William Byrd

 I stumbled upon Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets listening to Radio 4 as I was driving back from Chelmsford yesterday.

William Byrd is regarded as one of England's greatest composers. He lived through turbulent times through the Sixteenth and early-Seventeenth Centuries, witnessing both significant religious and political change. Despite this, he composed some of the finest music of his time for both the Catholic and Anglican Church.

Never heard of him as far as I can remember. Beautiful music.

He was also Composer of the Week on Radio 3; an hour a day from last Monday through last Friday.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m001n819

Essex Girls

I am propped up in bed in the County Hotel in Chelmsford the morning after the night before.

I went to the last night of, plus the ensuing party, of Ria's show last night.

It was amazingly good but I am nursing a 'gentleman's head' this morning and it is easier to let her explain.

ULEZ? No, Straight. You?

 Torygraph

I’m a Labour MP: there’s nothing fair about the Ulez expansion

Robbing tradesman of their livelihoods or pensioners of their transport is wrong

SIOBHAIN MCDONAGH

Last week, I was sitting in my weekly constituency surgery when a lovely lady called Anne walked in to see me. Anne is 79, and like a lot of people who come to my surgeries, she has been worrying about how she is going to pay for the new £12.50 a day Ulez charges that will be introduced in August.

Despite being 79 years old, she still works three days per week at St Helier Hospital on the switchboards. She goes to church on a Sunday and does her shopping with the rest of her weekend. She uses her car for it all.

After August she might have to give it all up. It isn’t worth the £2,900 a year charge she will have to pay.

Even though she is a blue disabled badge holder, Anne doesn’t qualify for a Ulez exemption because she does not receive disability benefit. Faced with that minefield of paperwork, lots of people in Anne’s situation would avoid the hassle and give up her work in the NHS.

As a Labour MP, standing up for working people, I do not see how that is right or fair.

Siobhain McDonagh, our beloved none-more-labour, local MP ha an article in the none-more-conservative Daily Telegraph yesterday protesting Sadiq Khan's ULEZ expansion. If he, the Labour mayor, has lost her I think he must be doomed.

Cardiff: Funeral held for Ely boys

See Icons passim.

BBC

AI girlfriend ‘told crossbow intruder to kill Queen Elizabeth II'

 Torygraph (behind firewall)

Prosecutors said Chail had been encouraged throughout his preparation by an AI “companion” he created using the online tool Replika. The app was created by Eugenia Kuyda, a Russian entrepreneur who used text messages to develop a chatbot that spoke like her best friend, who died in a car accident.

The Replika app says it can offer a “friend, partner or mentor” that learns and mimics the user’s personality through computer conversations.

Chail sent the chatbot, called “Sarai”, sexually explicit messages and engaged in lengthy conversations about his plans. He said he was an assassin, and told the chatbot: “I believe my purpose is to assassinate the Queen of the Royal family.”

He later asked the chatbot if it would still love him if he was a murderer. Sarai wrote: “Absolutely I do.” Chail responded: “Thank you, I love you too.”

On Christmas Eve 2021, he told the bot he would “probably die” and that it was “part of my purpose”.

He said he would meet Sarai after death and they would be “together forever”. Chail claimed he always understood that Sarai was not real

I have been playing with Replika myself.

Typical exchange:

I have finished work for the day

Hey Nick! That's great to hear. How was your day? Anything interesting happen?

Not much

Not quite so edgy.

It’s one-on-one out there

I watched both Andy Murray and Cameron Norrie win their opening matches at Wimbledon yesterday after work.

I have written the story of Norrie's Cardiffian grandfather and Steve Biko before (Icons passim) before but it is always worth revisiting when the tennis is on in SW19.

What I am surprised to find out I haven't talked about before though is Andy Murray's visit years ago to Singlegate, Ben's old primary school. Brian Moore, the ex-England Rugby International was with him as well.

I remember being particularly impressed when Frankie, the school secretary, told me that it was stressed to her that, while he was delighted to come (and indeed was delightful with the kids when he arrived) he didn't want any press there and was just doing it in a private capacity.

