Rohan Samuel

💻 Software Developer & ✨ Heavy Content Consumer

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

A reality check to the Government on the climate crisis.

Heatwaves this year estimated to have killed thousands of people.

The BBC didn't stream this emergency conference at all despite the urgency & their constant coverage of Reform - thank you to Sky.
https://t.co/IsycfbTRqy

[DiEM25 @DiEM_25]

This heat is not only a climate emergency, it is class war. The rich burn the planet, then buy air conditioning, private pools and second homes while workers are left in overheated flats, unsafe jobs, failed public services and burning cities. Climate Action Now!

[Cambridge University @Cambridge_Uni]

The UK government has announced plans to introduce a social media ban for under-16s by spring 2027.

Professor @Sander_vdLinden shares his reaction to today's news, and measures it against the evidence we already have about social media restrictions.

Learn more about his proposal for social media passports 👉 https://t.co/jqdggjan0E

Professor Sander van der Linden is the Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory and a Professorial Fellow of @ChurchillCol.

#SocialMediaBan #SocialMedia

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

Big up, Uncle Ian Wright for speaking up, and he's 100% correct.

Look how Qatar got dragged when they were hosting the World Cup.

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

Westminster may finally be about to have the argument it has spent 40 years avoiding.

If Andy Burnham returns to Parliament, the political class will know how to cover it. A leadership drama. Who is up, who is down, whether Keir Starmer can survive, whether Labour is once again turning inward. The familiar machinery of Westminster psychodrama will whirr into life.

That framing misses the larger point. Burnham’s possible return matters not because of what it says about Labour’s leadership, but because of what it reveals about the British state: what it can still do, what it has forgotten how to do, and what kind of country it must become if it is serious about resilience.

Britain is finally having a more serious conversation about national security. The Strategic Defence Review, the pivot back towards Europe, the recognition that hybrid warfare turns citizens, infrastructure and civic institutions into part of the front line: all of it marks a real shift in how the state thinks about its own survival.
But at the centre of that conversation lies a question that the defence establishment, and most of Westminster, still does not want to answer. What kind of society do you need to be before resilience is possible?

Finland is now the model everyone cites. Comprehensive security. Whole-of-society defence. Civilian preparedness woven into military planning. British strategists admire the Finnish system and ask how it might be copied. But the admiration stops short of the uncomfortable question: why does it work there?

The answer is not geography or history or some mysterious quality of Finnish national character. It is structural. Nearly 80% of Finns say they would defend their country if attacked. In Britain, the figure is closer to 33%. That gap is not an accident. It exists because Finland has spent decades building a society in which people have a genuine stake in what they are being asked to defend. Energy is affordable. Housing is available. Public services function. Institutions command trust. The Nordic welfare state is not a sentimental add-on to Finnish security policy. It is the foundation of it. You cannot ask people to defend a country that does not work for them.

Britain has spent 40 years building the opposite. The privatisation of essentials – energy, water, transport, housing – transferred wealth upwards from households to shareholders while making the basics of everyday life more expensive. The state, stripped of the tools to control costs at source, has been reduced to compensating after the fact.

Out of every pound the Government spends on housing, 88p goes to subsidising private rents. Just 12p goes to building homes. When energy prices spiked in 2022, the Government spent £40bn in a single winter cushioning the blow, not because it had a resilient energy system but because it lacked one. Debt interest now consumes more than £100bn a year. Britain has the highest debt servicing costs in the G7: the compounding price of financing failure rather than eliminating it at source.

This is what bond market dependency actually looks like. It is not an abstract fiscal condition. It is the consequence of a state that has been stripped of the supply-side tools that would let it cure the problems it now pays, indefinitely, to manage. And here is the paradox the Treasury refuses to confront. The countries that borrow most cheaply are often those that have retained the public investment model Britain abandoned. The spread between UK and Dutch borrowing costs has widened sharply not because markets fear public investment, but because they have lost confidence in a model that borrows to subsidise private failure while never addressing its causes.

This is the connection Britain’s defence debate is missing. The familiar framing, that social spending is what must be sacrificed to meet the NATO target, is not merely politically toxic. It is strategically illiterate. Cutting the foundations of social cohesion to fund the hardware of national defence is self-defeating. You end up with planes and no pilots, submarines and no crew, an army that cannot recruit because the society it is meant to protect has stopped believing in itself.

I think Burnham understands this. That is why his programme is more interesting than the leadership gossip suggests. What he has been building in Greater Manchester – public control of transport, expanded social housing, investment in the productive foundations of the city economy – is not a nostalgic rerun of postwar nationalisation. It is a proof of concept for a different kind of state.

The Bee Network is the most visible example, but the argument behind it travels. A state that can shape markets is not condemned to subsidise their failures. A state that produces affordable energy through public generation does not need to spend tens of billions cushioning every price shock. A state with a serious public housebuilding programme does not need housing benefit to rise endlessly in line with private rents. A state that builds institutions people can see, use and trust begins to restore the civic confidence on which resilience depends.

The real constraint on Britain is not money. It is capacity: the workers, institutions, supply chains and public purpose needed to turn national will into national renewal. Britain’s tragedy is not that it has run out of money. It is that after 40 years of hollowing out the state, it has made itself less able to act.

