Julia Bell

What would the world be like without writing? Answers on my Substack …. open.substack.com/pub/professorb…

“Practice any art… no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.” - McKellen reciting Vonnegut

""There should be a simple rule for being a thinker," says Cal Newport. "Don’t let AI write anything for you. Writing is to cognitive health what steps are to physical health"": chronicle.com/article/why-it…

The people responsible for Britain losing two decades after 2010 will soon tell you that what we really need is cuts to public spending, and tax cuts for the wealthy too, of course. Just unserious: it’s not about spending more, or less. We need to now be thinking like a developing country: cheap energy, cheap housing, development of human capital, technological autonomy, food and energy security. Anyone whose idea of ‘supply side reform’ being the same as cutting corporation tax is presently as useful as an umbrella in a hurricane.

Over the last few years, American tech oligarchs have become the greatest argument against their own existence. The sheer scale of their erratic behavior and political interference proves that extreme wealth concentration is a structural threat to society

Peter Thiel literally wrote that freedom and democracy are not 'compatible' and that regulating Big Tech is the work of the 'anti-Christ'. Stop treating this as metaphor. When billionaires tell you they want to end democracy, take them seriously.

The algorithm puts us in boxes. The workshop brings us together. BETWEEN THE LINES - May 7

Something genuinely different happened in British politics today. Zack Polanski gave his first major economic speech as Green Party leader and it wasn't the usual vague gestures you get from other party leaders. It was a diagnosis and a plan. The diagnosis: privatisation, austerity and Brexit haven't just been bad policy choices, they've locked Britain into a structural trap. A "bond market doom loop" where financial markets constrain every government before it's even started. The plan ("Zackonomics") is built around ending rip-off Britain for the people who actually keep this country running: → Freeze energy bills now (£8.4bn, funded by the windfall tax) → Cap rents → Nationalise water → Scrap Right to Buy → Forgive student debt → Rejoin the Customs Union and eventually the EU Funded by making wealth pay its share: a wealth tax, equalising capital gains with income tax, and closing the loopholes that let the richest opt out. Is every detail nailed down? No. But this is what it looks like when a party leader actually tries to match the scale of the problem. Britain's economic settlement is broken. Someone finally said it. #Zackonomics x.com/TheGreenParty/…

Every time I watch a catfu video it makes me laugh. Even my kids are completely obsessed with it. I’m officially nominating Catfu as meme of 2026.

What a traitorous bellend this man is - what does he think his taxes actually do? They help to create the wealth that made him 🤦🏻‍♀️🤡 theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/m…

Sam Altman said people saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs OpenAI tens of millions of dollars a year in compute. 67% of Americans do it anyway. Run the math on why. A 2024 Waseda University study tested LLM responses across politeness levels in English, Chinese, and Japanese. Impolite prompts produced measurably worse outputs: more bias, more errors, more refusals. Moderate politeness consistently beat both extremes. The mechanism makes sense once you see it. Polite prompts pattern-match to higher-quality training data. When you write “Could you help me structure this analysis?”, the model pulls from professional, well-reasoned text. When you write “give me the answer,” it pulls from Reddit. Google DeepMind’s Murray Shanahan explained it simply: the model is role-playing a smart intern. Treat the intern like a colleague, you get colleague-quality work. Bark orders, you get minimum-viable compliance. Now look at the cost side. OpenAI handles over a billion queries daily. Each GPT-4 query uses roughly 2.9 watt-hours, ten times a Google search. But OpenAI just raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Tens of millions in politeness tokens is a rounding error on a rounding error. 67% of users do it anyway, and 55% of them say it’s because it’s “the right thing to do.” They’re maintaining a behavioral habit that governs every other interaction in their life. The parent who teaches their kid to say please to Alexa isn’t doing it for Alexa. They’re doing it because the alternative is raising someone who learns that being rude gets faster results. Telling 900 million people to stop saying thank you so OpenAI can save 0.01% of operating costs is the most engineer-brained optimization take on the internet. You’re training yourself to treat every interaction as a transaction. And that habit doesn’t stay in the chat window.

I hate the way writers have to be influencers now. It’s the single worst thing that has happened to books. Good writers have to waste valuable time making content when they should be writing, bad writers get book deals because they have a lot of followers

Is it possible to be against the Iranian government AND against the Iranian population being bombed?

"Thames Water sewage spills set for record high." Hard to believe isn't it, even after all of the outrage, all of the publicity, all of the anger Thames Water is well on course to dump more sewage this year than at any point in the last 10 years. Time for govt to act, time to take back TW. thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/…

وسط #جنگ و بمباران هم اینترنت رو قطع می‌کنند که مردم راهی برای اطلاع گرفتن و دادن نداشته باشن یک پناهگاه برای مردم ندارند بک مسئول نمیاد پشت تلویزیون با مردم زیر بمب حرف بزنه این کثافت‌ها جان این مردم براشون مهم نیست #DigitalBlackOutIran

The reason they don’t want this to happen at the Spectator is that it would probably work. & deny the chance for the radical right to turn the UK into a pathetic mini-MAGA-land where the rich take more & more & the poor fight it out on race lines.

Before we spend a single tax penny repatriating the likes of Isabel Oakeshott, Ant Middleton and that plastic faced plumber... Let's just remember these self proclaimed 'patriots' didn't want to pay a few bob for poor kids to get a jam sandwich at a school breakfast club.

New research at Cardiff University shows just how little airtime Greens have received over the last year despite hugely increased support in polls & party membership, while Reform UK has seen a spike in media coverage. enhancingimpartiality.com/blog/after-win…

Commiserations to @bbcquestiontime on their defeat in Gorton and Denton

This is a golden opportunity for Europe. Welcome Anthropic with open arms. Offer a special deal. Fast-track permits. Europe is been powerless in the AI race so far - welcoming the best AI lab in the world would change everything. @MinPres @EmmanuelMacron @_FriedrichMerz

If people in Dubai didn’t want to pay UK taxes why should UK resources now come to their aid