Mark

[Bloomberg @business]

French football club Olympique Lyonnais said it filed a criminal complaint after an internal investigation allegedly highlighted unjustified financial flows worth several hundreds of millions of euros under the previous management https://t.co/qHax2MV3L3

[Fantasy Football Scout @FFScout]

Midfielders in FIFA World Cup Fantasy get an extra point for every 3️⃣ tackles attempted.

We’ve scouted the best MIDs for tackle bonus 🦾

https://t.co/F1y3yg4UrL

[The Square Ball @TheSquareBall]

🥅 ⚽️ FATHER'S DAY = DAD GOALS ⚽️ 🥅

Tell your #lufc supporting father figure they're alright with one of our Dad Goals bundles

All orders come with a free playing card, because why not?

SHOP @ https://t.co/EZZXCteDv5

[Ethan Ampadu @ethanamp26]

25/26 🤍💙💛
At least until the world stops going round… 👀🖊️
#MOT

[The Football History Boys @TFHBs]

There are few World Cup goals as iconic as Dennis Bergkamp’s winner vs Argentina! Unreal!

[Yorkshire Evening Post @LeedsNews]

Ethan Ampadu on signing new Leeds United deal, speculation, next aim and club declaration https://t.co/IKW1qwLluU

[Mark @eddiesLeftFoot]

@sportswebed Stick a badge on the cap and sell it…….

[euan mccolm @euanmccolm]

Under pressure, John Swinney angrily accuses journalists of putting words in his mouth. He’s dead right. It’s just that they’re PRECISELY his own words.

[Florian Ederer @florianederer]

I believe we now have evidence of FIFA's World Cup ticketing shell game: FIFA is colluding with third-party resale platforms for its own supply management.

Look at this SeatGeek map (secondary market!) for Saudi Arabia vs Cape Verde. The circled areas are not random single resale tickets, but large, contiguous blocks of seats: entire rows and swaths in sections 101/102, 112/113, 119/120, 134–137, 139, ...

The blue circles appeared weeks ago, then the purple blocks suddenly showed up a day or two ago, and the red blocks seem to have appeared recently too.

That's not what ordinary fan or even commercial scalper resale looks like who resell pairs, fours, and scattered seats. Instead, this looks like inventory being dumped in bulk onto secondary markets, at prices below FIFA's official site.

Why doesn't FIFA just lower prices on its own site Probably because official price cuts could trigger refund demands, chargebacks, or consumer-protection headaches from fans who already bought at much higher prices.

Instead FIFA keeps official prices high, avoids openly admitting the market-clearing price is lower, and moves unsold inventory through third-party resale platforms instead.

[Scotland’s Story @80_mcswan]

If you want Baroness Michelle Mone removed from the House of Lords and to repay the £136,000,000 owed to taxpayers, please RT!

[BBC News (UK) @BBCNews]

A rare ancient rainforest set to come back to life https://t.co/dWA4yUcRX8

[FlyFifer @FlyFifer10]

No to Scottish Independence and the SNP.

Good point well delivered:

[Mark @eddiesLeftFoot]

@reluctantnicko Yep but slower cos no one will be able to press at all

[Mark @eddiesLeftFoot]

@reluctantnicko Well yeah but it was going down the toilet……could have done it as soon as Alonso talk was happening. Or just told him to wait. Someone has clearly told Irola to wait!

[Mark @eddiesLeftFoot]

@reluctantnicko And why didn’t Liverpool do this 2 weeks ago?

[Mark @eddiesLeftFoot]

@henrywinter And League cup to exclude teams in Europe BUT keep its European spot. I’d also end the EFL trophy & bring back replays for the FA cup. There are too many games for L1 & L2 teams which just increases cost for most of em & damages League Cup & FA cup. 2/2

[Mark @eddiesLeftFoot]

@henrywinter Never ending story this new deal. Gone on as long as the Man City case. Regulator should just step in. End or at least massively reduce & shorten parachute payments, make relegation pay cuts mandatory for ALL PL teams. Income of 25% to EFL. Oh & reduce EFL to 3 leagues of 22 1/2

[Mark @eddiesLeftFoot]

@MarkWilsonRadio He’s not playing ahead of Raphinha though so unless he is being sold……

[Mark @eddiesLeftFoot]

@Buybeckford You want the guy on £300k a week to give up £200k a week? £10m a year? No chance- plus massively over rated with real attitude issues. Would fail the no dickheads policy in about 2 hours

[Tom Westgarth @Tom_Westgarth15]

Laura Gilbert built 10 Data Science and the Incubator for AI, which have both pioneered the deployment of technology across the British state. Few people have contributed more to improving the UK’s state capacity in AI than Laura and the teams she was a part of.

10DS modelling reportedly informed the choice to prioritise by age rather than occupation. This is widely credited with saving lives versus the occupation-based alternative being lobbied for at the time.

10DS and the brilliant folks there did a lot of other great stuff, including building live COVID data that policy teams and the public relied on, as well as releasing a lightweight data sharing tool on GitHub where anyone can access it free of charge. Today, it has amassed over 200,000 public downloads, used by teams across government and industry to make data sharing easy.

Onto AI, where Zack has suggested that Laura doesn’t have lots to offer to public discussion. Whenever I speak with frontier labs, they tell me the U.K. now has the most ambitious and sophisticated approach to deploying AI in public services.

With Extract (which Laura’s Incubator for AI team developed), planning documents are now converted into digital records in 40 seconds, versus the 1–2 hours of planner time it typically takes manually, with higher accuracy. That’s roughly a 100–180x speedup, and is contributing to a 45% reduction in processing time to build the housing and infrastructure the UK is sorely in need of.

The public sector team who built Extract scaffolded Gemini so that it could orchestrate Segment Anything and pose estimation models to map geospatial information from text and diagrams in a way that even the GOOGLE DEEPMIND TEAM hadn’t worked out how to do at the time.

So rather than outsourcing to big tech, which I’m sure Zack and many others are more than sceptical of, Laura helped build true public sector state capacity that reduced our reliance on the private sector, while also delivering a world class public service.

Powerful AI systems are going to usher in a centuries worth of social and economic transformation within only a couple of decades. This requires a deep analysis of where capabilities will develop, an understanding of which externalities we want to mitigate, a vision of what a good life looks like, and amassing the people, tools, infrastructure, and institutions to build that vision. 

Of course Laura is precisely the sort of person that has much to offer in answering these questions. We should be cherishing the tireless civil servants and incredible technical talent that have built capabilities that many folks think the public sector would never be able to do.