The couple above are W. H. Auden and Erika Mann. The photo was taken by a student at The Downs School, where Auden was then teaching. Erika, the daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann and an ardent opponent of Nazism, had been living in England but was in imminent danger of being repatriated to Germany. To prevent that from happening, Auden agreed to marry her. (Both were gay and not otherwise interested in matrimony.) On June 15, 1935 they were married in Ledbury, a town near the school. This photo was taken around that time, perhaps even on their wedding day.

Thomas and Katia Mann were very worried about Erika’s safety: had she been repatriated, a lengthy prison term was the best that she could have hoped for, especially since on her mother’s side she was of Jewish descent. Thomas and Katia were themselves safely on their way to New York City, traveling by ocean liner, when, on June 16, they received a terse and to-the-point telegram:

ALL LOVE FROM MRS AUDEN

Eventually the Mann family would be reunited in America, and Erika and Klaus would write a book about their deliverance from Nazism.

In January of 1939, Auden and his friend Christopher Isherwood arrived in New York City and were greeted at the pier by Erika and Klaus. They all drove down to Princeton to meet Papa and Mama Mann, and Life magazine sent a photographer to capture a family photo:

A happy reunion!

Wystan and Erika never divorced, so for decades Auden got to enjoy making jokes about “my father-in-law.” When Erika died in 1969 some of the obituaries noted that she was survived by her husband, the poet W. H. Auden — a piece of information that came as rather a shock to some of her friends, and his.

All that said, after their marriage Auden was very eager for his parents to meet Erika and insisted that she travel to Birmingham with him so they could receive the parental blessing. (“My husband is a tyrant,” Erika sighed in a letter to a friend, not thinking Birmingham a sufficiently interesting or beautiful city to make a visit worthwhile.) They remained friends always, and Isherwood thought that later there was even “a touch of eroticism” to their relationship. So to call it a “marriage of convenience” is perhaps not to tell the whole truth.

Review: The Stars, Like Dust, by Isaac Asimov

The Stars, Like Dust is usually listed as the first book in Asimov's lesser-known Galactic Empire Trilogy since it takes place before Pebble in the Sky. Pebble in the Sky was published first, though, so I count it as the second book. It is very early science fiction with a few mystery overtones.

Buying books produces about 5% of the pleasure of reading them while taking much less than 5% of the time. There was a time in my life when I thoroughly enjoyed methodically working through a used book store, list in hand, tracking down cheap copies to fill in holes in series. This means that I own a lot of books that I thought at some point that I would want to read but never got around to, often because, at the time, I was feeling completionist about some series or piece of world-building. From time to time, I get the urge to try to read some of them.

Sometimes this is a poor use of my time.

The Galactic Empire series is from Asimov's first science fiction period, after the Foundation series but contemporaneous with their collection into novels. They're set long, long before Foundation, but after humans have inhabited numerous star systems and Earth has become something of a backwater. That process is just starting in The Stars, Like Dust: Earth is still somewhere where an upper-class son might be sent for an education, but it has been devastated by nuclear wars and is well on its way to becoming an inward-looking relic on the edge of galactic society.

Biron Farrill is the son of the Lord Rancher of Widemos, a wealthy noble whose world is one of those conquered by the Tyranni. In many other SF novels, the Tyranni would be an alien race; here, it's a hierarchical and authoritarian human civilization. The book opens with Biron discovering a radiation bomb planted in his dorm room. Shortly after, he learns that his father had been arrested. One of his fellow students claims to be in Biron's side against the Tyranni and gives him false papers to travel to Rhodia, a wealthy world run by a Tyranni sycophant.

Like most books of this era, The Stars, Like Dust is a short novel full of plot twists. Unlike some of its contemporaries, it's not devoid of characterization, but I might have liked it better if it were. Biron behaves like an obnoxious teenager when he's not being an arrogant ass. There is a female character who does a few plot-relevant things and at no point is sexually assaulted, so I'll give Asimov that much, but the gender stereotypes are ironclad and there is an entire subplot focused on what I can only describe as seduction via petty jealousy.

The writing... well, let me quote a typical passage:

There was no way of telling when the threshold would be reached. Perhaps not for hours, and perhaps the next moment. Biron remained standing helplessly, flashlight held loosely in his damp hands. Half an hour before, the visiphone had awakened him, and he had been at peace then. Now he knew he was going to die.

Biron didn't want to die, but he was penned in hopelessly, and there was no place to hide.

Needless to say, Biron doesn't die. Even if your tolerance for pulp melodrama is high, 192 small-print pages of this sort of thing is wearying.

