Robin Sterling

After years of work, I've finished my range of carved Nixie clocks using @DaliborFarny tubes and solid wood bases—this one in walnut. Each clock is unique, featuring different wave patterns that showcase the wood grain and reflect the soft neon glow.

What’s incentive structure for politicians. The public have said at every opportunity for 10+ years what they want. Yet they continue to ignore them and actively do the opposite. From a purely selfish and self preservation perspective why chose this path of self annihilation?

There is a claim that keeps circulating, presented as sophisticated analysis: antisemitic violence is caused by Israel’s actions. If Israel behaved differently, Jewish communities around the world would somehow be safer. This argument is not analysis. It is a moral inversion. And it collapses the moment you apply it consistently. When China imprisons Uyghurs, does anyone warn Muslim communities in Paris to expect attacks? When Russia invaded Ukraine, did anyone tell Russian restaurants to brace for violence? No. Never. The causal chain between a government’s actions and violence against a diaspora is only ever constructed for Jews. Every other minority is extended the basic moral courtesy of being treated as individuals rather than proxies. Now look at what the data actually shows. The SPCJ, which tracks antisemitic incidents in France in coordination with the Interior Ministry, has documented a consistent and damning pattern: it is antisemitic violence that inspires more antisemitic violence, not Israeli policy. After Mohamed Merah murdered Jewish children at point-blank range at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse in 2012, antisemitic acts surged by 200%. There was no Gaza operation. No Israeli military action. The massacre of Jews in France produced more attacks on Jews in France. The same logic held after the Hypercacher attack in January 2015: antisemitic acts increased by nearly 300%. Massacres of Jews do not shock antisemites into restraint. They embolden them. They signal impunity. They normalize hatred. And everyone in a position of responsibility knows it. Which brings us to October 7. From the day of the Hamas attack, antisemitic acts in France increased by over 1,000%. A daily average of approximately 25 antisemitic acts was recorded in the 30 days that followed, reaching nearly 40 on some days. In the three months after the attack, the number of antisemitic acts equaled those recorded over the previous three years combined. And here is another detail that makes the “Israel causes antisemitism” argument impossible to sustain: the spike began on October 7 itself, the very day of the attack. Israel had not yet responded. Not a single soldier had entered Gaza. Interior Minister Darmanin sent an urgent message to prefects that same day asking them to immediately reinforce protection of Jewish community sites. Synagogues. Schools. Community centers. By October 10, 10,000 police officers had been deployed to protect 500 Jewish sites across the country. Before any Israeli response existed, the French government already knew that Jewish communities needed protecting. Not because of what Israel was about to do. Because of what had just been done to Jews. Antisemitic violence has one cause. Antisemitism.

If you're shocked by today's stabbing terror attack on British Jews, you must have been living under a rock for the past few years. Not a single one of the men who drove through North London in 2021 shouting “F*** the Jews, f*** their daughters, f*** their mothers, rape their daughters and free Palestine" were prosecuted. Not one. So why is anyone surprised when British Jews are stabbed in broad daylight a few years later? The message went out loud and clear that anti-semitism was allowed on our streets. You reap what you sow. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan…

Other than for code, how are people using Claude for work? The level of hallucination, gaslighting, incorrect memories and errors is off the chart. Totally unusable.

I think a huge part of the reason why no government has been able to enact difficult pro-growth reforms is that the average voter still believes we remain a rich country. You hear this in politicians’ rhetoric “the sixth richest country in the world”. We’re the sixth largest economy but now far from the richest. Per capita we’re tanking down the rankings. One of the reasons why Poland or China have been able to have growth miracles in recent years is they think like a developing country. They know they were poor and they have to build to get rich. We think we are rich and that we don’t have to build anything anymore, or that when we do, it has to be the most expensive possible version of what we build. Bat tunnels. Fish Discos. Kittiwake hotels. We think we’re rich so we can afford to chase some wealth creators away, afford to mandate public biodiversity net gain on every development in the country, and afford to ratchet up state pension spending five times faster than the rate of growth in the economy. We’re suffering from acute ‘rich country delusion’. It’s only once we realise we’re far poorer than we should be that we can start to fix this nonsense.

