Friday 29 May, 2026

Popping up I know, I know, it looks as though we are starting an opium farm. But they just popped up in a part of the vegetable bed that was lying fallow with no encouragement from us. Quote of the Day ”People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what’s wrong with it.” Noel Coward I disagree. That’s exactly what’s right about it. Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Dick Gaughan | Ruby Tuesday Link Long Read of the Day The Hidden Cost of Automated Thinking Thinking about the intrinsic inexplicability of LLMs reminded me of this lovely essay by the Harvard legal scholar Jonathan Zittrain about ‘intellectual debt’. And so I dug it out and re-read it. It’s as good as I remembered. And strangely prescient, given that it was published in 2019. Here’s how it opens: Like many medications, the wakefulness drug modafinil, which is marketed under the trade name Provigil, comes with a small, tightly folded paper pamphlet. For the…