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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 6h

Putting Traitors into the Bluesky search function is quite a rollercoaster ride.

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 7h

Celia Imre and Tom Daley - hmm. Both have the aura of harmlessness.

Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 11h

If you're going to dunk on Milei's devotees or the MMT advocates, you have to have some idea of what you think will work instead. Right now, there seems to be only defeatism.

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 11h

My main thought about British politics just now is that I'm keen to hear from anyone with a new theory of growth. The old ones aren't working and no one seems to be coming up with much new, and instead we're retrying the ones that have already failed.

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 14h

Twitter meets the real world.

Andrew R @excelpope.net · 14h

See yer da’s got a new car.

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 14h

Well *clearly* it's better to be a Traitor than a Faithful, because you're only at risk of being eliminated once a day rather than twice a day, and the odds are stacked in your favour at the end.

YouGov @yougov.co.uk · 14h

With Celebrity Traitors kicking off tonight, our study of 35,000 Britons found that 20% would prefer to be a Traitor versus 55% a Faithful - but how do the two groups differ in terms of politics and personality? 👇

YouGov @yougov.co.uk · Jan 22

"I don't mind being ruthless to get what I want": how do the personalities of Britain's traitors and faithfuls differ?

YouGov Profiles data shows traitors have more ruthless, deceptive, money-oriented, risk-taking and rule-breaking tendencies than faithfuls 👇

yougov.co.uk/entertainmen...

Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 15h

The only prize for Kemi in 2025.

The Guardian @theguardian.com · 15h

Nobel prize in chemistry awarded to scientists for work on porous materials

Trio honoured for developing revolutionary materials for applications ranging from gas storage to drug delivery The Nobel prize in chemistry has been awarded to three scientists who created revolutionary porous materials that can harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide from industrial facilities and remove toxins from water. Susumu Kitagawa, of Kyoto University, Richard Robson, of the University of Melbourne, and Omar Yaghi, of the University of California, Berkeley, shared the 11m Swedish kronor (about £871,400) prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Continue reading...

www.theguardian.com

Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 16h

Also, why on earth would an opposition party reinstate a tax break for private schools years after the event? Whether the original decision to scrap it was right or wrong (spoiler, it was right), behaviours will have adjusted by then. It's giving a bung to the richest for no good reason.

Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 16h

I know this is hardly the biggest point (and I know the real answer), but why would an opposition party make tax and spending pledges *four years* from a general election, when the circumstances in which that campaign will be fought are quite unknowable.

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 17h

That, coupled with a lack of flexibility. When the Conservatives lost in 1945, their position was confuted. Their leadership had the wit to rethink what Conservativism meant post-war, and were back in power and ideologically rooted in 6 years.

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Reposted by Alastair Meeks

Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 17h

One of the Conservative party's contributions to our country has been keeping people who think you can measure integration through skin colour out of office - what next, are they only going to be lukewarm on the property-owning democracy?

Thank the Tories for keeping Robert Jenrick out of high office

Shadow justice secretary’s comment about not seeing a ‘white face’ shows he does not understand integration

www.ft.com

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 17h

Also, there's a photograph of the Duke of Wellington.

Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 17h

As usual, my example is that Anthony Eden's widow would have had a Covid jab.

rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social · 1d

you ever think about those real weird overlaps. like tennessee williams might have listened to the ramones

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 18h

It's the sheer carelessness with their voter base that is so striking about the Conservatives' current approach, at a time when they are desperately low on support.

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 18h

If you want to retain your ethnic minority voters, banging on about failure to integrate is probably not going to help.

If you want to retain the quarter of your supporters who want to remain in the ECHR, taking a dogmatic approach on this is probably not going to help.

!/2

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 21h

The Lib Dems’ challenge is to remain a blank canvass onto which voters can project their hopes. As they get more scrutiny, that will become harder.

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 21h

The government equivalent of finding a fiver down the side of the sofa.

FinTwitter @fintwitter.bsky.social · 21h

UK public borrowing revised down by £3B due to VAT data error – ONS.

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 21h

Also underpriced: a Labour majority and a Lib Dem surge.

The Lib Dems are polling 10% ahead of the equivalent point in the last Parliament. They have not one but three potential sources of additional votes (Labour, Cons, Don’t Know). They are close to a tipping point. But no one is noticing.

John Oxley @joxley.jmoxley.co.uk · 21h

Think an underpriced 2029 scenario is "ungovernable mess".

Rob Ford @robfordmancs.bsky.social · 1d

Four parties within a 5 point swing of first place and five parties on 12% plus.

This would be pure chaos under first past the post.

