The Sheep Haven’t Looked Up Yet

Sheep, geese, three biographies of Barack Obama, a cow, and Her

The Week

In the Westerns I watched back when watching Westerns was the thing to do, the cattlemen and the sheepmen never seemed to get along like good neighbors should. Range wars and such. But I don’t recall the cattle and sheep themselves taking any part in the human battles, and developments here in Swaine’s World this past week bear this out.

While the sheep were arriving and getting settled in at the farm across the road early in the week, the solitary cow, whom we routinely greet when we go for our morning walks, was temporarily penned in the end pasture, far from the barn and the sheep. But by the end of the week they were all amicably sharing the grass in the near pasture. It looks so… pastoral.

It’s a small flock, going by my research on sheep flock size in Western movies and TV shows, maybe eight sheep, maybe half of them lambs, looking adorable as they bounce through the tall grass back to their moms every time they get more than ten feet away from her. So far the sheep have mostly ignored us, not coming to the fence to greet us the way the cow does, but we have hopes.

Down at the river, tight in to the far bank, the newborn goslings swim close to their mother as papa goose stands on that bank, neck extended, staring us down, guarding the family. The breeze is brisk and our field needs mowing. It’s that time of year.

There Were Big Announcements from OpenAI and Google

OpenAI and Google rolled out big announcements this past week. I tracked the announcements and the stories about the announcements, but I haven’t touched these technologies yet, so I turned to someone who has, my friend Ken Kousen.

“The idea is that their model can handle text, images, and audio all together, and the demo video they showed was very impressive,” he said about OpenAI’s GPT-4o. “That’s all well and good, but this field is filled with hype and promises that the resulting promises can’t match. So for me, the real question was, what’s available right now? … I’m not trusting anything until I can try it out.”

Which he did. Here’s his take.

Some other commentary:

“The confrontation between OpenAI and Google has gone into offline events. Both companies held big keynotes and showed off dozens of interesting products.” Stepan Ikaev, Creators’ AI

“OpenAI are calling this their new “flagship model” that can reason across audio, vision, and text in real time. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted that the model is “natively multimodal,” which means the model could generate content or understand commands in voice, text, or images.” Michael Spencer, AI Supremacy.

“it’s the multiplicity of Google’s product upgrades that is so multi-faceted, fascinating and frankly confusing. Google is putting AI into everything in their existing products, but also releasing many new AI related products.” Michael Spencer, AI Supremacy.

Meanwhile, OpenAI dissolved the superalignment team that it created in 2023:

“For months, OpenAI has been losing employees who care deeply about making sure AI is safe. Now, the company is positively hemorrhaging them.” Sigal Samuel, Vox.

“OpenAI has effectively dissolved a team focused on ensuring the safety of possible future ultra-capable artificial intelligence systems, following the departure of the group’s two leaders….” Rachel Metz and Shirin Ghaffary, Bloomberg.

“‘I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company’s core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point,’ Leike wrote.” Will Knight, Wired.

That doesn’t sound good.

An AI Icon To Keep Your Eye on

Mira Murati is OpenAI’s CTO. Here’s her bio on Wikipedia. In the Spring 2022 issue of Dædalus, the open access journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she wrote an article titled “Language & Coding Creativity.” It’s worth your time.

Image of the Week

Illustration by John Knapp from All About Barack Obama by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. Barack Obama shaking hands with Donald Trump. The peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next.

Book Week: the Dusty Shelf

Now and then, like maybe once a month, I like to dust off one or more books and write about them. These Dusty Shelf reports are not book reviews and they’re never about newly published books. They’re just books that have meant something to me personally, and something I want to share with you, and maybe place in some broader context.

Man on Bridge

British Science fiction writer Brian Aldiss came up with what I’ve always considered one of the best science fiction story titles ever: “Man on Bridge.” The idea (and image) of a man on a bridge, and all that it implies, — and then the dropped articles that make it not about a man but about Man, and what that implies — make that title, I think, a rich and powerful phrase.

