or so. Maybe earlier, but the USA’s apocalyptically stupid choice of head of state was the anti-icing on the un-cake of my feelings about the world in general.

I feel like I might be coming out of that downturn now. And strangely, I think I’ve got my new blog theme to thank for it. In part, anyway.

It seems daft, but just freshening the place up can make a difference, you know? So thanks once again to @Mtt, or Matt Langford, for the lovely Bayou Theme.

And we’ll see if things pick up a bit, here on the Bitface.

I got this by Agatha Christie for Christmas and started straight after Conclave, so technically last year. But I didn’t finish it till the new year, so 2025 it is.

Another great one from Christie, with a killer twist. Poirot has retired and is living in the country. But that kind of character never really gets to retire, do they?

Have switched my blog to the Bayou Theme by Matt Langford, @Mtt. Liking the look. I’ll probably give it a few tweaks, but looking good so far.

This is a glorious film. A dramatised version of Bob Dylan's early years on the New York folk scene and ascent into fame.

He visits Woody Guthrie in hospital, where Pete Seeger just happens to be visiting too. Seeger takes Dylan under his wing, encouraging him to focus on folk music.

Clearly some liberties have been taken with the details of events, but it's all in service of the story.

Timothée Chalamet gives an incredible performance as Dylan, and Monica Barbaro is luminous as Joan Baez. Their voices work beautifully together when they harmonise, and it's notable that both actors did all their singling vocals.

We see moments of the next few years, culminating in Dylan's famous appearance with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival.

For a film set in the sixties, it's surprisingly pure. Not just in the sense of Seeger and the other folk purists on the Newport organising committee. There's hardly any suggestion of sex, and no drugs at all.

No drugs. In the sixties. Unless you count cigarettes (of which there are a lot) and alcohol (most of which Johnny Cash, played by Boyd Holbrook, has already consumed). There are scenes where Dylan, at least, is clearly meant to be stoned, but no consumption.

I think that says something about our times, rather than the time of the movie, but I'm not sure what.

Will you enjoy this if you're not already a fan, and/or know some of the story? Probably not as much as I did, but see it for the beautifully-realised exteriors and interiors of old New York, for the performances, and of course, for the music.

I want to go to a singalong showing now.

This morning I read the whole of the Vulture article about Neil Gaiman. That link’s to an archived copy, because someone said on Facebook that the original has had the references to Scientology removed because of legal threats. And also it’s paywalled.

It’s so depressing that a man who seemed so decent, so generally a positive force in the world, can turn out to have been an abuser all these year. Allegedly, I suppose I must say.

You know, Paul Cornell included Gaiman as a character in one of his Shadow Police stories, The Severed Streets. If I remember the ‘Neil Gaiman’ character was a villain. We took it as fun at the time; but I wonder if Cornell had an inkling that he wasn’t the nice guy he seemed.

In other shitty-men news, Matt Mullenweg has been blowing up most of the good feeling people have about WordPress over the last few months. I’m glad I moved my site off it a few years ago. But now he’s attacked a woman who used to work on WordPress but hasn’t for years. For no very obvious reason, it seems.

Just being shitty.

Surprisingly funny in places, a film about race in America in the sixties. Still relevant today, in some circles at least, I'd imagine.

Highly enjoyable, even if the point is extremely heavy-handed at times.

After my recent viewing of the film based on this, my daughter got me the book for Christmas.

It’s surprising how compelling a book can be when you know exactly what’s going to happen, and it’s about something that you wouldn’t normally give a toss about. Though on the latter, I suppose the boy can leave the church, but it always leaves its mark, or something.

Anyway, it turns out this Harris guy can really write. Who’d’ve thought?

I note with interest that the ‘why this story, why now’ question that I mentioned when writing about he film, never even crossed my mind while reading this. I approach a book with a different set of expectations from how I do a film, maybe.

Finished reading several weeks ago, in fact. I’m way behind with the change of year.

Anyway, this is an odd little book. I stress the ‘little’ because it’s very short. We’re in Peru. An ancient rope bridge, of Inca origin, collapses one day, killing the five people who were crossing it. A priest, Brother Juniper, witnesses the event and decides to use it to prove God has a plan for humans.

The narrator, however, tells us that Juniper’s eventual vast book on the subject was derided, destroyed, and in any case incomplete. The narrator knows things about the people that Juniper never learned. How the narrator knows these things is never stated — we might assume it’s because the narrator is also the author, though that’s rarely a safe assumption.

That’s the start. The rest of the book consists of the stories of the victims and how they came to be there on that day.

It’s good. Won the Pulitzer.

Happy New Year, everyone. 2025 starts with London’s fireworks, and then, surprisingly, The Boomtown Rats on Hootenany.

Short stories by Ken 📚. I mentioned this in my Nineteen Eighty-Four post, since the first and last stories are inspired by Orwell’s novel. The last being the title story.

Both they, and the others, are very good. Ken’s usual concerns are here, of course: the future, politics, Scotland, and more.

Also the cover and internal illustrations are by Fangorn. Highly recommended.

When I was a kid, brought up in the Roman Catholic Church, my Mum taught me that, when a pope dies, all the cardinals get together to choose a new one. God guides them so they vote for who He has chosen, and it has to be unanimous.

Whether or not that unanimity requirement was ever really true, I can't say. But that's certainly not how it happens in this film. I imagine this tale is closer to the reality, humans being political beings with preferences and schemes. And God not existing, of course. Or, if 'He' does, certainly not taking that kind of hand in human events.

I enjoyed this story of the events after an unnamed, imaginary pope's death. It's well acted and beautifully shot. It does have one or two moments that tend to the over-theatrical, let's say.

But I have to wonder why the filmmakers chose to tell it, and why now. It's an adaptation of Robert Harris's novel from 2016, and could ask the same question of him: why that story, whey then?

And I guess you tell the story you want to tell, and why not? If other people enjoy it, or get something from it, that's all that matters, really.

I laugh gently at my past self, musing that this volume, based on its title, might have a less bleak universe-view.

Reader, it does not.

In fact, that’s the thing I liked least about this whole trilogy, the dark view of the universe, of sentience. The idea that every species that develops intelligence and advances to the point of thinking about space travel and the idea of possibly communicating with other intelligent species; that they would all have a xenocidal¹ instinct. Have it, and routinely, casually act on it, by wiping out the star systems of other species they detect.

I’m not saying it couldn’t be so. As one explanation for the Fermi paradox it’s exactly that: one explanation. But it’s just too fuckin bleak for my tastes.

Otherwise, this story, and the trilogy as a whole, is jam-packed with ideas, stuff about relativity, higher and lower dimensions, all sorts of good hard-SF stuff. The characters are kind of blank, undeveloped: I don’t think they’ll be sticking in my memory. But I enjoyed it overall.

Apart from when I was annoyed/disturbed/upset by the dark forest idea.

Your central idea: I do not like it.

Great screwball comedy. Lots of fun. Don't know why the poster is in colour when it's a black & white film.

Daft film about con men. I think I saw it back when it came out, but didn't really remember it.

I'm a week or so behind with posting this.

Currently reading (and relatively close to finishing): Death’s End by Cixin Liu 📚