This is the reason why we can never reform healthcare in the UK — or even have a sensible debate about it. The moment anyone suggests alternative/additional ways of funding health Labour rushes out privatisation smears and claims US private health insurance is being proposed. Labour has been doing it for decades. It explains why the NHS is effectively beyond reform. The two worst health systems in the rich world are in America and the UK. It’s why nobody has ever copied them. It would be mad to go from ours to theirs (or vice versa). But Europe is awash with health systems that can call on several sources of funds, including many with compulsory public health insurance schemes. They have better health outcomes than the NHS. They are free at the point of use (like the NHS). Most of them are better funded. But Labour puts them out of bounds, refuses even to discuss or consider. So patient care suffers. NHS struggles on. Labour is always telling us we need to get closer to Europe. It’s where we belong. But not when it comes to health, where it insists no lessons can be learned. Pretty pathetic, really.

Every measure you list involves spending wealth. You don’t list one measure that creates wealth. And if you don’t create wealth you will soon run out of it to spend, which is already happening (hence all your extra taxes and borrowing).

"If you want, I can also show you" This alone makes me want to switch.

@KerionX10 100%. Which is why quantum control hardware is such an interesting space. Small amount of very proprietary data and complex hardware. AI isn't useful (yet) because it hasnt anything to copy.

@RC_Sterling totally agree, most folks just want tools that work, not another diy headache. the real edge now is having unique data or access to hardware others can't just spin up.

Engineers nerdgasm for their AI tool chain doesn't translate to "saas is dead". People who use saas tools have no interesting in building and maintaining them. What it does mean is that it'll be much harder to find a moat. Software is now cheap to copy. Data and hardware is it.

@CryptoCyberia These prices are only a problem if you imagine teams looking the same in the future. If instead of 20 engineers you have 5, then $15k/month is a steal. The problem then is, what do all the unemployed engineers do.

Good news guys, Sonnet 4.5 would only be like $500 a month when the VC bucks dry up. Opus would only cost $3000-$15,000 bucks a month, unless you use Ralph and then it'll be way more. Keep in mind this is one instance. You all starting to see the problem yet?

Don't put hidden white text prompts in your CV. It's easy to spot and cringeworthy. Instant reject.

"Help my economy is dying and I can't figure out why."

During that quarter century you’ve enjoyed over £30 billion in direct subsidies (plus many more billions in indirect subsidies) for offshore wind alone. Yet still you require more subsidy for further expansion. And despite repeated claims to being cheaper — when all costs are included you remain very far from cheap. If you were as cheap as you claim you wouldn’t need all that subsidy. Plus the cost of job creation per job is astronomical. But you have proved the most efficient mechanism since medieval times for transferring money from the poor to the rich, including Crown Estates.

@paulg Seems like a better heuristic to skip investing. If humans already produce near-AI slop, existing AI tools are likely good enough. A startup there becomes a feature, not a standalone product.

That could be a useful heuristic for picking domains to attack with AI. If the work being done in some domain is already slop when done by humans, then presumably current AI can do it well enough.

I was talking recently to a startup using AI to take over a certain kind of work. Apparently investors are skeptical that AI could do it. I told them they should point out that most of this work already seems as if it's done by AI.

Zack Polanski talking about economics.

My 2yo daughter has an emotional support sandwich. I've never been prouder.

I seem to have upset people by pointing out that if the 70m people in the UK, only 32m pay income tax. Of those 32m, only about 9m are net contributors to tax. So in our hypothetical street, just over 13% of houses put in more than they take out... and other households resent them.

My AI investment thesis is that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundational model providers. App functionality will be added to the foundational models' offerings, because the big players aren't slow incumbents (it is wrong to apply the analogy of "fast startup, slow incumbent" here), they are just big. Far more so than with any other prior new technology, there is a massive and fast-moving wave that obsoletes every new app almost as fast as it can be invented. There is almost no time to build a company and scale it. There are two ways AI application startup founders can make money: - Make a flash-in-the-pan app that generates a ton of cash and bank the cash (my estimate is that you have about 12-18 months cashflow generation) - Make a good enough app that you get acquired by one of the big players for sufficient equity The situation is highly unstable - we don't know if it's going to crash or go to the moon but both scenarios make it very unlikely that any AI application startup will independently become a generational supercompany (baseline odds are low to begin with). The best odds are finding an application niche in a highly specialized field with extremely unique and specific data barriers, ideally ones relating to real atoms (hardware or world-related) data and not software/finance.

Perhaps @BrewDog falling on hard times has something to do with their pivot from making beer to making alcopops 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️😬