Liam Jacklin

Partner @weareagent3 Views are my own and i will declare client interest when applicable, although most posts are just things i find amusing

[nazir afzal @nazirafzal]

Reform Latest
2 councillors died before election
Several now suspended for various bits of bigotry
At least 1 doesn’t exist
Others want to stand down cos they didn’t know it’s unpaid
1 thought he would be in Parliament

They don’t need a Whip, they need a Missing Persons Officer

[Carrie🌻 @FirstLadyNot]

He did this for £80
Imagine what he’d do for 5 million

[Oliver @OWS1892]

"Can I count on your racism while I get on with removing your grandchildren's employment protections?"

[David Yelland @davidyelland]

Many of the newspaper editors, owners and lead commentators happy to back Trump's attacks on this country conspired to create Brexit with distorted, biased coverage. They have let their readers down and continue to do so.

[Larry the Cat @Number10cat]

The world is about to witness the biggest tantrum in history

[Bark @barkmeta]

Let me explain what just happened 👇

5 minutes before the President announced a halt to attacks on Iran… someone placed a $1.5 BILLION bet on stocks going up and dumped $192 million in oil.

5 minutes…

These trades were 4 to 6 times larger than anything else in the entire market. Whoever did this wasn’t guessing. You don’t risk $1.5 billion on a hunch.

There was zero public indication this announcement was coming. No leaks. No press. Nothing. The only people who knew were in the room when the decision was made.

Someone in that room picked up a phone.
And within minutes they made more money than most Americans will earn in a thousand lifetimes. In a single trade. On a war that cost you $4+ a gallon gas and $16 billion in tax dollars.

American citizens funded this war. Politicians are profiting from it.

This is not the first time. Every major announcement from this administration has had massive suspicious trades right before it dropped. Tariff reversals. Policy shifts. War decisions.

This is the most blatant insider trading operation in the history of American politics. It’s not even close. And it’s happening over and over in broad daylight.

You would go to federal prison for trading on a tip from your cousin. These people are front running war decisions with billion dollar bets and nobody will ever ask a single question.

Nobody will be investigated. Nobody will be charged. By tomorrow this will be buried under the next satisfying headline. Just like last time. And the time before that.

The game is rigged. And they’re not even trying to hide it anymore…

[Jack Dart @JackWDart]

Brexit cost this country £180 billion a year in lost economic output, enough to build 140 new hospitals every single year. The people who did it are now asking for your vote again.

#Brexit #NigelFarage #ReformUK

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

Lindsey Graham: “I feel good about where we’re going as a nation. We’re killing all the right people…Trump is my favorite president. We’ve run out of bombs.“

Every time this lunatic opens his mouth he pulls back the curtain and reveals just how sick the United States is.

[Tim Stanley @timothy_stanley]

The British Government's position is nuanced, clear, and correct. It's also frightfully dull, so will play badly on social media.

[Adam Schwarz @AdamJSchwarz]

Lib Dem's @EdwardJDavey:

"Tax exiles like Isabel Oakeshott and washed up old footballers who mock ordinary people who stay in the UK & pay our taxes... As we protect them, it's only right for tax exiles to start paying taxes to fund our armed forces, just like the rest of us".

[Clement Uwajeneza @cuwajeneza]

In 2017, I stepped onto the Facebook campus in Menlo Park. They took us to the Oculus VR lab first. A geeky engineer gave us a demo of the VR features and ended on the haptic gloves that let you "feel" virtual objects without touching anything real. Then he paused, voice almost reverent: “Imagine connecting anyone in the world… real social interaction… without ever leaving home.” The demo was amazing but I walked out with a strange feeling. This guy is "solving for humanity" and is excited about a world no longer needs physical human connection

We passed a long hall of developers. One guy—Black, friendly—leaned over his monitors and asked where the group of us (mostly Africans) was from. We chatted. His desk had big screens, half-eaten snacks, the faint smell of takeout lingering. His neighbor, paler watched curiously but, too timid to join. The desks were comfortable, the food smell everywhere, as it was available in every corner. It all felt… contained. Like this campus was its own sealed ecosystem, where the world outside was just data to optimize.

