‘Do you think you could live on £4.87 an hour?” Liam Byrne, the chair of the Commons business and trade committee, asked Peter Hebblethwaite, the chief executive of P&O Ferries, last Tuesday. “No, I couldn’t,” Hebblethwaite replied.
John Naughton: What would Steve Jobs think of Apple’s culture-crushing advert? | John Naughton
Its latest iPad ad, portraying the destruction of artistic tools, is confirmation that company is just another unfeeling, arrogant tech giant
This is a tale of two advertisements. And about the company that made them – Apple Inc. The first ad ran during the Super Bowl in 1984. It was made by Ridley Scott, the celebrated movie director. The vibe is distinctly Orwellian: set in a vast, darkened auditorium dominated by a giant screen entirely filled by a sinister-looking talking head, who is clearly Big Brother (BB).
The opening shot shows lines of drably uniformed, shaven-headed zombies marching in lock-step into the building. “Today,” intones the talking head, “we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the information purification directives.”
John Naughton: ChatGPT and the like will co-pilot coders to new heights of creativity | John Naughton
Far from making programmers an endangered species, AI will release them from the grunt work that stifles innovation
When digital computers were invented, the first task was to instruct them to do what we wanted. The problem was that the machines didn’t understand English – they only knew ones and zeros. You could program them with long sequences of these two digits and if you got the sequence right then the machines would do what you wanted. But life’s too short for composing infinite strings of ones and zeros, so we began designing programming languages that allowed us to express our wishes in a human-readable form that could then be translated (by a piece of software called a “compiler”) into terms that machines could understand and obey.
Over the next 60 years or so, these programming languages – with names such as Fortran, Basic, Algol, COBOL, PL/1, LISP, C, C++, Python – proliferated like rabbits, so that there are now many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of them. At any rate, it takes quite a while to scroll down to the end of the Wikipedia page that lists them. Some are very specialised, others more general, and over the years programmers created libraries of snippets of code (called subroutines) for common tasks – searching and sorting, for example – that you could incorporate when writing a particular program.
Nia Archives – Silence Is Loud
Nia Archives was first brought to my attention by the NPR Music Feed and according to a very extensive Wikipedia entry she is “Dehaney Nia Lishahn Hunt….an English record producer, DJ, singer and songwriter. Born in Bradford in West Yorkshire, she moved to Leeds aged seven, out of the family home aged sixteen, and then to Greater Manchester, during which time she was inspired by jungle documentaries and their women participants. After finding herself messed about by local producers, she began producing her own jungle and drum and bass works; after moving to Hackney Wick for university and finding that no record labels would release them, she released them herself” and she is “regarded as being at the forefront of the post-2020 drum and bass revival.” Which is news to me, but I did always find drum and bass the most interesting of dance genres and Nia Archives brings it together with some top notch songwriting to produce a top album. It is her debut LP but she had previously released 19 tracks on Spotify of which only 2 reappear on the album.
So empire and the slave trade contributed little to Britain’s wealth? Pull the other one, Kemi Badenoch
Britain ran an empire for centuries that at its peak 100 years ago occupied just under a quarter of the world’s land area.
Unfair jail sentences – one more example of demonising society’s ‘morally unfit’
David Blunkett acknowledged last week that it was the “biggest regret” of his political life. As home secretary under Tony Blair in 2001, Blunkett was the architect of the “imprisonment for public protection” scheme, or IPP.
John Naughton: The internet is in decline – it needs rewilding | John Naughton
The online world was meant to be an open system but has become dominated by huge corporations. If we are to revive it, that must end
Browsing through a history of online public messaging last week, I came across a magical photograph from 1989 or 1990. It shows the world’s first web server. It was Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT workstation in Cern, the international physics research lab, where he worked at the time. On the case is a tattered sticky label, on which is scribbled, in red ink, “This machine is a server DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”
Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, had come up with the idea for a “world wide web” as a way of locating and accessing documents that were scattered all over the internet. With a small group of colleagues he envisaged, designed and implemented it in the late 1980s and eventually put the whole thing – protocols, server and browser software, HTML specification, etc. – on one of Cern’s internet servers, and in doing so changed the world.
High on their own supply
There was a point on the BBC’s Question Time last week where the Minister for Policing Chris Philip, who was until recently an immigration minister, asked whether the Congo is a different country from Rwanda.
Did we really expect Tory MPs who fought for voter ID rules to follow them? Don’t be ridiculous | Marina Hyde
We seem to have reached the stage where Sunak’s MPs seek empathy for their inability to comply with their own policies
It seems certain Sunak will lead the Tories into the local elections. After that, regicide as usual | Marina Hyde
He will get zero credit for good results and blame for all the bad. And hovering overhead is Penny Mordaunt
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