Month: December 2024

“There are also people sniffily suggesting that, because there’s no public demand for such a move it is, ipso facto, pointless – as if the only reason to do anything is to attempt to plump the polls now, and that doing anything that might be termed “governing” is for wimps. Boris Johnson may have left office two years ago, but Johnsonism, the belief that governing is entirely a matter of chasing headlines and shaping a message rather than the boring, messy issues of actually running a country, still hangs over our politics like a bad smell”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/my-much-anticipated-2024-books-of

“Patriotic middle class Canadians often believe their country is good to the extent it functions as a stable, safe, bourgeois utopia, in which life’s most important bills are paid by someone else (healthcare, retirement) while everything else (real estate, food, gasoline, etc.) is cheap and abundant. There is no gun violence or endemic poverty, and if that means the citizenry are too complacent and risk-adverse to produce an Elon Musk, well, that’s a fair trade”

https://jjmccullough.substack.com/p/is-trudeau-responsible-for-declining

“This guy just won power for Labour for the first time in nearly 20 years. He ruined the Conservative party, reducing it to a rump of 121 seats. It is, by any measure, one of the single most impressive electoral accomplishments of our lifetime. There is no logical option but to acknowledge him as politician of the year. And yet the coverage of Starmer is sullen, grudging, condescending and vitriolic. Never has someone accomplished so much while being treated as if they’d achieved so little”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/the-complete-dunt-awards-2024

“1640. The protestants who dominate Scotland’s parliament pass a law making celebrating Christmas illegal; England follows five years later. The ban is short-lived south of the border – once Charles II is restored to the throne in 1660 it’s party on, really – but Christmas remains verboten in Scotland rather longer, and does not officially become a public holiday until (this is mind blowing) 1958. This is why the Scots are so big on New Year”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/its-chrissssssssstmaaaaaaaas

“I wrote that the man’s expression “simply cannot be defined” but it contained “relief, and bafflement, and newfound innocence, and the first hesitant vulnerable expression of hope”. My main crime here was that this section was overwritten. My lesser crime was that it’s now demonstrably bullshit. Then, because I am a parody of myself, I wrote that his face reflected “the aspirations of centuries of liberal struggle”. It is therefore a shame that he seems to be an Assad loyalist putting on an act.

I can learn several things from this. First, I must never, ever, under any circumstances become a police detective. And second, we really do see what we want to see. We can project, especially in dramatic but changeable circumstances, the things we want to believe, the story of a world we wish to be true. We all have it within us to look a right mug and I have accomplished that here”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/merry-christmas-you-cold-hearted

“One of the tricks used to make transformer neural networks produce more human-sounding output is to introduce a bit of randomness (the “temperature” parameter), so that they select one of the closest few “near neighbour” tokens rather than always glomming onto the single smallest vector distance. Consideration of the function of boilerplate immediately shows why that’s problematic – as well as wasting everyone’s time trying to work out whether a minor change in verbal expression is significant, there’s a constant danger of creating something which actually does have a different effect than the boilerplate and changing contract terms by accident”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/let-boilerplate-be-boilerplate

“To learn to photograph, you learn to think in angles and apertures. To learn to paint, you begin to think in brushstrokes and pigments. And to learn to write fiction, you start to think in sentences, POV, and other aspects of narrative prose. This takes a lot of time. Time studying and time practicing. No, there never are any shortcuts there.

This applies within mediums too. Thinking in fairy tales is different than thinking in hardboiled detective fiction. Thinking in aphorisms is different than thinking in longform essays. So on and so forth. (This is likely why so many artists can excel in one area but struggle in adjacent ones. Short story writers who can’t finish novels. Actors who flop at directing. Etc.)”

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/turning-off-the-tv-in-your-mind

“The industry now is contracting and adapting. I would argue that the changes it is undergoing are changes for the better. I’ve spoken to a lot of movie execs over the last few weeks and not one of them has any interest in trying to set up a $200 million movie at a streamer; they’re all talking in terms of more modestly budgeted movies that might sell tickets at an actual movie theatre. The TV people still think there is a market for drama, but it has shrunk – the ideas need to be better, the budgets need to be significantly lower. And I think we’re slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y moving away from the godawful notion that everything has to be based on something else”

https://developmenthell.substack.com/p/do-the-work