Monday 9 November, 2026 – by John Naughton – Memex 1.1

John Naughton in trenchant mode:

“ Here’s an experiment you probably can’t try at home. Take a large language model (LLM) and prompt it with a passage about English church architecture of the 14th century; you know the kind of stuff – towers, master masons, the perpendicular style, and so on. Straight out of Pevsner, if you like. Ask it to carry on writing. Then train a fresh model on what the first one wrote, and ask it to do the same.

Keep going, generation after generation. By the ninth, you find that the machine has given up talking about churches and is producing an earnest list of jackrabbits with tails of various colours: black, white, blue, red and yellow.

You think I made this up? Nope. It’s one of the illustrations in a paper published in Nature by researchers at, among others, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London and Toronto University who wanted to know what happens when AI systems start learning from the work of other AI systems. Their answer: the machines go gently, and then not so gently, potty. The technical term for it is “model collapse”.

…

Unless the model collapse problem is solved, we’re heading into what Jathan Sadowski, a technology researcher at Melbourne-based Monash University, memorably called “Habsburg AI”. He used it to describe models trained so heavily on the output of other LLMs that they become inbred mutants, rather like the Spanish bloodline of the famous European dynasty, which inbred itself to extinction. Or, to put it more crudely, it may mean a kind of accidental enshittification of LLMs.”

Well, after all, Gregor Mendel was firmly based within the Habsburg empire.

The ever insightful Paul Taylor writing on ‘Free Agents’ in the LRB.

Paul Taylor · Free Agents

As LLMs have become more powerful and their responses less error-prone, the number of applications built this way has boomed. It is often useful to think of the prompt sent to an LLM as composed of different elements, some of which supply contextual information and others more detailed instructions. By specifying a set of different contexts to be used in different prompts, you can configure a set of distinct software agents to tackle different aspects of a problem – one could be the project manager, another the programmer and a third could run checks and find errors. Programmers refer to these characteristics as forming an agent’s ‘persona’. In the early days of LLMs, agentic programming rarely worked for long. Once you set the agents talking to one another the original goal would quickly get lost. The models were designed to converse with people and to include pleasantries in their responses, which, if consistently recycled back into the conversation, come to dominate the exchanges. Agents drifted away from their assigned tasks in a phenomenon known as ‘sycophancy collapse’.

Sycophancy collapse, is a new one on me. Brings to mind my thoughts on much medical education (or more accurately, medical educationalists).

Talking about the John Lennon song Imagine in fairly unflattering terms.

“Even so, it must have had an edge to it when Lennon performed it as a benefit for the relatives of inmates killed by police after the Attica State Prison riot in 1971. It was BBC policy, nearly 20 years later, to keep it off the air for the duration of the Gulf War.”

John Lennon, Jeremy Harding, New York Review of Books, Volume 23, Number 1, 4th of January 2001. (reprinted in the LRB diary, Week 41, October, 2026)

Article by David Runciman in the New Statesman

“My mum loves telling everyone I’m a Cambridge don. But I’m the poor sod who has to do it.”

Patrick Cockburn · Leap in the Dark: Irish Unity

Once the NHS in the North [of Ireland] was one of the few institutions seen as providing a better service than the confused private/state healthcare system in the South. But now, McBride writes, the NHS in Northern Ireland ‘has become an elaborate fiction. It promises to treat everyone free at the point of need, but can’t … some people wait a decade for a hip replacement.’ Instead there is a two-tier health system, with the better-off buying private health insurance ‘while the poor are left to live in agony and die before their time’. The problem isn’t just lack of money – Northern Ireland spends more per person on healthcare than any region in the UK aside from Scotland – but that the system is badly run

Hip replacement, also known as the operation of the century.

See how I gloat! said Stalky

from The Economist

The modern worker is status-obsessed. Even the bosses of giant companies find time to post on LinkedIn, a social network that functions as a forum for gloating.

Which god does JD Vance kneel to? – New Statesman

For most of my life,” he intones, “suffering has been my pathway to God.” Perhaps he means inflicting it on other people, which in recent years has absorbed much of his attention.

Terry Eagleton in the New Statesman.

Silence of the Loans: How Loan Book Fictions Prevent Higher Education Reform – The Post-18 Project

The student loan book is not an asset. It is a political fiction that has outlived whatever usefulness it once possessed. For over a decade, it shielded the true cost of higher education from public view; now, perversely, it shields the true cost of inaction. Every year that the fiction is maintained, the Plan 5 book grows, the trap binds tighter, and the political consequences compound.

Who can afford hope?

The Post 18 Project

Prepare for a world of ad hoc coalitions

The world order built after 1945 is unravelling. Institutions as they stand are ill-prepared to avert this decline. This is a moment that comes once in a century, in which our collective prosperity is defined by what we choose to build, and how we build it. (The Economist)

I thought it was just me 😉.

From Medicine Balls Private Eye, number 1678, 26th June / 8th of July 2026; page 16.

NHS online plans to see 8.5 million patients in three years but will it steal staff away from hospitals? NHS online’s first chair is John Browett, a former Tesco.com, Dixon’s and Dunelm chief executive and ex Apple retail head. He was poached from Dixon’s by Apple in 2012 but was sacked shortly afterwards, with Bloomberg attributing this to his oversight of a “morale-sapping” culture.

Note the model: retail, not medicine or even engineering. A few lines later we learn:

Patients will be able to access online care…

From next year tech-savvy patients will apparently be able to access online appointments from specialists around the country directly through the NHS app. Any tests, scans or procedures will then happen at healthcare sites closer to patients’ homes while clinicians will be able to review notes remotely.

Patients will apparently always have the option of face-to-face appointments (if they’re prepared to wait longer), and the scheme is going to be piloted for specific conditions first.

According to the government press release, “Women’s health issues, including severe menopause symptoms and menstrual problems that can be a sign of endometriosis or fibroids, will be among the conditions available for online referrals. Prostate problems like prostate enlargement and a raised prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level will also be covered by the service, along with eye conditions including cataracts, glaucoma and macular degeneration. NHS online will also provide support for other painful and distressing conditions such as iron deficiency anaemia and inflammatory bowel disease.”

Read that again: iron deficiency anaemia??? It is hard to imagine that anybody with a medical degree could write such rubbish. Interesting to know if they will do the same for dentistry.