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 21h

On the question of an AI bubble, I found this by Jon Evans of Gradient Ascendant a thoughtful take.

The AI Horseshoe Spectrum

…You’d think there’d be quite a range between “end of the species” and “immortal luxury for all,” but no, those are the two main camps. (If you’re thinking, hey, those both sound insufficiently weird: you’re right.) Kind of hard to talk about those outcomes and also, in the same breath, include sober quantified analysis of investment growth by sector and how long a recession might last, you know?

But let’s try. Another way to frame AI beliefs is as a spectrum:

AI is a once-in-a-species tech that will utterly transform the world by 2030¹.
AI is an important but normal technology.
AI is useless and counterproductive, the technological equivalent of asbestos.
…There’s a sort of horseshoe theory here where people on either extreme end of this spectrum, despite having what are theoretically opposed views, sound a lot more like each other than they probably want to admit: evangelistic, hectoring, suspiciously disingenuous when it comes to ignoring countervailing evidence, convinced their opposite counterparts are scamming grifters, and ultimately thoroughly unconvincing.

The problem is that the reality is probably neither an endpoint or the midpoint on that spectrum, and where exactly will dictate just how ill-advised this bubble. The hyperscalers are making a conscious bet that AI is somewhere between 1 and 2 on that spectrum. The doomsayers are protesting that it’s somewhere between 2 and 3. Nobody really knows, yet, and anybody who says that they do is selling something.

But for better or worse, we’ll find out relatively soon, thanks to the hyperscalers…

My own view meshes pretty well with Epoch AI’s recent report on AI in 2030; call it a 1.5ish on the scale above. (Maybe more like 1.66 but who’s counting.) If so, then several hundred billion dollars is a completely reasonable investment! The world already spends at least $1 trillion/year on software, so if AI merely doubles the efficiency of software development — which seems at least plausible, we’re not there yet but we’re getting there, vibecoding has changed a lot (for the better) just over the last several months — then AI is a $500B/year technology on that alone.

(Note however this still isn’t anywhere near position 1. The contours of the jagged frontier still seem fundamentally unchanged, and we won’t get “transformative AI” without surmounting it.)

So How Bad Will The Pop Be?

Yeah I mean the problem with that question is that the answer depends entirely on where we are on that spectrum above.

If we do live in a 1.5ish world, then the focus on the depreciation of GPUs is myopic, and claims that we’re wasting money on useless infrastructure seem kinda ridiculous. Demand for inference will continue to grow; data centers full of old chips will still be useful, especially as investment in new GPUs drops post-bubble. Previous-generation chips aren’t useless, just relatively inefficient. The analogy to fiber optic cables holds.

Perhaps more importantly, the other infrastructure being built out is infrastructure for the production of new GPUs. That definitely retains value in a 1.5 world.

In that case, this is, in fact … relative to the long-term importance of AI … a boring, normal tech bubble. Sorry. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it will deflate not pop; but that seems unjustifiably optimistic. AI is sucking capital from other sectors, and that will make the pop pretty painful. Again, sorry. The long- and even medium-run gain will be more than worth it, but that won’t make it sting any less.

But if we live in a 2, or, AGI help us, a 2.5 world? Then this will go down as one of history’s great blunders. I’m pretty sure we don’t — but, for better or worse, we’re all likely to know that answer within the next few years.

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Look, I’m being generous/conservative here, people actually argue by the end of 2027. I was loosely involved in AI 2027 - long story, maybe I’ll write about it sometime - and let’s just say that involvement did not increase my belief in its conclusions.

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 1d

(It should not need to be said, but to put the point beyond all doubt, I have no qualms about prosecuting cases where threats to kill are made.)

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 1d

Not Reform's favourite political prisoner, I infer.

The Guardian @theguardian.com · 1d

Nigel Farage felt ‘genuinely worried’ by alleged TikTok death threat, court hears

Fayaz Khan, 26, is on trial at Southwark crown court, accused of threatening to shoot Reform UK leader Nigel Farage felt “genuinely worried” after a man allegedly posted a TikTok video threatening to come to Britain and shoot him, a court has heard. The Reform UK leader was giving evidence at the trial of Fayaz Khan, 26, who has been charged with threatening to kill the Reform UK leader last year in a post Farage described as “pretty chilling”. Continue reading...

www.theguardian.com

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 1d

Huge immigration leaving the indigenous population in a tiny minority?

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 1d

The main thing I see coming out of the party conference season is that no party has the glimmerings of a theory of economic revival. We're heading for another lost decade as a result.

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 1d

Perhaps he's caught in a bizarre love triangle?

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 1d

It's huge in Hungary - a radio staple.

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