POD PEOPLE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 366/ 05 Jan 2025 03:05

It’s January, when columnists feel obliged to reflect on the past year and who am I to refuse, though I’ll try to be different by not saying that 2024 was the year of AI. Instead I’m going to say that for me it was the year of the podcast. That’s partly because I got exposed to AI rather early via Stable Diffusion in 2022, and was bored stiff by the end of 2023. But it’s also because online services that had kept me amused for years, like FaceBook and YouTube, started sliding down a sloppily slippery slope into irrelevance during 2024. Feeds filled up with unwanted sponsored guff and AI-generated fluff, real friends abandoned platforms to be replaced by reels and clickbait that spread like digital cockroaches. In response I began to view more podcasts. 

Just as reels were shrinking down to 30 seconds of inane pointlessness, podcasts started expanding into 3-hour epics. Of course our own excellent PC Pro podcasts, crafted by Barry, Tim, Jon, Lee and Rois, adopt a manageable one hour format, probably the optimum length for normal attention spans, but several other podcasts I consume started at that length then got carried away. Back in 2023 an old friend recommended an article about The Velvet Underground, of special interest to me as the first piece I ever had published was about my experience of working at Max’s in New York in 1970 while they were the house band. This piece was on a podcast called “A History Of Rock Music In 500 Songs” by Andrew Hickey, and it was three hours long… 

Rather to my surprise I listened to all of it and was riveted: Hickey’s taste, depth of research, even his bluff Mancunian accent kept me enthralled. This episode on “White Light/White Heat” was only number 164 of the 500 he plans, in chronological order, but I was hooked and started listening from the beginning – number 1 was on Benny Goodman Sextet’s 1939 “Flying Home”, the first record with electric guitar, played by Charlie Christian. Andrew’s early episodes ran around 30 minutes, soon zoomed past the hour and now are regularly split into two or more parts – as for example The Beatles and Rolling Stones – reaching three hours plus. Thanks to his immense research efforts they remain quite engrossing. He’s now at episode 177 and intends to finish with a song from 1999 (which may take another 25 years at his current delivery rate). 

Another mega-podcast I’ve listened to all through is Paul Cooper’s superb “Fall Of Civilisations” about the rise and fall of empires throughout human history. He has an advantage over Andrew Hickey in that they’re fewer of them, mostly long in the past, and he’s covered most of them in 19 episodes. While not an academic historian, Cooper like Hickey has invested huge research effort and is an excellent presenter, making every episode informative and exciting without resorting to sensationalism. Some online niggling about historical accuracy is only to be expected, but his interpretations are largely convincing, not grossly ideological biassed, and the video version of the podcast (free on YouTube) illustrates his arguments with a well-curated montage of photographic, film and literary evidence on par with the work of Adam Curtis. Turns out that my favourite dead empires were the Nabataean and the Pagan.

Cooper’s series, available in both audio and video, raises the question of when is a podcast actually a vlog, but I don’t much care. Among my favourites is a series of 80+ YouTube interviews with living musicians by the veteran jazz guitarist and producer Rick Beato, which is probably neither or both but his interview with Rick Rubin is priceless.  

Have I ever podcasted myself? Only once because I don’t much like the sound of my own voice. It happened this way: in 1990 my brother-in-law Pip Hills and I took a road trip to Prague in his 1937 Lagonda saloon to witness Václav Havel’s inauguration as president of the Czech Republic. Following this trip another friend, Mark Williams, commissioned us to write about it for his magazine The Classic Motoring Review and subsequently the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, which Pip had founded in 1983, asked to reprint our article in their magazine and accompany it with a podcast. I charily agreed, and since I don’t possess a professional-grade microphone let alone a studio, performed my part over my Chromebook’s mic, using an audio editor called Lexis (my Android replacement for the wonderful Audacity with which I had 20 years of experience). I managed a usable take after two attempts, even including a snatch of music by Smetana at a pivotal point. Judge for yourself from the link below whether a career in voice-overs beckons…

