David Elikwu FRSA ⚔️

Today my book Sovereign finally launches. It’s a handbook for outsiders ready to bend reality in their favour. It’s a manual for making things happen, and a guide to creating the outcomes you want. Sovereign will show you how to (1) nurture ambition, (2) develop agency, and (3) navigate adversity, regardless of your starting point. One reader called it: “A manual for life - modern stoicism at its best” Others have called it “Clear, useful, and entirely uninterested in gimmicks, and “Refreshingly sane”. A year ago I decided to write the best book I was capable of, distilling the last five years of my work and so much more. It’s been an incredible journey. Buy Sovereign today to... • Stop following the default path and learn to architect a life on your own terms. 🗺️ • Break through self-imposed limits by understanding how to rewrite the rules you quietly accepted. • Build the practical toolkit of trailblazers—from faster learning to authentic influence—to make your vision a reality. • Turn inevitable adversity into your greatest training ground for resilience and strength. 💪 You can get it on Amazon today (and a bunch of other places)

YIkes – welcome to 2015

@WantMakeRE @Mind_of_yakub @interesting_aIl Is this Perplexity?

@Mind_of_yakub @interesting_aIl They did a lot of fighting.

So how tf did anyone win

@venturetwins nice

Truly blown away by a new AI image model launching this week ✨ Finally, you can generate photos that actually look like you! It's so much better than everything I've tried - from LoRAs to NB Pro. Onboarding some early testers. DM or comment if you want access 👀

Getting on Hacker News - @kadavy via @itstheknowledge 🎙️

@SonnyTLoughran Yep you can basically use this checklist for every post and one of them will explain it

had a quick look through this account and bascially every example is a leasehold lol

@LondonPriceDrop Half of these posts are often explained by houses split into flats / divorce sales / leasehold renewals or charges / overpriced new builds / shared ownership / HTB scheme sales where the government still owns a chunk of equity, etc. Rarely a real property issue.

Sold for £550k in Nov 25 Previously sold in 2018 for £825k (£1.1m inflation adjusted) rightmove.co.uk/house-prices/d…

@LondonMoneyFS Or it’s just ridiculous ground rent. In these flats it’s about £16k apparently. Boggles the mind but also a very different problem than pure property pricing.

@LondonMoneyFS My problem with it on the whole is half of the posts from it I see are often explained by houses split into flats / divorce sales / overpriced new builds / shared ownership / HTB scheme sales where the government still owns a chunk of equity, etc etc.

Wish I’d thought of this account

@MalcolmX_90s @rowanajmarshall @LondonMoneyFS This

@rowanajmarshall @LondonMoneyFS I think this is due to large amount of new build properties. There tends to be this issue as sale prices are over inflated and after some years they lose their wow factor or over influx of new builds. House prices are falling in London. But who knows we could see a crash!

Anthropomorphising AI chatbots and agents will likely prove to have been a catastrophic mistake. It's the primary cause for a whole range of AI psychoses - AI penpals and girlfriends, AI convincing people to do stupid things or kill themselves, etc. Every now and then, I get angry that my agent has made a stupid mistake and have to catch myself and ask why. The only reason I have this kind of emotional response is that the AI tries to relate and engage with me like a human. So when it makes a mistake, I react as though a human has done something stupid. When it lies, it is as though a human has lied. But I don't react the same way when my computer used to restart at a bad time or some work didn't save before a crash. I was only ever angry at myself - what could the computer do about it? It's just a machine. These things happen. My reaction to AI mistakes is just a drop in the bucket of all the emotional entanglements people are developing while interacting through AI interfaces. And we have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes. The only time these entanglements are noteworthy is when you see a real-world catastrophe like murder or suicide following an AI engagement. We have no idea how much trouble we're in for. Not simply because of the risk that AI ever falls out of alignment, but because of all the ways AI – like a gravity well of attention – is pulling humans out of alignment, and into a nebulous grey zone. You see crumbs of this already, in the people who bark "Grok, is this true?" when presented with the most basic information. You can already see people's brains smoothing over as the friction of deep thought is sanded over by automated output. You see, on social platforms everywhere, a strange mirror-world forming as people use AI to reply to posts also with AI in a nefarious circle-jerk of empty platitudes. You see the people, already becoming numb to the nuances of human interaction, using ChatGPT to email friends and text crushes, turning themselves into intermediary button-pushers for eventual AI-to-AI engagements. You see the midwits fancying themselves geniuses because a text chat on their phone praises their every thought as "absolutely right" while they drift deeper into delirium. It will soon be obvious that it was a mistake to shape AI as your friend/coworker/therapist/lover instead of simply an 'answer machine'. And by then it will be far too late to put the genie back in the bottle.

