Keith Dear

This is huge— @Cassi_on_X came 2nd overall and 1st on "Dataset" questions on @Research_FRI Forecastbench! 🥈📈 Only @elonmusk's @xai @grok outperformed us overall. What this means: 🧵

This excellent discussion had the power to shock even me — and I have been lamenting the disarmament of Britain for years. ⁦⁦@shashj⁩ on good form. Money quote: “the British Army could just about take control of a market town on a good day.” bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0…

England and Portugal. One of the oldest alliances in the world. Since 1386. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇵🇹 They had sailed together. Traded together. Gone to war together. But there was a moment when it nearly ended. And the reason was slavery. Portugal started the Atlantic slave trade. In 1444. For the next four centuries they transported more enslaved people across the Atlantic than any other nation on earth. Britain joined them. For a hundred years British ships sailed the same routes. British merchants made the same profits. Then in 1807, thanks to the will of the British people, they stopped. The Royal Navy, the most powerful fleet on earth, was sent to the African coast. Not to conquer. To hunt. Every slave ship it found, it seized. Every person on board, it freed. But the trade was still going. Under Portuguese flags. So Britain went to its oldest friend and made a demand. Treaty. Portugal agreed to restrict its slave trade. Britain pushed harder. Another treaty. Portugal banned the trade north of the equator. Britain pushed harder still. Another treaty. Portugal conceded the right to let the Royal Navy stop and search Portuguese ships on the open ocean. The alliance nearly didn't survive it. Six hundred years of friendship stretched to breaking point. Portugal called it betrayal. Britain called it justice. Portugal formally abolished the slave trade in 1836. Slavery itself in its African colonies, 1869. It took sixty years of pressure. Sixty years of treaties. Sixty years of Royal Navy ships on the water. The alliance held. It still holds today. The oldest in the world. These are the stories that don't make the history books. We find them. We tell them. If they matter to you, be part of us. proudofus.co.uk/support Be Proud Of Us. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧

The correct decision but, blimey, it really is impressive - but not surprising - that you can spend £179m on not building a tunnel. Classic Britain.

I can’t quite believe this is real. Horrifying.

Prof Dieter Helm proposes UK gov signs long-term offtake contracts to support the resurrection of North Sea gas (this is likely necessary to reassure producers they won't be taxed/regulated out of existence by a future gov) Hard to see how you argue against this at this point

BREAKING ⚠️ India will join either the Tempest or FCAS 6th generation fighter programs, Indian MoD tells Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence

I’m 50 years old. 42 of them using a computer. I’ve been working with tech 30 years. Still I can’t believe this happened in my lifetime. Can’t imagine not even a little what I’ll see in 30 or 40 years (yes, I’ll still be here). The live neural network is ON. 🤯

Another brilliant piece of analysis from @EdConwaySky Gets right to the heart of the debate on the North Sea 1⃣ Rapid decline curves aren't inevitable 2⃣Without the North Sea, the UK relies on more carbon intensive LNG Link to full version in the comments

Sovereign AI is opening the doors to the UK’s most powerful AI supercomputers. Through the AI Research Resource (AIRR), ambitious startups can now apply for access to national AI compute. Capital, compute and a country behind you.

Compute in the service of British AI startups - apply below 👇

The 'lipstick rocket'. Cancelled, elements of the design were used in the European Space Agency's Ariane rocket. Britain remains the only nation to develop a satellite launch capability and then discard it.

“The cheap energy economy,” wrote Robert Allen in his book The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, “was the foundation of Britain’s economic success.” The expensive energy economy is the cause of Britain's economic stagnation.

Went to China last year. Beijing just announced a new college: drone tech - separate from traditional eecs, aero and ME. My cousin is a professor, told me there will be 10,000 graduates of the major per year starting this year since it overlaps with EECS/aero/ME for now. By contrast, we’re stuck with the traditional “drone being under aerospace” when China is printing talent.