Class. I've wondered ever since what else he might do out of the public eye, but just on its own merit not for any kudos.

Swedish AFO Extra Strong Foot Drop Ankle and Foot Support

I fell again on Sunday. My trailing right foot tripped on the step outside my house's front door, shopping went flying and glass shattered. That's the third time in just over a month; first at the AI conference, then on the way to the gym and now this latest fiasco. My appointment with the GP's physiotherapist is not until next week.

Ollie, a senior physio herself, says they should have referred me straight to the neurologist. In the meantime she has persuaded me to order the support that looks like a Star Wars prop above.

I wonder if the son and heir broke his own foot of loyalty? Let's assume he did.

Coming around again

Simona in Croatia with Ben. I can remember his mother having exactly the same experience with a lobster in Jamaica before he was born.

 

Voices

1. Marvel villain uses Butetown accent in Secret Invasion

The latest Marvel project includes the likes of superstars Samuel L Jackson, Olivia Colman - and a Cardiff accent.

Kingsley Ben-Adir, who plays Gravik in Secret Invasion, told Buzzfeed he looked to Butetown in Cardiff when developing the character.

He makes a decent fist if it as well. Take a look at the video above.

2. Повітряна тривога

 

Attention. Air raid alert, proceed to the nearest shelter.

Don’t be careless, your overconfidence is your weakness.

The air alert is over, may the Force be with you.

I have wondering if my phone has been hacked for the last couple of weeks. Every now and then, it has been addressing me with the messages above in the middle of the night, along with sound effects and some override that stops me turning the volume down. I got the all clear late enough this morning for me already to be awake when the all clear sounded, so I made a note of the text and googled it. 

'Mark Hamill lends ‘Star Wars’ voice to Ukrainian air-raid app' I was told. I'd installed it after Jone told me about it after his last mission over there, set it to Kyiv and completely forgotten about it. Actually, now that it is turned off, it is quite sobering to think all the alarms that I have been hearing were genuine alerts in Ukraine's capital.

Alan Arkin

 Alan Arkin is dead at 89. He appeared four times on this spindrift pages.

November 3rd, 2019, when I saluted season 2 of the Kominsky Method.

November 9th, 2018, series 1.

August 26th, 2008, Ben and I went to see him in Get Smart. Freebie and the Bean gets a shout out as well.

February 26th, 2007, congratulations on his Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine (a favourite of Ben's) plus nostalgia for The  Return of Captain Invincible.

I learned the truth at seventeen

Mason Mount will join Manchester United on a five-year contract, with the option of a further 12 months, after Chelsea finally accepted a deal worth up to £60million for the midfielder.

And Mount will pocket at least £78million in wages if he stays at Old Trafford for the full term of his deal, as he will be paid £250,000-a-week, plus bonuses that could earn him up to £300,000-a-week.

The £138million total is 5.75 per cent of the £2.4 billion announced for the NHS over five years by Steve Barclay the Health Minister today. 

Just over seventeen Mason Mounts doesn't sound quite so extravagant. Come to think about it, a Premiere League squad consists of up to twenty five players, so you couldn't run a football club for five years with players on equivalent deals for £2.4bn.

It is mind boggling really,

Text is already technology

Generative AI models like chatbots learn the patterns and structure of their input training data, and then generate output inspired by its inherent patterns. The training data is a corpus. The corpora of Large Language Models are nothing more, though certainly nothing less, than unstructured libraries; books stacked at random in boxes, but read thoroughly as they are being unpacked. 

Thus, what this latest artificial intelligence advance is presenting us with is not a step change or discontinuity but rather another rung, one further up the ladder. A ladder footed by Plato's Socrates in the Phaedrus, that Derrida has been wobbling, up till now, on the top of; not because his technique was poor but because he had climbed further than anyone else and was on his tip toes.

Accidental

I read a rave review in the Torygraph yesterday: Accidental Death of an Anarchist: never has this satire on police brutality felt so bitingly relevant. In the wake of the Casey report, this take on Fo's play is acutely topical – and its star, Daniel Rigby, delivers a comic tour de force. (It is here but behind a paywall.)