But I didn’t invade your headspace to talk about an old science fiction story, rather a less-old book, a 2010 biography of Barack Obama by David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker. But we have a couple of bridges to cross before we get there.

Ruby Bridges

This past week was the 70th anniversary of a landmark civil rights case. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that State-sanctioned segregation of public schools violated the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional.

At that moment, Lucille Bridges of Tylertown, Mississippi, was pregnant with hir first child, Ruby. Lucille and her husband Abon left the farm and moved to New Orleans when Ruby was two years old, and by the time Ruby was five, Lousiana schools being still segregated, Ruby went to a segregated kindergarten in New Orleans. But the next year, change came to the South, and a federal court ordered Louisiana to desegregate its schools. Things rapidly got dicey. Segregationists did everything they could to fight the change, and any Black child daring to enroll in a White school was risking their life.

Ruby’s district, still hoping to fend off integration, created entrance exams to test whether Black kids could compete academically at the all-White school. Ruby passed the exam and enrolled, integrating the school with her own tiny body. Her parents knew what she’d be facing. Apparently Ruby kinda did too.

First-grader Ruby Bridges was escorted to school every day that year by federal marshals. “Barbara Henry, a white Boston native, was the only teacher willing to accept Ruby, and all year, she was a class of one. Ruby ate lunch alone and sometimes played with her teacher at recess, but she never missed a day of school that year.” [Wikipedia]

Ruby will turn 70 later this year. She has written two books about her life, and in 1999, she created The Ruby Bridges Foundation to promote tolerance and create change through education.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge

Five years after Ruby Bridges integrated that school in Louisiana, another historic event in the fight for civil rights took place: Blood Sunday. This was the first of three Selma-to-Montgomery marches for voting rights when John Lewis and other marchers were brutally beaten by police and State troopers as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The Edmund Pettus Bridge is now a National Historic Landmark.

Barack Obama: the Bridge

David Remnick also found inspiration in the metaphor of a bridge. In 2010 he published his biography of Barack Obama, titled The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.

Here’s where I casually say, oh yeah, I wrote a biography of Barack Obamatoo. And then hastily clarify that it was just a little thing.

In the last year of the Obama Presidency, Paul Freiberger and I wrote this little 100-page biography of Barack Obama, targeted at middle-school readers. It was a fun project, but the publisher didn’t seem too interested in promoting the book, and we wrote it off as a bad time investment.

But just financially. Otherwise, I considered the time well spent. I did a ton of research, and I never regret time spent on research. I originally decided to be a writer in part because I saw it as a way to remain a perpetual student. So far, it’s working out that way.

This little book was a second-source biography, meaning that I researched it by reading three then-existing biographies of Barack Obama. I also read the Peter Slevin biography of Michelle Obama, as well as Barack Obama’s two first books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. Other biographies and books by them have appeared since, including Michelle Obama’s excellent autobiography, Becoming.

The three Barack Obama biographies that I read were coincidentally all written by men named David. They are: Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, by David J. Garrow; Barack Obama: The Story, by David Maraniss; and The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, by David Remnick.

Admission: The Garrow biography is over 1400 pages. I sampled it. The others I read thoroughly, adorning them, as well as the Garrow, with hundreds of post-it notes, and comparing their depictions of the same events. The kind of activity a perpetual student loves.

This election year I’m feeling nostalgic for that President, and thought you might at least appreciate some perspective on how his biographies differ. I’ve supplied links to the books on Bookshop.org.

https://bookshop.org

because it supports local bookstores and isn’t Amazon. You can to search the site yourself for the books; the links I found may not lead you to the best price.

The Maraniss book is the best source for Obama’s childhood (particularly in Indonesia) and the lives of his parents. If you’ve read Dreams from My Father, Maraniss will show you all the places where Obama took artistic license with his own story. Maraniss has written an accurate, enlightening biography that also reads smoothly as an engaging story.

Garrow’s book is encyclopedic, but not particularly engaging. It is by far the most detailed about Obama’s political life. It’s the kind of book a historian would describe as indispensable.