Fast-forward to 2020. I work at Andela, where we placed remote engineers with Silicon Valley teams. Some companies flew their leads over to meet the "remote" teammates in person. When they visited the Kigali campus I went to dinner with them. They were 5. Of this dinner I vividly remember 2 conversations. One guy launched into how "all humans are actually lactose intolerant after infancy… we're the only species that keeps drinking milk." They all nodded, confessed their own intolerances like it was a quirky universal truth. Then came the photos: a dog's birthday party. Balloons, cake, friends invited. The owner beamed like it was his kid's party. I love dogs. But something twisted in my chest. These are the people shaping the tools billions use every day—yet their version of care, connection, family… felt redirected, abstracted.

Now it's 2026, and Sam Altman says training an AI costs less than "raising a human"—because it takes "20 years of life and all the food you eat during that time before you get smart." He compared childhood—first steps, heartbreaks, scraped knees, bedtime stories, learning trust—to server racks and electricity bills. I think back to that VR promise of connection without leaving home… to offices smelling of food and isolation… to dogs celebrated like children while real human messiness gets optimized away

[Harry Eccles @Heccles94]

Please don't share this 🫣 it's a bit embarrassing for @JDVance

[Parody Nigel Farage @Parody_PM]

Hot on the heels of our £9m donation from a Thailand-based crypto investor, I am currently serving my Clacton constituents in Dubai, at a private lunch hosted by an Indian billionaire, where I hope to encourage more foreigners to interfere in British politics.

[Rob Wiblin @robertwiblin]

Even 'aligned AGI' naturally kills democracy and leads to oligarchy, or worse.

That's the take of Anthropic's past alignment evals team lead, Prof @DavidDuvenaud.

Once humans aren't needed to do jobs or serve in the military, to governments we look like "meddlesome parasites".

With voters unable to contribute but engaged in incessant activism to extract resources from others – resources the country needs to avoid domination by rivals – the attraction of mass disenfranchisement could be overwhelming.

In 2025 David co-authored "Gradual Disempowerment", which aimed to lay out this and many other political, economic, and cultural forces that could sideline ordinary people (and maybe all people) in the presence of machines that can cheaply do everything humans will do.

Most controversially, David and colleagues believe that competitive forces will compel disempowerment, even if all those AIs are aligned and loyal to their users.

I wasn't sure how much I believed this vision of how the future might play out, so I interviewed him for The 80,000 Hours Podcast to probe how well it holds up. He and I covered:

01:30 The case that alignment isn’t enough
14:15 How smart AI advice still leads to terrible outcomes
19:05 How gradual disempowerment occurs
22:10 Economics: Humans become "meddlesome parasites"
29:37 Humans are a "criminally decadent" waste of energy
40:48 Is humans losing control actually bad, ethically?
57:47 Politics: Governments stop needing people
1:10:47 Can human culture survive in an AI-dominated world?
1:27:20 Will the future be determined by competitive or coordinative forces?
1:35:00 Can we find a single good post-AGI equilibria for humans?
1:45:17 Do we know anything useful to do about this?
1:56:42 How important is this problem compared to other AGI issues?
2:05:42 Improving global coordination may be our best bet
2:08:14 The 'Gradual Disempowerment Index'
2:11:22 The government will fight to write AI constitutions
2:17:48 “The intelligence curse” and Workshop Labs
2:23:48 Mapping out disempowerment in a world of aligned AGIs
2:30:10 What do David’s CompSci colleagues make of all this?

Links below — enjoy!

[Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en]

President Zelenskyy on Maduro:

What can I say here? If this can be done to dictators, like that, then the United States of America know what they should do next.

[Ed Krassenstein @EdKrassen]

BREAKING: EVERYONE NEEDS TO HEAR THIS.

Senator Mark Kelly just completely torched Donald Trump:

"When Donald Trump was driving the Taj Mahal casino into bankruptcy, I was getting shot at over Iraq and Kuwait. In 2001, after Donald Trump said that the collapse of the Twin Towers now meant he now owned the tallest skyscraper in Manhattan, I was carrying flags honoring 911 victims into space on a rocket ship. In 2003, when Donald Trump was writing birthday greetings to the monster, Jeffrey Epstein, I was the first on the scene to recover the bodies of my fellow astronauts who died when Space Shuttle Columbia exploded during re-entry. In 2011, when Trump was hosting a reality show, and peddling conspiracy theories against President Barack Obama, I was sitting next to my wife’s hospital bed as she recovered from a gunshot wound to the head."

[Socialist Opera Singer @OperaSocialist]

Your reminder of what the Mail, Express and Sun thought about Liz Truss and her Kamikaze budget