Britain has, with the best of intentions, judicialised its own government into paralysis, hollowed out its departments, and outsourced delivery to 600+ arm's-length bodies that can't make trade-offs. New piece on why civil service reform needs to go further. Read in replies

That one neuron connects to about 7,000 others. Your brain has 86 billion of them. Do the math and you get somewhere around 100 trillion connections inside your head. More connections than stars in 1,500 galaxies. And each connection point is way more complicated than anyone expected. A Stanford lab found that every single connection contains about 1,000 tiny switches that can store memories and process information at the same time. So your brain is running roughly 100 quadrillion switches right now, while you read this sentence. The wild part is the power bill. Your brain runs on 20 watts. That’s less energy than the light in your fridge. The world’s fastest supercomputer needs 20 million watts to do the same amount of raw calculation. A million times more power for the same output. We’re still nowhere close to understanding how any of this works. In October 2024, a team of hundreds of scientists finished mapping every single connection in a fruit fly’s brain. Took six years and heavy AI help. That fly brain had 140,000 neurons. Yours has 86 billion. Google and Harvard also mapped a piece of human brain last year, a speck smaller than a grain of rice. That speck alone contained 150 million connections and took 1,400 terabytes to store. The lead scientist said mapping a full human brain at that detail would produce as much data as the entire world generates in a year. A tiny worm had its 302 brain cells mapped back in 1986. Almost 40 years later, scientists still can’t fully explain how that worm’s brain keeps it alive. Your brain has 86 billion of those cells, each one wired to thousands of others, each wire packed with a thousand switches, all of it humming along on less power than a lightbulb.

The UK triple lock is the singlest stupidest policy in the entire Western world, and the most damaging to the future of a country. Of course, it is also untouchable and almost undiscussed in the UK press. @mattyglesias does a big favour to the UK public here.

🚨 Do you understand what happened in the last 12 hours? > A CEO of a $200 billion company said on camera that 35% of new grads won't find jobs. He didn't even flinch saying it. > Meta made $165 billion last year and is still firing 15,000 people because apparently record profit isn't profitable enough. > Some random guy in Florida sold his entire house in 5 days using ChatGPT. No real estate agent, no commission, no experience. Just vibes and a $20 subscription. > A man in Australia cured his dying dog's cancer with AI after every single vet told him there was nothing left to do. Built a custom vaccine from his couch. > The guy who created Uber and left 300,000 taxi drivers broke is back. Building robots now because apparently ruining one industry wasn't enough. > Tinder wants access to your camera roll. Your drunk photos, your 3am notes app meltdowns, your deleted selfies. They're calling it a "vibe check." > Naval, the man who made hundreds of millions investing in software, just said software is dead. Four words and the entire industry felt it. > And Anthropic removed the limit on how long their AI can think and then doubled everyone's usage for free. Because when the product is addictive enough you give the first taste away. All of that happened today. Not this week, not this quarter. Today. A random Saturday in March. This is worse than you being on meth.

New research from Tsinghua, Peking University and other top labs taught a humanoid robot to play tennis using scattered human movement clips instead of perfect match data. The big deal here is how the team solved the data problem for physical robots. Usually, teaching a robot to do something highly athletic like playing tennis requires perfect, continuous tracking data of professional human players. Getting that kind of flawless 3D physical data during a high-speed match is extremely difficult and expensive. This paper bypasses that massive hurdle entirely. Instead of needing perfect full-match data, the researchers just used short, disconnected, and imperfect clips of basic human swings. The AI system uses these rough clips as a basic hint for how a swing should look, and then a physics simulator corrects the physical errors so the robot does not fall over while swinging to hit the ball. Because they proved they can take messy, fragmented human data and turn it into a smooth, highly dynamic robot athlete, this means we can start teaching robots all sorts of complex physical tasks without needing to record perfect human demonstrations first. It severely lowers the barrier to making robots useful in fast, unpredictable physical environments. The robot successfully tracked fast incoming balls and consistently hit them back to specific target zones while looking surprisingly natural.

Cool use case of AlphaFold, this is just the beginning of digital biology!