Building career momentum - @jenny_blake via @itstheknowledge 🎙️

Very often the truth is the simple thing everyone already knows, except it's so painfully obvious that nobody actually believes it. We believe things have to be far more complicated than they are.

@goddek @marklevinshow why even bother buying so many fake followers?

@marklevinshow And this is a moldy slice of bread. It will get more likes than your post.

It's important to revisit this:   This is the suicidal insanity of the Woke Reich neo-fascists.  It's not about forever wars, American First, or MAGA.  It's about affirmatively encouraging the development and acquisition of nuclear weapons by the Iranian regime.   algemeiner.com/2026/01/22/tuc…

@BeFe56044218 @BeckyLTuch @nytimes ? Lolwut

@Delikwu @BeckyLTuch @nytimes u really used AI to say alladat

Wow. This 2025 Modern Love column in NY Times. Human writing or...? 😬 I don't want to falsely accuse writers of AI-use. But this reads EXACTLY like AI slop. And this is the frickin @nytimes Modern Love column, which is notoriously competitive, super hard to break into. Just sad.

@marknorm Shane Gillis Alexander

Magic ‘the gathering’ Johnson

We do ourselves a disservice by hating AI writing simply because it was written by AI. It is enough to hate it simply because it is bad. The whole premise of slop is that it's 'mid'. You hate it because it's formulaic and boring; verbose and redundant. It lacks taste and reference and the colour of a life outside of this one piece of output. It lacks life because it never had it. Mid writing has always existed as the SEO-fodder layer of the internet. It sounds soulless because it is – it was being written, often overseas in slop factories, to sell affiliate links and bridge the gap between AdWords slots. AI writing is mid because the internet was previously full of mid writing that you often ignored because you knew it was dull and deficient and bad. Mid writing becoming accessible to a broad cohort of bad writers who could only ever hope of being mid is not terrible. I can see why it is useful. What it shouldn't be, is an excuse to lower standards. Writers who know better, who are intentionally degrading themselves and sliding into 'mid' territory should be called out / let know – to the extent they care at all about their craft and their betterment.

@MikeIsaac This is a massive part of it. But the other half (esp when responding) is the debate school classic of simply not accepting loaded dice. Loaded i.e. terms/framings that inherit a set of unfettered points which force a conversation into a prefixed lane.

what makes carlson so effective is the dumb guy school of journalism, which i think is often underutilized in media homing in on one simple question and asking someone to explain themselves rather than trying to seem like the smartest person in the room

Learn to earn the things you want - @hiiamArielle via @itstheknowledge 🎙️

@stillshowing_up @that_stocks_guy If you make +£200k a year which is many city lawyers of my vintage you’re filling that ISA simply by needing somewhere to put the money.

@that_stocks_guy the £20k ISA point is the one that actually stings. people are literally spending their entire yearly investment allowance just to look the part in a car park. owning a boring car with money working in the background is so much quieter and so much more powerful

I used to think like this but it turns out some people just have money. The lie that everyone driving a decent car lives in fear of their credit card debt, and are one redundancy away from penury, is designed to make you feel better about not having what they have.