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Reposted by Joshua Barretto

Tom Whyman @tomwhyman.bsky.social · 4h

Wow! It's good that AI is going to unlock massive productivity gains and unleash the fourth industrial revolution, or else we'd really be in trouble.

Unusual Whales @unusualwhales.bsky.social · 2d

AI bubble now 17 times bigger than dot-com boom and four times larger than subprime crisis, per MW

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 3h

"People may be using artificial intelligence, but that doesn’t mean it’s useful"

@eryk.bsky.social in @techpolicypress.bsky.social is really great:

www.techpolicy.press/generative-a...

Generative AI’s Productivity Myth | TechPolicy.Press

People may be using artificial intelligence, but that doesn’t mean it’s useful, writes Eryk Salvaggio.

www.techpolicy.press

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potion of @candlestick.bsky.social · 18h

installed the feed that lets me read every bluesky post in alphabetical order. lot of screaming thus far

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Gabriel Milland @gabrielmilland.bsky.social · 7d

I don't think Robert Jenrick realises that the people clapping along to him when he talks about Handsworth would clap along if he said the same about Stamford Hill. I'd hope that would give him pause for thought.

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Colin Murray @colinmurray.bsky.social · 8d

Robert Buckland epitomises the branch of conservatism that pays attention to the Union (and the legal commitments underpinning it), values personal liberty and instinctively distrusts silver bullet solutions to multi-faceted issues. Feeling for him today:

conservativehome.com/2025/10/05/r...

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Jonn Elledge @jonnelledge.bsky.social · 8d

I do think the media is giving too much attention to the possibility of Farage winning an election that's nearly four years away. I also think it's underplaying the extremely high possibility that, even if he does, he immediately drowns in the same mire that swallowed Starmer and Sunak before him

Financial Times @financialtimes.com · 8d

Reform likely to raise Kent council tax after cost-cutting drive falters on.ft.com/4pTvJ62

Reform likely to raise Kent council tax after cost-cutting drive falters

Nigel Farage’s party promised to revive local authority finances by slashing wasteful spending

on.ft.com

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 8d

An astronaut, looking at the Earth: “Wait, it’s all social care obligations?”
Behind them, another astronaut, drawing a gun to shoot them in the back: “Always has been.”

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.com · 8d

This might be true in a hand-wavey numbers sense, but obscures a more inconvenient truth: people are getting wealthier (if you smooth out the bumps in the data) but happiness is much more strongly correlated with equality.

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James Austin @jamesdaustin.bsky.social · 8d

One thing I believe that everyone in society should do, fairly regularly, is some sort of doorknocking in one of the more disadvantaged areas of the country.

So much stuff is just... detached from the reality of poverty and those sad little tragedies you encounter. Its vital and grounding

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Nute @nutedawn.bsky.social · 9d

I had a weird dream that the Conservative Party, which rejects the idea that there should be money available for things like 'basic policing services' or 'care for the elderly', has committed itself to a colossal new state deportation project which it has branded by association with Donald Trump

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 11d

I didn't know until we buried my mother, so probably most people here don't know: Jewish cemeteries strongly recommend that you get insurance for the headstone.

Because the cemeteries are so often desecrated, the gravestones smashed.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.com · 10d

I imagine that most of that 13% are just people that accidentally misremembered NHS advice or something and haven't been swayed by the US situation also.

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 12d

The kind of thing that forecasters and economists are blind to is the fact that the decision to set a five-year forecast window as the basis of the whole framework is itself a democratic deficit; it introduces a bias against a whole space of possible politics.

Simon Wren-Lewis @sjwrenlewis.bsky.social · 14d

New post: Misunderstandings on the left (and elsewhere) about the OBR, independence and the bond market
mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2025/09/misu...
The government delegating some highly technical tasks to independent experts doesn't create a democratic deficit, but it does avoid wishful thinking.