[Dick Pountain’s Prague trip podcast is at https://unfiltered.smws.com/unfiltered-01-2024/smws-adventures-prague]

TRUMP OF DOOM?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 365/ 09 Dec 2024 10:48

I’ve been writing this column for over 30 years, during most of which I’ve deliberately tried to keep my political opinions out of it, apart from the occasional nod and wink about my lack of faith in free-market dogmas. However there are, very occasionally, world-historic events of such importance that to avoid mentioning them would be a sign of ignorance and cowardice. The last such event was the destruction of the World Trade Centre on the 11th of September 2001, and I did permit myself a column on that. Well, to me the re-election of Donald Trump on 6th November 2024 is another such event. 

I have of course been commenting on the rising power of Silicon Valley moguls – corporations like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, HP, Twitter and more – who built the industry whose products we document in this magazine. And during those whole 30 years I was writing under an unspoken assumption that these moguls, having emerged from the post-1960s counterculture, were fundamentally inclined toward ‘liberal’ (in the American sense) values. The two Steves Jobs and Wozniac were once ‘blue box’ phone phreaks, Google was started by two Stanford students in a friend’s garage under the motto ‘Don’t Be Evil’. And in the interest of full disclosure, PC Pro itself was created by a company founded by Felix Dennis, once editor of Oz magazine on which I too worked. 

In order to remain neutral, over the last couple of years I’ve refrained from expressing alarm as it became clearer that my assumption was being overturned. It started to look really shaky when Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, bought Twitter and proceeded to corrupt it from a vital news conduit for journalists of all persuasions into X, a conduit for previously-banned hate speech and pro-Trump propaganda. Then a week or so before the November election Musk came out for Trump and appeared prancing on platforms with him. Meanwhile Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post as well as Amazon, forbade its editors to endorse any candidate, while Mark Zuckerberg announced he’d made a “20-year mistake” and “political miscalculation” (coded language for dumping the Dems). 

What has induced such a hand-brake turn in these billionaires’ opinions? A stock price rally following Trump’s victory increased their collective fortunes by $64 billion overnight but that’s merely chump change: Musk spent $250 million to finance Trump’s election campaign, a sum he earns every 15 minutes. Trump is promising to oppose internet regulation and prosecute journalists who investigate or criticise too much, but I think even those aren’t sufficient bait. These moguls already had everything except power to rule, which is now on offer.

The other promise Trump makes is to dump the Democrats’ (already feeble) policies toward climate change mitigation, turning the USA away from the Paris Agreement and Net Zero. This very well suits a second generation of moguls – the AI barons. My own attitude to AI has changed somewhat over the last few years. I’ve been sceptical of earlier claims that silicon tech will soon produce intelligence equivalent to or greater than humans, a goal now renamed a AGI, but I’m enormously impressed by the strides made in language and perceptual processing (I did after all let ChatGPT write a guest column for me). 

Three AI problems are rapidly becoming visible. The first is that those who really know (as opposed to simply hyping a stock-price bubble) are  as sceptical as I am about whether merely adding more GPU and training data will push GPTs across into AGI: there are already signs of plateauing or even degeneration through data pollution. A second problem is the absurd, even obscene, amount of electrical power consumed by the huge processing arrays that support the current generative AI models. Pronouncements from OpenAI about their future energy needs are beginning to sound frankly deranged – restart old nuclear power stations to marginally improve AI services which are, let’s face it, really only souped up search engines rather than solutions to any physical-world problems. Building a new clean energy infrastructure to mangle words and bitmaps rather than provide clean transport, heating and air-conditioning is actually psychotic. 

The third problem is that if Trump humours his new silicon buddies by employing their current, flawed, AI products to displace huge numbers of human jobs, he’ll likely trigger an economic crisis that leads to social unrest or even breakdown. This magazine is called PC Pro, the first P standing for Personal. We grew out of a 1980s technical revolution that put computing power into the hands of individuals and decentralised power away from the mainframes of state bureaucracies. The ambitions of the AI brigade concentrate processing back into gargantuan data centres that threaten data democracy itself.  

