iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 3h

A real shame and a puzzle, given the decision seems at odds with the stated desire to increase the BBC's presence in 'discussion and ideas' podcasts. I generally listened to Free Thinking as a podcast.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 3h

Also sits very weirdly with the stated priorities of doing more 'discussion and ideas' podcasts - that's exactly what Free Thinking is! I *suspect* someone in commissioning/management thinks it's too high-brow and/or esoteric and maybe also that its brief is covered by In Our Time.

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Recent arrival in London who hasn't worked out all our social norms yet.

Also: the fact that if you're not in academia, getting hold of ebooks of many academic books (old or new), whether by purchasing or through a library, is nigh on impossible.

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The 2022 stereo mix of Revolver was a revelation (a stereo mix of Eleanor Rigby that doesn’t sound bloody awful through headphones!) so I am very much looking forward to listening to this on my commute this morning.

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Why did no one tell me that last Friday Rubber Soul had been reissued with a remaster, a Giles Martin stereo mix and the super deluxe treatment? It may not objectively be the Fabs’ best album, but it’s my favourite - partly because 20 years or so ago it was where I began moving beyond Red and Blue.

James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

You can get 5-1 on Claire Coutinho's imaginary meat tax in the 3:30 at Newmarket.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Hmm. Toby Ord comes from a very particular intellectual/philosophical group (close association with Nick Bostrom, Will MacAskill etc) whose viewpoint is strongly contested by the likes of Emily Bender and Emile Torres.

Yep, I speak frequently to the curators there (especially now we are co-supervising a doctoral student!). One of these days I will make a trip - probably combining it with Earth Station Goonhilly!

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Thing is though, this is not that different from the activity by AI company scraper bots that has been regularly knocking library, archive and museum catalogues offline for the last 3 years. That wasn’t ‘rogue agents’, it was an attempt to harvest training data at breakneck speed.

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The whole suite of technology from the cables themselves, the optical fibre within them, the repeaters, the routing protocols etc., is just incredible - and so often gets overlooked in discussions about the internet and globalisation.

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We have a little display at work on the actions of the Post Office’s cable ship ‘Alert’ on the night of 4-5 August 1914 when she cut the German cables to North America, South America and Africa in the Channel - the first aggressive British action of the First World War.

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It was Bigwig in the snare for me.

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I think I've read that the Wimbledon Branch now has the worst service record on the network. This gets noticed once a year when the tennis is on, but otherwise hasn't been covered much so far as I'm aware. There were minor fixes but AIUI there are now no plans at all to do anything about it.

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If you're after sub-surface line content, the parlous state of the signalling on the District Line Wimbledon Branch needs more attention. Everything west of Fulham Broadway got descoped from Four Lines Modernisation in the post-Covid budget crunch. The number of delays and failure is now dire.

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I got the book from the library around the time the film came out, and something in the first 20 pages or so terrified me (I think it may simply have been the concept of being pulled into a never-ending book). Hence never finished the book and never saw the film.

The thing I don't understand about Digger is the posters on the tube which, apart from Tom Cruise, don't mention any of the cast. Instead it lists all of the writers, when: 1) Except for Jez Butterworth they're not well known. 2) There are loads of them which is rarely a good sign.

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Reminds me slightly of the niche rowing kit, 'pogies'.

A rower sitting in a boat. She is wearing 'gloves' that cover both her hands and the oar.

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I will say that Edgware Road is one station very much in need of lifts given the need to use the footbridge when changing there. I often have to do it with luggage and it’s a pain in the proverbial.

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Brain has thankfully not quite given out yet.

I think Jonn and I can, in different ways, be proud that I still remember something he wrote 12 years ago.

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I was just thinking that I’m probably half-remembering this from a CityMetric article by Jonn 8+ years ago.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I think if you get a rail geek on to the subject they can explain why it’s a very bad idea indeed. As far as I can remember the need for train to cross tracks (at Edgware Road maybe) would cut the number of services per hour that could be run.

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I’m not sure if there’s a missing first post, but are you talking about Archive Fever?

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Yeah, so Nate Silver is still talking nonsense. In the episode I listened to he called staffers complaining about a Senator physically shoving them in the workplace as “snowflakes”. Yikes. But on the other hand, Clare Malone swiftly and robustly responded.

OK I’m going to give Still Counting a try in the run-up to the US Midterms. I’ll just try to forget all the nonsense Nate Silver has been talking on various subjects in the last few years and concede that he is good at turning polls into a coherent model. I’m mostly there for Clare Malone though.

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Malcolm Arnold, Eric Coates, Robert Farnon were some of the bigger names in light music I think. As to production music, Keith Mansfield and Alan Hawkshaw produced absolutely loads (much of it beloved by crate diggers and repurposed or sampled).

YouTube video by Queen's Hall Light Orchestra - Topic

If you're British and over about 45 I'd say you almost certainly know this without knowing its name or composer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j-s...

youtube.com

Coronation Scot

The story of Light Music - Full Documentary

Also 'Light Music' (especially in the British context). Years ago BBC Four did a very good documentary on this - in fact they did a number of excellent docs on British musical genres. I'm quite partial to it, as I am to 'Production Music' - the instrumental stuff produced by libraries like KPM.

youtube.com

YouTube video by Jayne Anne Strutt

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Meantime I'm making progress using IBM Docling and Granite, plus DeepseekOCR (all open source) to take PDF scans and turn them into Markdown. The goal is to turn them into machine-readable text and then ultimately to do some interesting Named Entity Recognition, Topic Modelling and GraphRAG work.

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It's like the finance equivalent of "Curtains for Zoosha? K-smog and Batboy caught flipping a grunt."

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Untangling The Victoria Police Charge Books With Fable 5 AI

I think for anyone jaded by all the extremely stupid uses of AI in the context of history (chat with Abraham Lincoln! make people in prison mugshots smile! draw spurious links and conclusions!), this might be interesting. How professionals, volunteers and an LLM can make real progress.

makingfamilyhistory.com

How Anthropic's Fable 5 AI helped a stalled indexing project came back to life by consolidating 18,000 records from Victoria's 1870s.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

It’s only a sham deal if it’s from the Shampagne region of France. Otherwise it’s just sparkling fabrication.

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I have given up using the apps’ algorithms and now use JustWatch to keep track of when new seasons arrive of things I’ve been watching, and of when films I want to see are available on streaming or broadcast TV.

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Publishers should offer deals where if you buy/are gifted a new hardback in the initial, undiscounted release period, you get an ebook copy thrown in too. Ideally it wouldn’t be in their own stupid DRM version either.

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I think that's true in *so* many fields - and it's why I find it so odd and frustrating when so much of the discourse and marketing is focused around LLMs and chatbots. Yes, I have *loads* of uses for ML in the workplace. No, 'helping me draft my emails' is not one of them.

And it's the sweeping statement that 'streaming is over' that riles me and shows a blinkered view. I'm personally not that focused on new music - I'm interested in exploring 75 years of hi-fidelity recorded music in different genres, so AI generated stuff is fundamentally not interesting to me.

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I've been serious unimpressed by, iirc, two Bagehots and one Charlemagne.

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