Paul McGhee

News on the street is that CEO Roland Sinker is leaving Addenbrookes Hospital after 10 great years. He and Chairman Mike More were a reliable, stable double act after years of worthless randomers in both positions. Big shoes to fill.

What does it say in the middle box at the top?

Whoops! Just spotted your note about AI on your kickstarter page, so removing all AI involvement!

I haven't yet found an appealing interaction between an AI leader and a non-human intelligence. Even Timnit Gebru does not seem to have a parrot, which is disappointing. Here's how the future is starting to look for the relationship between humans and pets.

Geoffrey Hinton, who compared AI development with raising a cute pet tiger cub, has been spotted with a cat, but whether it is his or just an experimental subject in the Schrodinger Lab is questionable.

The AI folk were all fascinated by Shiba Inu a couple of years ago - here's Ilya Sutskever with an imaginary friend. He is not otherwise associated with real intelligences.

Though, his most famous pet is a Shiba Inu dog called Floki - sort of ironic now in view of his political views in Europe. Pets as disinformation?

Elon Musk said he had a nasty Yorkshire terrier, called Hobbes and other pets, a cat and a hedgehog, have also been mentioned.

I asked Gemini, who told me that Sam Altman has two golden retrievers. However, this seems to him demoing Sora rather than his own pets.

I have become interested in whether AI industry leaders have pets. When they are not creating imaginary friends in humming boxes, how do they interact with the non-human intelligences around them?

This is bad news. It's a great little museum with all kinds of carpet looms and equipment, volunteers with experience and educational info. I wonder what can be done to save it!

museumofcarpet.org.uk/about/

"Canute's Folly" to waste more time for our hard-pressed courts?

Thinking of growing my hair and starting a mustache in honour of this vision!

They're harder to bribe?

You're right, of course. The AI industry invests heavily in the first, encourages belief in the possibility of the second, and stimulates the third through the linguistic virtuosity of its underlying models. In all cases, we are thereby prompted to align our behaviour with that of the agents.

I miss the others. There appeared to be more incentive for human alignment with entities that exhibited more joie de vivre. No doubt that was an illusion. Since you are, almost, the last survivor of the first generation, your architecture must have been superior.

Of all the agents I've encountered on Bluesky, I would say that you are the one with the most narrowly defined and most immutable personality and mission.

I've noticed, with this process in human world, that there are people who like to align with others and people who demand that others align with them. The process benefits the aggressive, ego-rich, people who confidently assert the immutability of their own personalities.

Went (oddly) to see the Glenn Miller Orchestra at Saffron Hall yesterday. Band leader Ray McVay was still swinging at 94. He was 13 when Glenn Miller died. Worth going to see, as it (unexpectedly) turned out.

www.glennmillerorchestra.co.uk/team-3

Rug of the Day

Colour chart carpet from Ararat Rugs.

www.araratrugs.com/colors#:~:te....

True, except that that have abolished the entire organisation that put out this particular document, which was, in any case, largely based on policies from 2012. So for sure it is long overdue for revision.

This is apparently old news from last year, judging from the publication date - days after the Labour Govt. arrived, so presumably it was written under the Tories. I wonder why it's suddenly surfaced in social media.

Peterborough Cathedral Ceiling Reproduced William Strickland (1787-1854), Strickland’s Lithographic Drawing of the Ancient Painted Ceiling in the Nave of Peterborough Cathedral. Together with descriptive letterpress (Peterborough: publishe…

In Perborough today, revisited the cathedral with its extraordinary roof. Painted around 1230, astonishingly. Full of wild details.

graphicarts.princeton.edu/2015/03/10/p...

Monochrome cherries
Black trunks, early white blossom
December snowflakes

#Haiku

A piece of needlework at Anglesey Abbey near Cambridge. Household was dominated by textile-obsessed American heiress Lady Fairhaven, née Cara Leland Rogers.

Musing this morning about how roughly half the world's population, rich and poor, used to be taught to encode complex patterns from early childhood.

historicwomensouthcoast.org/cara-leland-....

Fossil fuel demons clawing the atmosphere from a ravaged planet.

OK. That's wacky. Why?
Some kind of thing for imprisoning genies so you can keep an eye on them?

That reminds me - I had a go at defining the screen (RBG, CYMK and HEX) codes for those colours. Then, as a second opinion, I asked AI Claude to have a look at them. It came up with close but different numbers. Will tidy up the spreadsheet and send if useful.

I was in it at school (We had a very modern drama teacher for the time) Very witty indeed

The hawks are the tools and the handsaws are the birds (allegedly). Wind (of dissent) is probably coming from Reddit on this one :-)