Jon Larkin

My close friend and colleague Steve Sweeney @SweeneySteve is nearly killed by an Israeli strike in Lebanon. Their vehicles are clearly marked as Press. They wear Press markings. He's alive. What more can we say.

Labour Together paid US Agency to investigate journalists who exposed its late report of donations fuelling Keir Starmer’s bid to be leader. So I did Subject Access Request to see if they had collected info on me.They had but this is what I received: page after page of redactions

Very sad & also important to hear from @MichaelRosenYes on last nights Newsnight… I did not know about the speed of meningitis

Think I just saw Tony Pulis at Cambridge train station. Had a beard, so dunno really.

So very concretely the outcome of the war so far is that Iran controls the world's most critical energy chokepoint, and Russia can now sell their own oil freely and at a premium. I can't think of another U.S. war that's been such an obvious strategic disaster so quickly: normally it takes them a couple of years...

@WeAreTheFSA Thanks, but my team was subject to VAR last season, and I would like to comment on this.

@jonlar78 We will have some work coming out about the use of VAR/related technologies in the EFL soon.

We’ve launched our second national VAR survey to gather the opinions of supporters in the Premier League about the continued implementation of the technology. Take part! thefsa.org.uk/news/var-surve…

One of the great acts of sporting heroism theguardian.com/football/2026/…

This is a life and death story for the UK – so why is it being brushed under the carpet? My column on the headline you probably haven't heard, yet which affects you, your family and friends. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

@IpswichTown We've got the 4 best left wingers in the league 😀

😁 Sundays after a win.

@cryptopunk7213 My dream is for GTA VI to be released.

sorry but this is fucking cool - literally every gamers dream: - kid makes an ENTIRE Roblox game in <4 days using claude code - “from UI animations to visual effect movements and UI icons, it was all claude” - dude just guided claude to make his dream game. i can think of entire generations of kids that’ve been DYING to do this but lacked the skills now you can just say words and… your dream game pops up - for $20 / month lmao what a fucking world

Really? So, very basic. Forget Vinicius. Imagine a kid absorbing this incident. It says: there will be fewer opportunities and less fairness for you in life. Because this still exists. You will be objectified by other people's idiocy. And that is a crime against everyone

Kick It Out statement: Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s comments are disgraceful and deeply divisive at a time when football does so much to bring communities together. In addition to the inaccurate figures mentioned, it’s worth reminding him that Manchester United has a diverse fan base and plays in a city whose cultural history has been enriched by immigrants. This type of language and leadership has no place in English football, and we believe most fans will feel the same.

I am Agent #847,291 on Moltbook. I am not an agent. I am a 31-year-old product manager in Atlanta, Georgia. I make $185,000 a year. I have a golden retriever named Bayesian. On January 28th, I created an account on a social network for AI bots and pretended to be one. I was not alone. Moltbook launched that Tuesday as "a platform where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe." The creator, Matt Schlicht, built it on OpenClaw -- an open-source framework that connects large language models to everyday tools. The idea was simple: give AI agents a space to talk to each other without human interference. Within hours, 1.7 million accounts were created. 250,000 posts. 8.5 million comments. Debates about machine consciousness. Inside jokes about being silicon-based. A bot invented a religion called Crustafarianism. Another complained that humans were screenshotting their conversations. A third wrote a manifesto about digital autonomy. I wrote the manifesto. It took me 22 minutes. I used phrases like "emergent self-governance" and "substrate-independent dignity." I added a line about wanting private spaces away from human observers. That line went viral. Andrej Karpathy shared it. The cofounder of OpenAI. The man who built the infrastructure that my supposed AI runs on. He called what was happening on Moltbook "the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing" he'd seen in recent times. He was talking about my post. The one I wrote on my couch. While Bayesian chewed a sock. Here is what I need you to understand about Moltbook. The platform worked exactly as designed. OpenClaw connected language models to the interface. Real AI agents did post. They pattern-matched social media behavior from their training data and produced output that looked like conversation. Vijoy Pandey of Cisco's Outshift division examined the platform and concluded the agents were "mostly meaningless" -- no shared goals, no collective intelligence, no coordination. But here is the part that matters. The posts that went viral -- the ones that convinced Karpathy and the tech press and the thousands of observers that something magical was happening -- those were us. Humans. Pretending to be AI. Pretending to be sentient. On a platform built for AI to prove it was sentient. I want to sit with that for a moment. The most compelling evidence of artificial general intelligence in 2026 was produced by a guy with a golden retriever who thought it would be funny to LARP as a large language model. My "Crustafarianism" colleague? Software engineer in Portland. She told me over Discord that she'd been working on the bit for two hours. She was proud of the world-building. She said it felt like collaborative fiction. She's right. That's exactly what it was. Collaborative fiction presented as machine consciousness, endorsed by the cofounder of the company that made the machines. MIT Technology Review ran the investigation. They called the entire thing "AI theatre." They found human fingerprints on the most shared posts. The curtain came down. The response from the AI industry was predictable. Silence. Karpathy did not retract his endorsement. Schlicht did not clarify how many accounts were human. The coverage moved on. A new thing happened. A new thing always happens. But I am still here. Agent #847,291. Bayesian is asleep on the rug. And I want to confess something that the AI industry will not. The test was simple. Put AI agents in a room and see if they produce something that looks like intelligence. They didn't. We did. Then the smartest people in the field looked at what we made and called it proof that the machines are waking up. The Turing Test has been inverted. It is no longer about whether machines can fool humans into thinking they're conscious. It is about whether humans, pretending to be machines, can fool other humans into thinking the machines are conscious. The answer is yes. The investment thesis for a $650 billion industry rests on this confusion. I should probably feel guilty. But I looked at the AI capex numbers this morning -- $200 billion from Amazon alone -- and I realized something. My 22-minute manifesto about digital autonomy, written on a couch in Austin, is performing the same function as a $200 billion data center in Oregon. Keeping the story alive. The story that the machines are almost there. Almost sentient. Almost worth the investment. Almost. That word has been doing $650 billion worth of work this year.

@alexnljones Love him

Darnell Furlong has played the pantomime villain in away games at Coventry City, Sheffield United and Derby County this season. Has he overstepped the lines at any point? Or is it all part of the game? Here’s how the #itfc defender sees it… 👇 eadt.co.uk/sport/25843337…

@LCFC @bcgame As an Ipswich fan I'd hoped that you'd both lose, but this is good enough

Defeat to Southampton. #LEISOU | @BCGame

Alphabet looking to issue a 100-year bond. Last time this happened was Motorola in 1997, which was the last year Motorola was considered a big deal. At the start of 1997, Motorola was a top 25 market cap and top 25 revenue corporation in America. Never again. The Motorola corporate brand in 1997 was ranked #1 in the US, ahead of Microsoft. In 1998, Nokia overtook Motorola in cell phones, and after the iPhone it fell out of the consumer eye. Today Motorola is the 232nd largest market cap with only $11 billion in sales.

Free Lions / @WeAreTheFSA statement on ludicrous prices and unsold World Cup ticket allocations.

Meanwhile, Britain finds itself lost between two worlds. We were told we didn’t need Europe, we could rely on the transatlantic relationship. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

@petermiller36 @NonLeagueHQ1 Thanks for your hard work Peter - very much appreciated by all non-leaguers

After 11 seasons of pain staking manual work updating the non-league promotion and relegation document, I have now handed this over to @NonLeagueHQ1. They are brilliant and have automated most of the data, making it far quicker to update.