Unsurprisingly, Remnick’s book is a solidly-written story. Remnick is a fine writer, and this is the Obama biography to read if you only read one. In it, he ties the Obama election to Bloody Sunday and John Lewis and the Edmond Pettus Bridge, as well as explaining in what sense the Obama Presidency could be a bridge.

Remnick ends the main body of the book thus:

“[A]t the luncheon following the swearing-in ceremony, Lewis approached Obama with a sheet of paper and, to mark the occasion, he asked him to sign it. The forty-fourth President of the United States wrote, “Because of you, John. Barack Obama.’”

Verse

If you’ve been following this blog for over a year, you may recognize some of these. I just feel a need to put some verse in each post. I’ll try to include a new one from time to time. This month I’m just doing limericks.

Three Limericks

A young Unitarian preacher
Said God was a mythical creature.
When accused and abused
For his skeptical views,
Said that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

A Muslim gourmet from Hamtramck
With catholic tastes, not Islamic,
Once brought some Kielbasa
To feed his madrassa
Where he said, hey, it’s all Abrahamic.

Said the chef to the girl in the bikini,
You really must try my zucchini.
She said my guy saw you
Come out of the shower
And he says you’re serving linguini.

Of Interest

When I was editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, we had a section in the back of the magazine titled “Of Interest.” Here are some things that I think you might find Of Interest.

The Blogroll

One Useful Thing
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick shares research-based views on the implications of AI.

The AI Edge
A daily newsletter to help you keep up with the latest news and trends.

Big Technology
A newsletter about big tech and society by independent journalist Alex Kantrowitz.

Creators’ AI
AI insights, tools, guides for creators and entrepreneurs.

AI Supremacy
News at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, technology, and business. Includes Op-Eds, research summaries, guest contributions, and info on AI startups, by Michael Spencer.

Artificial Intelligence Made Simple
AI made simple by Devansh.

AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans
A blog about interesting developments in artificial intelligence by Melanie Mitchell, Professor, Santa Fe Institute.

marcwatkins
How generative AI is impacting education, by Marc Watkins, Academic Innovation Fellow, Director of the Mississippi AI Institute, Lecturer of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi.

The AI Optimist
Exploring the possibilities of AI, against the drawbacks. By Declan Dunn.

Machine Society
Mike Elgan’s technology newsletter, formerly known as “Mike’s List.”

Ahead of AI
Machine Learning & AI research by Sebastian Raschka.

Mark Watson’s AI Books and Blog
Read his books for free online.

Doctors Without Borders
Every day, Doctors Without Borders teams deliver emergency medical aid to people in crisis, with humanitarian projects in more than 70 countries.

World Central Kitchen
WCK is first to the frontlines, providing meals in response to humanitarian, climate, and community crises.

And a few friends-and-associates links:

Kent Beck’s advice for geeks
Tales from the Jar Side
Bookshop.org
Pragmatic Bookshelf

My Day Job

I edit books on technology for The Pragmatic Bookshelf. A book I edited was released last week in beta form. It’s called Serverless Apps on Cloudflare, and here’s what it’s about:

For decades, applications have been built and deployed in a similar way: you write code, provision a server, and upload your code. Over the years, you’ve graduated from FTP or SSH to Docker and Kubernetes, but fundamentally you’ve just switched from owning to renting. Your application is running 24/7 on a server you’re paying for. Serverless technologies are changing that: you focus on your applications and offload the worry of where and how they’re deployed. This book will teach you how to write serverless applications on Cloudflare’s global platform.

This means that you can focus on writing code and not have to worry about how it’s deployed. With serverless, you only pay for when your application code is executed rather than pay for idle servers. You’ll do this using Cloudflare, which is built from the ground up to be a serverless platform.

ICYMI

Thanks for reading. You can read all the back issues of Swaine’s World at my blog home.

Coming Attractions

In the coming weeks, more Swaine’s Flames flashbacks, Dirt Road Diaries, bulletins from the AI revolution, tech history, books, and random verse.