Andrew Smith

Israel's longest serving Prime minister is posting images of queues outside polling stations in Arab towns, describing Palestinian citizens exercising their right to vote as an existential threat: "The future of our Jewish State is hanging in the balance".

AI is one of the most pernicious technologies man has ever developed. Why would you want to outsource the very things that make us human to software?

This is a good rebuttal to what was argued in this ft article: bsky.app/profile/fina... You can't talk about red tape/regulation in the abstract. It has to do with who has the power to determine what the economy produces, and whether that is left to the market, or democratic control.

A nice article by Melissa Lee (Monash) on the recent OpenAI math dump, intended for the general public. It’s a good summary: balanced, and making a clear point about questions of quality in a way that’s easy to appreciate. #MathSky

The elite hate us being educated, us educating you, you educating each other, and you having time to do this. Stop granting that it's the university that is elitist inherently: it's been made that way for a reason. Some more points below also on the marriages between patriarchy, AI, capitalism...

Amazing, the new wonder technology is recreating the paperful office

🔴 REVEALED: Palantir led closed-door review of how MoD buys software The review was presented to defence minister Luke Pollard by Palantir UK boss Louis Mosley in Feb and has mostly been implemented None of this was made public New investigation🧵 democracyforsale.substack.com/p/revealed-p...

Except AI didn’t find the vulnerability. The PHP foundation has known about it since 2024.

Is he talking about the people who actually create wealth, or those who expropriate it?

Well worth reading to understand the full background behind the php exploit: thephp.foundation/blog/2026/10...

"Britain cannot build its future by returning to the 1970s" says Martin Wolf in the FT. It was in the 60s & 70s that the UK built the infrastructure that it sweated & ran down in the 80s & 90s. We stopped building for the future, and now the future has arrived.

Good this. A difference I see between the historical enclosures, and what AI is doing now, is that the historical ones did not destroy the productive capacity of the thing they expropriated. Whereas all the indications are that AI will do exactly that. GenAI will fossilise knowledge.

I expect Turning Point UK will be designated a terrorist organisation now, right?

So why was the exploit published before sites were given time to install the patch? Was it to induce panic and highlight AI’s role in discovering the exploit, in a similar vein to AI hacking websites etc etc?

‘At least one Microsoft executive apparently agrees, having described the AI industry’s actions as “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history.” ‘

I can’t get over that carers were the initial target and now they’ll likely be protected while the rest of us have to take the bullet so this government can save face. 1. NOBODY should have this. 2. The general public pays no attention anyways, our lives are being destroyed for no political reason!

NEW ANALYSIS: Expensive gas behind "nearly 90%" of rise in UK household electricity bills since 2020 + 77% of the rise in gas bills Contrary to what you've seen in media / political narratives, net-zero is "helping to shelter Britain from the impact of expensive gas", says @acjsissons.bsky.social

The LabGovt demanded £250,000 from the Aberfan villagers’ charity reduced to £150,000. It was returned to them 30 years later without interest by the 1997 LabGovt. Hillsborough; postmasters; infected blood; nuclear testing: why are working people treated so contemptuously by the system?

These are political problems; they show up as legal and regulatory problems because that's how accountability sinks work. Not only that, the political problems are largely a result of erosion of trust, which is a result of the behaviour of developers, which is a result of deregulation.

1. Credit is not scarce. 2. The only plausible form of crowding out is of scarce physical inputs. 3. This shows up (in part) as inflation. 4. It is translated into higher interest rates only be deliberate central bank action, or financial market expectation of same.

They should of course spend $0 on Claude, just as they should spend $0 on crystal meth.

It’s well worth reading the whole article. There are many gems in there.

It’s nice to see someone understands the economic arguments against rent control. morewrong.lol?post=my-tena...

Under the current UK legislation the works of Sally Rooney now can't be published in the United Kingdom but those of Adolf Hitler can be. www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...

If you establish and entrench a consensus that (a) hostility to migrants is a cri du coeur from the authentic working class, and (b) anti racism is the preserve of out of touch metropolitan liberals, where do you suppose the country will end up? www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Gorgeous piece on what you learn when you learn Japanese, by @caitlinallen.bsky.social in @engelsbergideas.bsky.social engelsbergideas.com/notebook/why...

"The U.S. had the lowest life expectancy among peer countries and spent nearly twice as much" (Peterson-KFF) www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collec...

Hey. Labour MPs. And other MPs, too. Are you on your way to the Commons for the Courts and Tribunals Bill? Grab a coffee. Come over here. And pay attention. 👇🏼

Well worth a read.

Yes, fiscal credibility is important, but I am so fed up of this “headroom” fiction. www.ft.com/content/6198... Healey’s Budget will be ‘fiction’ without plan for £35bn hole in spending, IFS warns

Hannah Arendt and why friendship matters more than truth ft.trib.al/5UcB3NF | opinion

“What good is a proof of the Riemann conjecture if there is no one who understands it”

This is fantastic satire "In keeping with our commitment to objectivity, no human has watched any of the endings. Internal research found that human viewers introduce bias, emotional responses, and the persistent question "wait, who is that guy?"" www.illposed.claims/posts/openai...

I’m a bit baffled about how blithely economists talk about the labour share falling to zero. Is this a case of mistaking models for reality? Something else? They can’t seriously entertain this as a realistic proposition.

And no amount of code reviewing, refactoring, or anything else, turns shit code into quality code. The only place for this slop is the bin.

Here’s a bombshell for those considering the impact of the recent dump of mathematical papers by OpenAI: why the semantic translation of a mathematical text into Lean code by an AI may neither be reliable nor faithful 👉🏼 arxiv.org/abs/2610.08144

Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

Someone at AHM pointed out this paper which seems to cast doubt on the validity of the statement proved by the OpenAI Navier-Stokes paper. Too tired to read it, but here it is. arxiv.org/abs/2610.08144

New substack: why there's no place for good ideas in politics: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/who-needs-...

OpenAI didn’t simply stumble upon all these results down the side of the sofa whilst cleaning. They chose to systematically invest huge sums of money to produce them. And to keep on going. And going. And going. They systematically took our motivational questions, perhaps with the… #MathSky #LLM

I drew a face on a paper plate and sellotaped it to broom. It's answers may surprise you.

Let’s be very clear: there is value in automating tedious and repetitive and dangerous tasks; there is value in delegating certain work to our machines that can do the work tirelessly and much faster.

A rare example of a coherent argument on this stuff. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... Protests from the City about bank tax ring hollow

In the market of agentic mania ,apathy and hubris appear to be the primary competition for most anything involving solid engineering. Apathy: we don't need no stinkin' rigor, because we can iterate so quickly. Hubris: give me a swam of agents and enough tokens to stand on and I can move the world.

This level of stupidity doesn’t just happen. You have to work to achieve it.

They are just alchemists really, not really knowing what they are doing , like Henig Brand boiling the output of local beer drinkers in an a attempt to create the philosophers stone. At least he discovered phosphorus. I doubt the output of gen AI will ever be as significant.

This does indeed smell desperate, but that's not why I'm sharing it. No, the bit that leapt out to me was the @financialtimes.com use of the phrase "Seattle-based cloud giant" to describe Amazon, which sounds beautifully fairytale and captures the nature of this whole industry: magic beans.

This is a dreadful argument from Burnham. Empirically false - almost 6m people were granted settled status; about 4m are currently resident. More importantly panders to racism/xenophobia, and directly contradicts argument made in his speech about migrant contributions.