Misunderstandings on the left (and elsewhere) about the OBR, independence and the bond market

I often see pieces from those on the left criticising the OBR. Here is Louise Haigh , for example, talking about the “rigid orthodoxy of t...

mainlymacro.blogspot.com

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Tom Roberts @tpgroberts.bsky.social · 12d

Fundamentally, if you were designing a refugee policy that annoyed everyone, then I'm not sure you could do much worse than still accepting refugees but turning them into a permanently precarious underclass.

Alan Beattie @alanbeattie.bsky.social · 12d

But I was told that Keir Starmer’s conference speech marked a pivot away from imitating Reform and towards a bold new liberal something! I WAS PROMISED!

on.ft.com/4mGqFPF

UK to scrap right of refugees to seek permanent residency after 5 years

Policy comes as Keir Starmer seeks to toughen stance on immigration and fend off Reform UK

on.ft.com

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.com · 13d

Turning a big dial labelled "pissing off the Daily Mail" and glancing back at the audience like a contestant on The Price Is Right

Alfie Tobutt @alfietobutt.bsky.social · 13d

DAILY MAIL: The day Labour dragged politics into the gutter #TomorrowsPapersToday

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Ben Ansell @benansell.bsky.social · 13d

Seeing him and the conference finally rise to this is quite something. You can see the surge of confidence in the speech as he realises, hey basic antiracist rhetoric is popular and I believe it too! Glad the message has sunk in.

Adam Schwarz @adamjschwarz.bsky.social · 14d

Wow Starmer finally drawing a line!

"If you say or imply that people cannot be English or British because of the colour of their skin, that mixed-heritage families owe you an explanation... If you say that they should now be deported, then mark my words - we will fight you with everything we have".

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.com · 17d

Yeah, fair enough. LLMs are doing more than enough damage despite lacking 'intelligence'. I've just screwed around with misbehaving genetic/q-learning algorithms enough to be wary of the "actually this is a nothingburger, we don't need to talk about existential risk at all" crowd. They are wrong.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.com · 17d

I don't think so. Accretion disks always glow, because matter in the disk is sufficiently tightly packed that it's heating up and glowing due to black body radiation. I think the difference is that black hole star would be structurally stable even if the black hole was not there.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.com · 17d

Like, I think it's fairly evidently throwing the baby out with the bathwater. "These guys are weird losers so the entire crux of their argument must be wrong". The former is undoubtedly true, but warnings about existential risk have also come from many more reputable sources.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.com · 17d

I think there's some truth here, but the article seems quite confused. It argues that anthropomorphism is a key failing of the text it is reviewing, then immediately makes an argument about wealth accumulation that relies on a far greater anthropomorphisation of the technology. Quite bizarre.

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social · Aug 11

ChatGPT is probably the biggest honey pot of willingly-turned over highly confidential information that has ever been created in human history.

Sam @very-simple.com · Aug 11

also, so many of these people are just taking company confidential, proprietary data and dumping it into public iterations of ChatGPT, which is so incredibly problematic on so many levels. Even on our internal approved tools I have to tell people to turn them off when discussing certain legal stuff!

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Ruth Curtice @ruthcurtice.bsky.social · 21d

Report out on tax options for the Budget. 2p income tax rise alongside 2p national insurance cut would mean no tax rise for an employee whose income comes from a job. With employment overtaxed at the moment, workers pay packets should be protected and distortions in the tax system removed.

2p switch from National Insurance to Income Tax could raise £6 billion while protecting workers’ pay packets • Resolution Foundation

The Chancellor should protect workers’ pay packets and level the playing field on how different forms of income are taxed – including a 2p cut in employee National Insurance (NI) offset by a 2p rise i...

www.resolutionfoundation.org

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 20d

I'm very very very slightly torn on this. I mean obviously the whole tylenol prenancy autism thing is just another "punish women for everything" piece of right wing garbage. But also tylenol is incredibly dangerous and causes acute liver failure and death at astonishing rates nobody talks about.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.com · 21d

Part of Long Osborne is this knee-jerk tendency politicians have to believe that negative campaigning will somehow accrue them influence. Despite the only resoundingly successful election success since 2008 (2019) being fought in broadly hopeful terms by Johnson.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.com · 21d

The turbofish in the ocean, perhaps?

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