[Dick Pountain is busy gathering followers on BlueSky (@dick-pountain) as an act of Xtermination]

IN PRAISE OF PDF

Dick Pountain /Idealog 364/ 07 Nov 2024 12:58

Besides all that arty stuff I wrote about in last month’s column, I also review books. Not novels, self-help or pop science books but rather heavier subjects like political economy, evolutionary and social psychology. Some of these tomes get big (I mentioned a 1000-page job back in column 315) and note-taking for such a behemoth is hard work. That’s why I was delighted to discover the notation abilities in Kindle ebook editions, which I’ve also mentioned in previous columns. This ability to bookmark pages, search for keywords, add comments and cut-and-paste notes and quotes has become essential to my way of working. 

Regrettably or otherwise, Amazon’s dream that Kindle editions could take over the book business hasn’t materialised, with sales stagnating or declining and, more importantly for me, few of the academic publishers I deal with still producing Kindle editions. However they do all produce PDF versions, used internally for proofreading and so on. Hence when soliciting a review copy I now always ask for a PDF too.

The facilities provided in a PDF are sometimes sparser than those in Kindle Reader, depending on the settings used by the publishers and designers when outputting them, and so the capabilities of PDF readers have become a vital issue to me. I started out as everyone does with Adobe Reader, but found it less and less satisfactory over the years and not just because of Adobe’s grabby pricing structure – it’s become way too slow to navigate and search my biggest books. Also in column 315, I described discovering a far better PDF viewer, the Chrome extension PDF.js which is a free GitHub project built with HTML5. I’d been using this happily for several years until recently a Google change to ChromeOS stopped it working, and my Chromebook is too old to support the OS update now required. Before biting the bullet and buying a new computer I decided to try out all the PDF readers in the Playstore.

What a horror-show that turned out to be. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of them nearly all crap. It appears every wannabe Android developer from Lapland to New Zealand writes one as his apprentice piece, then bungs it online to reap 2-star reviews. All assume you’re using a phone rather than a Chromebook, all offer their own wretched file management, and few can see external USB drives at all, so I soon became Olympically fast at the ’install-swear-uninstall’ cycle. Scouring the forums yielded recommendations for phone users only, few understanding requirements as demanding as mine. Then one glorious day in October I found Readera, which does almost everything that Kindle does (and a few things more) at remarkable speed and with a very comfortable UI. Not only does Readera read every ebook format you’ve heard of, on Windows, Apple or Android, but it does it for free without ads. And not only does it see external USB drives but its own PDF manager with cover thumbnails is actually superior to Android’s. I used the free version for several weeks but they lured me into spending £14.49 (one-off) on the Premium upgrade which offers colour-coding for notes, which I’d started using under Kindle but then lost with the Chrome extension.

An unexpected side-effect is that I’ve started using PDFs for all sorts of purposes besides book reviewing. I’ve always known you can print documents to PDF rather than a physical printer via the system print dialogs in Windows, ChromeOS, Android (and I imagine iOS too) but I’d never found much use for this until recently. I started having problems saving web pages to Pocket for various reasons and so the penny dropped – just Save To PDF instead and store the file locally rather than in Pocket’s cloud, USB storage being so big and cheap.Some websites offer a download option, but for those that don’t, save-to-PDF often works and retains all formatting and colour pictures. 

I must stress that I’m not a pirate who re-sells or wishes to profit from such copies – they’re just aides-memoire for my writing of both book reviews and this column. For many years I used browser bookmarks but weblinks can break or just vanish and the bookmark hierarchies in successive browsers became more and more unwieldy. My local Idealog folder has subfolders like AI, Bio_Neuro and Quantum full of PDFs from journals like Nature, which I can find quickly to swot up or quote from. 

What I’d like is a good grep-like utility that searches for text within multiple PDFs. Adobe Reader does this but its file management has irritating limitations, so occasionally I fantasise about writing one in Python (and bunging it in the Playstore to reap 2-star reviews) but the feeling soon passes…    

[Dick Pountain thinks PDFs are Pretty Damn Fine]