Links: Angles of Approach (+3)

Sandwich bar on Grove Close

  • The best thing I’ve read in the last couple of weeks is this piece by Sally Rooney in the New York Review of Books about professional snooker, and in particular Ronnie O’Sullivan, the undisputed king of the sport. It has some excellent questions about how exactly professional sportspeople perform their wondrous feats, and how much they understand about how they do what they do. Rooney says there isn’t another sport with the same qualities as snooker, but much of what she writes rings very true for me about Test cricket. Replace snooker savant O’Sullivan with leg spinning savant Shane Warne and much of the article would read the same.
  • Twenty years ago, on March 27, 2005, at the Ether Festival at the Royal Festival Hall in London, Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke debuted a new song which they called Arpeggi. I was in my peak Radiohead fanboy phase at this stage, constantly lurking on the now-defunct AtEase fan forum and downloading hundreds of bootlegs, and this sniff of new material, the first since the Amnesiac sessions, was a huge moment. This song kicked off more than a year of new songs being tested out during a tour that ultimately culminated in 2007’s In Rainbows album, which includes a studio version of this song which sounds very different to this skeletal, other-worldly version which will always be the “original” to me.

Plane above Datchet Rd

  • A couple of weeks ago I made a proof of concept of a web application called GreenChainer, which creates urban routes through green spaces designed for walking, and inspired by the Green Chain Walk in south east London near where I live. You can read a bit more about how and why I made it on my personal webiste.
  • Scott Alexander has a very thought-provoking piece about the “semantic apocalypse” — the death of meaning — that many fear is coming as a result of the onset of generative AI and the commodification of so many things that humans can create. There’s lots of interesting comparisons to similar past events in world history: the invention of synthetic colours, recorded music, the printed word. Something in me just feels a bit different about this though: in all the other examples Alexander provides, people were still involved in the process which replaced its antecedent. With LLMs, we are ceding our semantic sovereignty to a machine which doesn’t actually know what it is creating.

Photographs

  1. A sandwich bar in Forest Hill, London.
  2. A plane flying above a eucalyptus tree in Catford, London.