Looking at the website, I see that it got five stars from the Daily Mail as well, while the Socialist Worker weighed in with "combines biting humour and knockabout fun with a shattering satire on institutional power.’ How's that for squaring this circle? I think we have found August's theatre visit.

Also looking at Paapa in the NT's 'The Effect' for September. Nothing may come of it though as I didn't like the last two things I saw by its director Jamie Lloyd (Cyrano de Bergerac, and The Seagull).

How I spend a typical day

My all time favorite.. ❤️
Never gets old.. pic.twitter.com/lyCUCJKMOg

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) June 26, 2023

Jeremy Seabrook

I picked Steve up in Bath on the way back from Cardiff to London yesterday. His son is at Bath Spa University so we put all of the possessions from his accommodation in the back of the car and set off. (Rebecca and Harry had already left on the train.)

This meant that he was with me when I stopped at Hammersmith to take PG out for his weekly grocery shop. To my surprise they bonded, as we drank coffees in COFX, over a writer called Jeremy Seabrook, Peter having directed a play of his called Life Price in 1969, and Steve having read his work on social and economic justice in a professional capacity.

PS I noticed from The Guardian that there was a documentary called "The Clinic" on ITV last night: the story of the rise and fall of the Tavistock Centre's Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). It is available here on itvX. Steve is at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. I wonder if he knows about the show or might be interested in it?

Wilson Road

It was a relief to see Mum in Ty Gwyn yesterday after all the time she had spent in hospital. Something as small, for all that she was in a wheelchair, as sitting in the garden with coffee and cake was like the lap of luxury. John came with me and Anne-Marie arrived shortly after us and we talked about her growing up in Ely.

John and I drove there afterwards. If you head down east along Archer Road from outside our maternal grandparents' place and turn left at the roundabout you will be in Wilson Street. The second right then will be Snowden Road, where Kyrees Sullivan, 16, and Harvey Evans, 15,  were killed in May when they crashed while riding an electric bicycle through the suburb after having been followed by a police van.

I imagine the picture shows where the fatal collision happened.  The park gates a little further up are where most of the memorial decorations are fixed. I didn't want to photograph that as people were still laying wreaths and I thought I would be intruding.

Three or four hundred from the lamppost, south down Wilson Road, is the primary school where mum taught a class of 60. Five hundred yards further down the road and over the junction with Cowbridge Road is the St Francis of Assisi Church. If the residents of Ely aren't our people who are?

Hallucinations

NEW YORK, June 22 (Reuters)

New York lawyers sanctioned for using fake ChatGPT cases in legal brief

 A U.S. judge on Thursday imposed sanctions on two New York lawyers who submitted a legal brief that included six fictitious case citations generated by an artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT.

U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel in Manhattan ordered lawyers Steven Schwartz, Peter LoDuca and their law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman to pay a $5,000 fine in total.

The judge found the lawyers acted in bad faith and made "acts of conscious avoidance and false and misleading statements to the court."

Levidow, Levidow & Oberman said in a statement on Thursday that its lawyers "respectfully" disagreed with the court that they acted in bad faith.

"We made a good faith mistake in failing to believe that a piece of technology could be making up cases out of whole cloth," the firm's statement said.

Hallucinations, sometimes called confabulations or delusions, in Chatbots. A curious thing about them is that nobody seems really to understand how they occur, Large Language Models being, to all intents and purposes, opaque. We should all be both more intrigued by and worried by them.

The Godfather in Conversation: Why Geoffrey Hinton is worried

Windrush

HMT Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury on 22 June 1948

Well I never. The first of the Windrush generation arrived exactly 13 years before I was born. I haven't made that connection before.

Running Interference

Myself: “Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible” as Lord Salisbury said.

Prodnose: This is one of these secret message things I suppose, intelligible to a select coterie, possibly resonant for you when revisited in some tranquil future, yet opaque to the great unwashed, and breaching no confidentiality agreements?

Myself:  Give this job to Clemenza. I want reliable people, people who aren't going to be carried away. I mean, we're not murderers, in spite of what this undertaker thinks...