rolandomnes

Millennial Miscreant; Master Debater; Arthur Russell Evangelist

[James Wise @Jameswise]

We need around 100 more @AlistairPullen's in the UK, but until that happens it's worth listening to what he's working on @CosineAI below:

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

I talked with a few folks inside Anthropic and I am starting to understand what @karpathy is saying (and what lots of people are misunderstanding)

It's not about Slack, but about a cloud AI, hooked up to ALL internal company systems, that "just works." THIS is the breakthrough

[rolandomnes @rolandomnes]

Just aced the @emma_finance quiz with a perfect 5/5 score! 🎉 Think you can beat me? #EmmaQuiz

[Paarug Sethi @paarugsethi]

all timer

[Mina Kimes @minakimes]

This would be true if the purpose of reading was purely utilitarian. No one is looking at maps for anything other than information; people read for a wide variety of purposes, many of which are contingent on the idea that original thought is involved.

[Suraj Sharma @suraj_sharma14]

Bro I'm so sick of pretending this isn't weird.

The internet spent 20 years creating tutorials, open-source projects, blog posts & answers for free.

AI companies turned all of it into products worth billions.

And now the same people who created that knowledge are being told they're replaceable.

We built the library.

Someone else started charging admission.

[Rowland Manthorpe @rowlsmanthorpe]

Well I found out and the answer is: not very. AI is not a priority for the Burnham team

They do appear to take it seriously but as part of their existing agenda

Main Burnham AI advisors are:

1. Josh Simons. Before becoming an MP he worked for Meta AI. He’s expected to take on a fairly wide role in any new administration and has previously called for tech platforms to be regulated as “utilities for democracy “

2. Antonio Weiss, a Cambridge academic who is currently on the UK Digital Service Responsible AI Panel and has written a book called “AI Demystified”

The agenda is still v much in flux but according to multiple sources the main elements are:

1. A sense that government is getting a lot right on AI

2. A hope that AI can be used to reinvent public services - tech as “digital public infrastructure”. The aim is to get real practical benefits from AI

3. “Pro-decentralisation”: spreading AI’s economic benefits to the rest of the country. One question being asked is: which places outside London could have world-leading ecosystems

4. Reducing US dependence in some way (yet to be defined but I’m told they’re “asking the right questions”)

Lots of questions.

Can you really decentralise without killing growth in London?

Will the “not a priority” policy endure the next AI shock?

And of course: who will be the next Chancellor?

More as I get it

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

Spent 2 hours in a small public park in Barcelona. The adults/parents were eating and drinking (in a covered area before you mention the weather!) while the kids were running around a well kept pond and playing on a basketball court and football pitch. Dozens of kids.

The social value generated by an ordinary space like this, over decades, is incalculable: social capital, better physical and mental health, biodiversity.

With the occasional exception we don’t have this stuff in PFI-Serco-Capita Britain. Because of our model, dominant since around 1980, this would either be an empty landbanked shi*thole, or ‘student’ flats.

We can do a lot better. Part of getting there is that the left needs to stop talking just about redistribution and more about how value is created - which includes *infrastructure* like this.

Maximising broader social and economic value for a space like this - over a century - is a very different proposition to flogging everything to a highest bidder at any given moment.

[Danz 🇵🇹🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇧🇷🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇨🇩🇸🇳 @zinownh]

how the french niggas treating the yewkay lots

[Jack Raines @Jack_Raines]

Every year around my birthday I publish an updated "reflections"-ish piece.

This one is two and a half months late, but my thoughts on optionality, depreciating utility of money, tech sales, intuition, and more.

https://t.co/1CxV6UN9sB

[rolandomnes @rolandomnes]

@DKThomp @s8mb I think we’re seeing the caption is confusing MMs point. Apollo mission is about state capacity.

[Ben Southwood @bswud]

The entire modern world, including capitalism and industrialisation, happened because we beat NIMBYism and vetocracy in 18th-century England.

Today, the vetocracy, the stakeholder state, the NIMBYs stop us building the nuclear power plants, railways, houses, towers, bridges, roads, gas turbines, solar panels, and powerlines that we need for growth.

Then, they stopped people from consolidating their land, transporting goods freely, investing in irrigation, and mortgaging their property to invest. The events that led to their downfall are called the Glorious Revolution. I think we can repeat what they did and have another Glorious Revolution of our own.

https://t.co/5PrKLK1nah

Early modern Europe was sclerotic, stifled by NIMBYs of its own: the aristocrats, guilds, and clergy who stood against the reforms that were necessary for 18th-century progress. Everyone knew that inheritance rules split land up too much, everyone knew that common land was overgrazed, everyone knew that property rights restricted making best use of land, labour, and capital.

Each one of them decided the answer was consolidating power in an absolute monarch. Each one of them failed completely. They didn't crush the NIMBYs: the NIMBYs crushed them.

One country launched itself into rapid growth, creating the industrial modernity we live under today: England. It did this, as everyone agreed was necessary, by overriding the tangle of landowner property rights that prevented best use of land. But it tried something almost unbelievable: to get the landowner NIMBYs to crush themselves.

England did not attempt to set up an absolutist state: quite the opposite. It gave landowners supreme power, and they used it to crush their fellows: the minority of landowners who were opposed to progress.

There are lessons for today. Many modern reformers think that the answer to NIMBYs is demonising them, trying to build an angry coalition of forces who hate homeowners or boomers or Republicans or environmentalists. But many of the most successful reform schemes operating around the world today try a different tack: bring a majority of homeowners onside, and it is much, much easier to crush the remaining NIMBYs.

We can still learn from England's Glorious Revolution.

Read my latest article, with historian Kara Dimitruk, in @WorksInProgMag.

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

A plausible and frightening vision of Europe's near future, ending in economic collapse and vassal status under the US or China. Enjoyed reading it, although I feel a little depressed now.

https://t.co/Pe3ddlUBtS

[brian b.dot™️ miller @bdotTM]

this looks like when they tried to integrate schools in the south.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

Very kind of Dara to sprinkle some tasty morsels into every AI camp's feeding trough

For the AI-value skeptics: They blew thru their annual AI budget in a quarter and they're already pivoting

For skeptics who say the frontier labs have no moat: Once Uber figures out what works, Dara says they'll switch to "efficient models or even "open source."

For the AI boosters: He's still pushing teams to "fundamentally use the power of AI to rebuild systems and processes from the bottoms up"

[Alhan Gençay @alhan]

Culture Vulture

[rolandomnes @rolandomnes]

@stanfield_12 Fatality

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

“The Soho Society…voted in its AGM on Thursday for a new licensing mandate, meaning it will challenge all new applications for bars and restaurants in the area, including *renewals of existing licences*.”

NIMBY final boss!

[Tom Harwood @tomhfh]

Every time I see these stats I am just as astonished at the first time I read any version of them.

“There are about 450,000 socially rented homes in inner London. This is about one in three homes. About half of the 450,000 are occupied by lead tenants who are not working, either because they are retired (18%), disabled (13%), caring for someone else (7%), studying (2%), or unemployed/otherwise inactive (11%).”

[Zohran Kwame Mamdani @ZohranKMamdani]

we both up now