Like a lot of Asimov plots, The Stars, Like Dust has some of the shape of a mystery novel. Biron, with the aid of some newfound companions on Rhodia, learns of a secret rebellion against the Tyranni and attempts to track down its base to join them. There are false leads, disguised identities, clues that are difficult to interpret, and similar classic mystery trappings, all covered with a patina of early 1950s imaginary science. To me, it felt constructed and artificial in ways that made the strings Asimov was pulling obvious. I don't know if someone who likes mystery construction would feel differently about it.

The worst part of the plot thankfully doesn't come up much. We learn early in the story that Biron was on Earth to search for a long-lost document believed to be vital to defeating the Tyranni. The nature of that document is revealed on the final page, so I won't spoil it, but if you try to think of the stupidest possible document someone could have built this plot around, I suspect you will only need one guess. (In Asimov's defense, he blamed Galaxy editor H.L. Gold for persuading him to include this plot, and disavowed it a few years later.)

The Stars, Like Dust is one of the worst books I have ever read. The characters are overwrought, the politics are slapdash and build on broad stereotypes, the romantic subplot is dire and plays out mainly via the Biron egregiously manipulating his petulant love interest, and the writing is annoying. Sometimes pulp fiction makes up for those common flaws through larger-than-life feats of daring, sweeping visions of future societies, and ever-escalating stakes. There is little to none of that here. Asimov instead provides tedious political maneuvering among a class of elitist bankers and land owners who consider themselves natural leaders. The only places where the power structures of this future government make sense are where Asimov blatantly steals them from either the Roman Empire or the Doge of Venice.

The one thing this book has going for it — the thing, apart from bloody-minded completionism, that kept me reading — is that the technology is hilariously weird in that way that only 1940s and 1950s science fiction can be. The characters have access to communication via some sort of interstellar telepathy (messages coded to a specific person's "brain waves") and can travel between stars through hyperspace jumps, but each jump is manually calculated by referring to the pilot's (paper!) volumes of the Standard Galactic Ephemeris. Communication between ships (via "etheric radio") requires manually aiming a radio beam at the area in space where one thinks the other ship is. It's an unintentionally entertaining combination of technology that now looks absurdly primitive and science that is so advanced and hand-waved that it's obviously made up.

I also have to give Asimov some points for using spherical coordinates. It's a small thing, but the coordinate systems in most SF novels and TV shows are obviously not fit for purpose.

I spent about a month and a half of this year barely reading, and while some of that is because I finally tackled a few projects I'd been putting off for years, a lot of it was because of this book. It was only 192 pages, and I'm still curious about the glue between Asimov's Foundation and Robot series, both of which I devoured as a teenager. But every time I picked it up to finally finish it and start another book, I made it about ten pages and then couldn't take any more. Learn from my error: don't try this at home, or at least give up if the same thing starts happening to you.

Followed by The Currents of Space.

Rating: 2 out of 10

“Meet Your New Assistant” says the announcement, going on with “Built With Llama 3”. And oh my goodness has it ever got a lot of coverage. So I thought I might as well try it.

My first cut was a little unfair; I asked it about a subject on which I am unchallenged as the world’s leading expert: Tim Bray. (That’s probably overstating it: My wife is clearly in the running.)

So I asked meta.ai “What does Tim Bray think of Google?” Twice; once on my phone while first exploring the idea, and again later on my computer. Before I go on, I should remark that both user interfaces are first-rate: Friction-free and ahead of the play-with-AI crowd. Anyhow, here are both answers; it may be relevant that I was logged into my long-lived Facebook account:

The problem isn’t that these answers are really, really wrong (which they are). The problem is that they are terrifyingly plausible, and presented in a tone of serene confidence. For clarity:

1. I am not a Computer Scientist. Words mean things.

2. I worked for Google between March of 2010 and March of 2014.

3. I was never a VP there nor did I ever have “Engineer” in my title.

4. I did not write a blog post entitled “Goodbye, Google”. My exit post, Leaving Google, did not discuss advertising nor Google’s activities in China, nor in fact was it critical of anything about Google except for its choice of headquarters location. In fact, my disillusionment with Google (to be honest, with Big Tech generally) was slow to set in and really didn’t reach critical mass until these troubling Twenties.

5. The phrase “advertising-based business model”, presented in quotes, does not appear in this blog. Quotation marks have meaning.

6. My views are not, nor have they been, “complex and multifaceted”. I am embarrassingly mainstream. I shared the mainstream enchantment with the glamor of Big Tech until, sometime around 2020, I started sharing the mainstream disgruntlement.

7. I can neither recall nor find instances of me criticizing Google’s decision-making process, nor praising its Open-Source activities.

What troubles me is that all of the actions and opinions attributed to meta.ai’s version of Tim Bray are things that I might well have done or said. But I didn’t.

This is not a criticism of Meta; their claims about the size and sophistication of their Llama3 model seem believable and, as I said, the interface is nifty.

