Daybreak

At Massey College last night I got the chance to play Daybreak: a cooperative board game about solving climate change.

I played with another couple of beginners, but got two crucial strategy tips. Like in real life, greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning in the past persist and accumulate, creating an important incentive to cut quickly as a higher priority even than building green energy to keep up with growing demand. Second, since it’s a cooperative game, all the players should be working to help keep anyone from getting in too much trouble.

As Europe, my two big contributions to the game were stressing the strategy of rapid cuts right from the beginning and using an ability to rescue ‘communities in crisis’ anywhere in the world. It’s nice to see a game that demonstrates the huge range of solutions which can help humanity control the problem, although the game structure where everyone accepts cooperation and works together exists in painful contrast to actual global climate negotiations.

I enjoyed the game a lot and took considerable inspiration from it both in terms of physical game design and implementing game mechanics. I’d like to make a tactile version of my Rivals sim where each player’s completion card goes in a mini-briefcase which can be closed during breaks to keep it secret, and where the steps toward weaponization are represented as physical tokens that get added to the briefcase.

I’m grateful to have had the chance to play a game like this, and to meet more of the sort of people interested in playing. This likely creates new avenues toward finishing development on Rivals and getting people playing.

Carney caving on Keystone

More evidence is emerging that Prime Minister Mark Carney is choosing to ignore what he knows about climate change economics to do precisely the wrong thing. He is thinking of reviving the Keystone XL pipeline.

As a world expert on climate change economics, Carney could tell you that the crucial thing is to avoid locking in inappropriate long-term investments in fossil fuels which we will need to scrap early and which will delay and raise the costs of dealing with climate change. Unfortunately, the political imperative to cater to the planet-wrecking industry has overpowered his expertise, honesty, or integrity. The sad fact is, once built, even the dirtiest projects are politically agonizing to shut down. Carney is ignoring the most elementary requirement of controlling climate change: to stop building the fossil fuel infrastructure that causes the problem.

Related:

A shark from the library

Libraries have been one of life’s joys for me.

The first one I remember was at Cleveland Elementary School. From the beginning, I appreciated the calm environment and, above all, access at will to a capacious body of material. All through life, I have cherished the approach of librarians, who I have never found to question me about why I want to know something. Teachers could be less tolerant: I remember one from grade 3-4 objecting to me checking out both a book on electron micrography and a Tintin comic, as though anyone interested in the former ought to be ‘beyond’ the latter.

At UBC, I was most often at the desks along the huge glass front wall of Koerner library – though campus offered several appealing alternatives. One section of the old Main Library stacks seemed designed by naval architects, all narrow ladders and tight bounded spaces, with some hidden study rooms which could be accessed only by indirect paths.

Oxford of course was a paradise of libraries. I would do circuits where I read and worked in one place for about 45 minutes before moving to the next, from the Wadham College library to Blackwell’s books outside to the Social Sciences Library or a coffee shop or the Codrington Library or the Bodleian.

Yesterday I was walking home in the snow along Bloor and Yonge street and peeked in to the Toronto Reference Library. On the ground floor is a Digital Innovation Hub which used to house the Asquith custom printing press, where we made the paper copies of the U of T fossil fuel divestment brief. This time I was admiring their collection of 3D prints, and was surprised to learn that a shark with an articulated spine could be printed that way, rather than in parts to be assembled.

With an hour left before the library closed, the librarian queued up a shark for me at a size small enough to print, and it has the same satisfying and implausible-seeming articulation.

I have been feeling excessively confined lately. With snow, ice, and salt on everything it’s no time for cycling, and it creates a kind of cabin fever to only see work and home. I am resolved to spend more time at the Toronto Reference Library as an alternative.

Poverty and forced obedience

Nothing stands out from the autobiographers’ testimony more strongly than the way in which rising levels of employment pushed up family incomes in meaningful and much appreciated ways. Yet the autobiographies suggest that there was something else at stake. Poverty forced our writers’ hand in other walks of life. The decision to marry, the timing and content of their sexual lives — such things could be controlled to some degree by more powerful neighbours when a couple’s outlook for raising their children by their own labour was poor. And how did a man challenge the religious or political views of his employer in an era of low employment? Offending one’s master meant certain dismissal — a risk that could not be taken when there were no other employers to whom one might turn. Low levels of employment obviously meant low incomes, but it also restricted the personal and political expression of the labouring poor. It continued to restrict working women’s scope for self-improvement and political activity well into the twentieth century. And it is perhaps here that we see most clearly the grounds for emphasising the ways in which the industrial revolution enhanced rather than destroyed patterns of life. Critics will argue that the material gains for most families were small. But they were just enough to drag wage-earners out of the servile submission that poverty had forced on them since time immemorial.

Griffin, Emma. Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution. Yale University Press, 2013. p. 246-7

Schneier at SRI

This afternoon I was lucky to attend a talk at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society by esteemed cryptography and security guru Bruce Schneier. He spoke about “Integrous systems design” and how to build artificially intelligent systems that provide not just availability and confidentiality, but also the assurance that systems will exhibit correct behaviour which can be verified.

One interesting project mentioned in the talk is Apertus, a Swiss large language model (LLM) which was developed by three universities with government funding, without a profit motive, and without copyright infringement in the training data:

Apertus was developed with due consideration to Swiss data protection laws, Swiss copyright laws, and the transparency obligations under the EU AI Act. Particular attention has been paid to data integrity and ethical standards: the training corpus builds only on data which is publicly available. It is filtered to respect machine-readable opt-out requests from websites, even retroactively, and to remove personal data, and other undesired content before training begins.

I will give it a try and see if I can find any behaviours that differ systemically from Gemini and ChatGPT.

P.S. As an added bit of Bruce Schneier-ishness, when he signed my copy of Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship he included a grid of letters which decode pretty easily into a simple message:

O H O E
O E Y N
K B T J

It’s just a Transposition Cipher (an anagram), and one which follows a simple pattern.