"To chart a safe path between the Scylla of missed windows and the Charybdis of systems melting into slop, we need eyes on both threats as we coordinate, synchronize, and pull together." YES EXACTLY!

And yet: - wages have stayed flat for most people since 2008 - housing costs have exploded in that time I would love someone more qualified than me to untangle how much of this thread applies to income alone rather than combined income and wealth taxation

If you build on brownfield, people complain. If you build on greenfield, people complain. If you don't build, people complain. I honestly don't know why anyone would want to be a leader in this country, it would be soul destroying

This is a harrowing and important read

A little service announcement - there are plenty of search engine alternatives to Google! Use them 😄

My hot take is that the academic paper is fundamentally meaningless in this day and age as a research output. It's doing too many things at once, and reproducibility is just too low down the priority list

symbolic integration is the first arrow, numerical integration is N_ITERATIONS more arrows

Blair putting on full display what is in many ways his special ability - to lay out a political argument grounded in his own view of global trends (globalisation in the 2000s, tech in the 2020s). But… institute.global/insights/pol...

I suspect this is highly related to loss aversion - easy come easy go

Registered my first academic abstract for a conference since I was a PhD student in 2016 - it's good to be back! 🙌🏾

You may have seen this graph in the FT, which claims to show birth rates plunging since the introduction to smartphone. Except it doesn't. Read my short piece with @debscohen.bsky.social on some of the problems with this graph of juicy cherries! unherd.com/newsroom/are...

The good taxpayers of New York have given me a pair of Meta glasses because I am low vision disabled, and I seem to have used them more than a lot of people on here, so let me say a little about my experiences:

My theory is that Reform run councils won't be disasters that kill their national chances simply because every council is already operating at its absolute minimum essential statutory level and they can't change anything, and council staff will just get on with the same as before.

It's an interesting question to consider - even if the past was pragmatically worse, was it less uncertain, and is that what drives nostalgia?

Not sure this is the gotcha the OP thinks this is. "Green Party suggests a policy that rations the use of jet fuel in a shortage" seems like a reasonable interpretation to me 🤷🏾‍♂️

The critical thing that's missing is that doctors have an explicit causal model for *why* they have made a diagnosis. An LLM just predicts tokens. Any "explanation" you get from it simply isn't real. Pattern recognition isn't enough when it comes to human health - it's only the first step.

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An interesting distinction to make. I'm not sure any aspect of being a good historian would make you a worse citizen?

100% agree, I would add that the loss of designers and UX research across the tech industry is coming home to roost

I have a slightly different model for this. 1. There are many more lower paid workers than higher paid. So cheap automation (i.e. traditional software) scales better (and was our only option pre-LLM anyway)

I couldn’t wait to get back to my wild rogue rampage of hitching rides on bot-piloted transports and watching my serials.

If you're still dichotomising continuous variables, stop. Dichotomising your exposure &/or outcome wastes power. Dichotomising confounders introduces residual confounding. If a variable has non-linear effects, use splines! If you want 'clinically relevant' threshold effects, use marginalisation.

Leave it long enough and you'll end up in a pickle

I finally thought I understood the Monty Hall problem (kinda) and then I saw it in DAG form and now I'm pretty sure I neither understand the Monty Hall problem nor DAGs.

Double-take detail in this interview with Edith Heard, head of the Crick Her French husband decided against getting a spouse visa because of the UK's "intrusive" immigration rules If that's happening with one of the UK's most senior scientists, how many others are being put off completely?

So I have finished the main tasks in Pokopia, this chat sums up my approach, and yes we build the wall to set us free that's why we build the wall we build the wall to set us free

I think I can offer a partial explanation, as yer resident anti-AI understander. Programming is wizardry: you go to school, you read the books, you learn the arcane languages. Using AI is like being a warlock, making a deal with a demon to do the things you can’t do. And who knows the cost?

Surely a trap

Glad to be counted as a young person

My favourite tactic for being served quickly in a bar is when the bar tender asks who's next, just point to the person next to you, regardless of position in the theoretical queue. This almost always guarantees you will be served immediately afterwards

You have to do it at least once in your twenties, in order to learn: 1. That following peer pressure leads to sub optimal outcomes for you definitely and the group probably 2. That nothing good is free any more, and there's also plenty of expensive shite too

all meaning has collapsed in our post-literate society and i wrote a bunch of useless, useless words about it. read it if you, like me, are one of a diminishing minority who still reads www.theverge.com/policy/84960...

A lovely last sunrise of 2025

I am fortunate to be in a very similar position today - I've taken one big strides this year to see my distant friends more often, and will be making an even greater effort in 2026! @jamesomalley.co.uk how do I get on that mailing list 🙏🏾

I will play good side the first time around because it's a decent prior for what games will reward you for. Then subsequent playthroughs are for exploring moral choices when you know what's coming up in the story. Even the I only like being evil in a game if its funny (Kotor, fable etc).

Late to the Hades 2 party but my goodness the writing is brilliant, better than many novels I've read this year. Now we just need the last dinner party to do a cover of I am gonna claw out your eyes (and drown you to death) and the thing will be culturally complete

Another Christmas, another year I will tell you to ditch the Christmas pudding and make yourself a @nigella.bsky.social sticky toffee pudding instead

Under two weeks of my sabbatical left, and I have two messages: 1. Merry Xmas for tomorrow 2. Death to Chronos

Wildly different things, tasks, techniques, subspecialties being lumped into "AI" and then being conflated with each other, doesn't help. Different types of models vs the techniques to train them vs the tasks they are supposed to accomplish, all under "AI".

My top five favourite words to pronounce like they’re Greek philosophers…   5. Monocles 4. Bicycles 3. Popsicles 2. Obstacles 1. Testicles

Often the answer is "don't use it!". I never want to read an AI-generated novel or essay, look at an AI image, or listen to AI music. I'm not interested in the inner mental life of the shoggoths.

I remember when Michael Gove said that the public had "had enough of experts" in the run up to the Brexit referendum

Tempted to start ranking star wars movies and sneak in deep space 9

As my colleague Chris Giles put it: "The economics of this is pretty simple. 1. You should be a billionaire if you're worth it 2. Probably, no one is 3. If you're not worth it and a billionaire - you've got your money from rent exploitation - which should be stopped/taxed"

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

Almost all musicals are significantly worse in the second half. The only exception to this is Les Miserables, and that's because Fantine is out of the picture

Of course I have beaten the jet lag, it's entirely coincidental that I took a 4 hour nap at 3pm 😐