Is it fair for me to criticize this particular product offering based on a single example? Well, first impressions are important. But for what it’s worth, I peppered it with a bunch of other general questions and the pattern repeats: Plausible narratives containing egregious factual errors.

I guess there’s no new news here; we already knew that LLMs are good at generating plausible-sounding narratives which are wrong. It comes back to what I discussed under the heading of “Meaning”. Still waiting for progress.

The nice thing about science is that it routinely features “error bars” on its graphs, showing both the finding and the degree of confidence in its accuracy.

AI/ML products in general don’t have them.

I don’t see how it’s sane or safe to rely on a technology that doesn’t have error bars.

Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise, initial writeup of CVE-2024-3094 by Andres Freund.

Everything I Know About the XZ Backdoor, by Evan Boehs.

Timeline of the xz open source attack, by Russ Cox.

xz/liblzma: Bash-stage Obfuscation Explained, by Gynvael Coldwind.

xz backdoor payload analysis, by Filippo Valsorda.

xzbot, exploration of the xz backdoor.

Cloning a laptop over NVME TCP, by copyninja using the Linux nvemt-tcp module.

RP2040 Boot Sequence, in detail by V. Hunter Adams.

The Mark Williams Company, and the COHERENT operating system.

OldWeb.Today, run ancient browsers in your browser!

Strachey love letter algorithm (1952).

The Wi-Fi only works when it’s raining

Thanks to the xz backdoor, many people are now talking about the state of Linux packaging tools, and in particular build systems. As a maintainer of Void Linux and packager of many things, I have my five cents to add, so today I’ll be the contrarian and argue what autoconf got right. This is not an apology for GNU autotools; we are all well familiar with the issues they bring—yet some prospective replacements manage to be worse in certain aspects.

It provides a standardized interface.

This is of course the hardest point to tackle for any new contestor that has not reached a critical mass.

In Void Linux, the GNU configure build style is the most popular; roughly 2250 of about 14300 package template use it, and an additional 120 use the generic configure build style, which works similarily.

As a packager, the worst thing is to find a custom made build system that behaves totally different from what we know—if you decide to write your own ./configure scripts, please stick to the conventions! We packagers really have better things to do than figure out yet another homebrew build system that’s used exactly once.

These conventions are standardized as part of the GNU Coding Standards and they specify many features that packagers expect, but developers without own packaging experience are likely to miss. One example is support for staged installation, i.e. DESTDIR. This is essential for building packages that only contain the files that package actually ships. And no, support for --prefix is not enough to make up for this (if you wonder why, please read up the standards).

It is based on checking features.

People who have been staring at ./configure output for too long may want to disagree, but let me make my point: check-based configuration is the only way to write software that will continue to work properly in the future. If you instead keep a table of broken systems and workarounds, it a) will not be updated for future systems, b) doesn’t detect if the system was actually fixed (either by patching a bug, or adding a missing feature). It’s also very unlikely the software builds on an system unknown to the build system, even if it’s standards-compliant otherwise.

Of course, the checks should be reasonable (and in practice, often are excessive). If your code assumes a C99 environment, you don’t need to check whether all C99 functions you use are available. Likewise, if you don’t need macros for certain sizeof values, you don’t need to check for them, either. And you never need to check if sizeof char is actually 1—it literally can’t be anything else. Also, checking for functions can be done incorrectly.

Overrides are possible.

While checks are good, sometimes they are broken or a certain configuration needs special override, because a feature can’t be checked (for example, when cross-compiling). In this case, autoconf scripts provide options to override checks with a predetermined result; usually you can set an environment variable like gt_cv_func_printf_posix=yes.

Likewise, if a library is installed at a special location, it’s also easy to tell configure to use it.

The config.log tells what happened.

Many other systems do checks, but only tell that something has failed. Debugging this can be difficult. Autoconf writes what it does into a config.log file, which is sometimes helpful to debug a check.

There is support for cross-compiling and for host/target separation.

Cross-compilation is a build system feature that is often put in second place, but as a maintainer of a system that heavily makes use of it, I have a fair share of experience and can say that autotools are one of the best systems to support cross-compilation. Especially custom-made build systems are often very lacking. Cross-compilation of C programs is not particularly hard in principle, but your build system needs to know which code is going to run on the target, and that programs which need to run during compilation (e.g. to precompute tables or something) need to be compiled for the host (with different CFLAGS and so on).

It has few runtime dependencies.

This is also a defining feature of autoconf, as usually a basic POSIX shell environment (or, say, something busybox) is enough to run the configure scripts. This is in particular important for packages needed for bootstrapping. If your build system needs Python, well, then you need to compile Python first; but to compile Python, you need to compile all of its dependencies, which hopefully don’t need Python then themselves to build…

However, for packages not directly relevant to bootstrapping a system this is not such an essential feature.

NP: Policy of 3—Let It Build