Burnham’s critics will reach for the familiar warning. Borrow more, spend more, spook the gilt markets, repeat the Truss disaster. But this misunderstands both the problem and the opportunity.

Bond markets do not have ideological preferences. They have functional ones. They prefer clarity, credible revenue streams, productive investment, and a state with a plan. What they punish is not public ambition but incoherence. A properly designed productive state programme would not be a leap into fiscal fantasy. It would be an attempt to end the much costlier fantasy that Britain can keep borrowing to compensate for broken markets while refusing to repair them.

The defence conversation and the economic conversation need to become the same conversation. Finland did not build national resilience by choosing between welfare and security. It built resilience by understanding that they are inseparable: that a country in which the basics work, where people trust one another and the institutions around them, is one that can face danger with something more than anxiety.

That is the deeper argument Burnham represents. Westminster will be tempted to treat him as a leadership story. It should resist the temptation. The question is not whether Burnham can return to parliament. It is whether Britain can return to the idea that the state should make life work. Because a country that cannot command the confidence of its people cannot truly defend itself.

[Rohan Samuel @rohanmsamuel]

@levelsio What do you mean when you say they have the wrong solutions? And out of curiosity what do you think the right solutions are?

[Rohan Samuel @rohanmsamuel]

1. Open Claude
2. Prompt it to write some content on a topic you like
3. Get it to create a PDF with the content
4. Job done 🚀

Really cool to see this new agentic tool developed by my colleagues @serendipity_ai get out there 💪

[Serendipity AI @serendipity_ai]

https://t.co/LoAdoBPW3S A demo of our experimental markdown to PDF converter which mashes together @AnthropicAI's Claude, L402 payments and Model Context Protocol into an agentic workflow, with payment handled by @getAlby (examples also in SDK for @fewsats @lnbits) @lightning

[Serendipity AI @serendipity_ai]

In the agent economy, AI agents are the new buyers, so we created this experimental service using L402 and MCP to enable agents to convert the typical markdown output of LLMs to high-quality PDFs. Learn more at https://t.co/VGQmdtllrA. SDKs support @fewsats @getAlby @lnbits.

[Rohan Samuel @rohanmsamuel]

Again wanted to spotlight the amazing work from my colleagues to ship this amazing AI document generator!

Built as a universal app with Expo 👌 feedback and testing would be much appreciated to help them take it to the next level 🙏

[syntheticdocs @syntheticdocs]

Our mobile apps are here! 🚀

Draft professional documents with AI wherever you are. Sync seamlessly between web and mobile — start a document in your client meeting, finish it on your commute.

Download now:
🍏 iOS: https://t.co/UriDFNHn0E
🤖 Android: https://t.co/fORmgsPxrK

[syntheticdocs @syntheticdocs]

You spend hours on a doc. They only read the summary.

Make it less painful. Try syntheticdocs: https://t.co/3phMZW6WUD

#PDF #Word #Document #AI #ContentGeneration

[syntheticdocs @syntheticdocs]

If you’re curious about how syntheticdocs works—or want to try it yourself—check it out here: https://t.co/SOfk2et6f9

We're welcoming early users and would love your feedback 🛠️✨

[Rohan Samuel @rohanmsamuel]

Our colleagues at our company have been whipping up something special over the past 2 years ✨ if you're keen to try the new product, check out the account below and sign up! The team is very keen to gather as much feedback as possible!

[syntheticdocs @syntheticdocs]

We're curious — how many hours do you spend getting a document to its first draft? And how much quicker do you think that could be if you had an AI-document assistant?

[George Alexiou @georgealexiou_]

Excited to share my first article on #visionOS app development with #swiftUI and #realityKit on the @serendipity_ai blog.

Here I explore using AI-generated 360 images to create realistic immersive views for users.

Article: https://t.co/mreqidb7Wa
Repo: https://t.co/5n48i86Srv

[Callum Hemsley @hemsley_callum]

Super excited to write about offline first with Expo and Legend State here! Please give it a read and let me know what you think 🤩 Thread to come in the following day or so!🧵

[React Native London @RNLConf]

Curious about how big tech giants are using React Native? We're hosting a panel discussion with developers from industry leaders on their use React Native!

🎟️ Grab your tickets here: https://t.co/f5VfgLJjRg

👀 Stay posted for speakers details...

[Justin Kek @justin_kek]

📱In collaboration with experts from @theodo_uk and @bam_lab, I've written a comprehensive series exploring #flutter vs #reactnative from the perspective of a CTO, Senior Dev and Junior Dev!

Full Series: https://t.co/nQVjAncbDv

[Rohan Samuel @rohanmsamuel]

Really insightful article by my colleague and coachee, Matt Newhall, introducing Zod and it's capacity to create shared typings between backend and frontend codebases. 👀

Worth a read for Zod newcomers: https://t.co/ftDtLmLVYt

[Rohan Samuel @rohanmsamuel]

@georgealexiou_ @reactjs @tailwindcss You clearly didn't need any help with knowning with divs were looking at this🤩