Fred

@MartinSLewis new scandal: £18 annually to 'verify address' for a 60+ TFL photocard, just to keep the card active. Doesn't matter if you're on UC or other means benefits. Absolute rip off.

@rorysutherland Love the idea of more 'Philosophers'. But the system isnt setup to accommodate them. Too many 'Can't park there, mate' merchants around.

‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ is genius marketing - (it's actually an early example of woke-washing, where you hide self-interest behind a bunch of confected virtues). spectator.com/article/life-l…

For those who used a computer between 1995 and 2001, what's the computer game from that time that sticks with you the most, and why

@HCH_Hill What's the point of elections if you can just govern for everybody? Thatcher really should of setup Rent-a-spine before she left.

I once suggested at a roundtable that the Tories are in such dire straits because they lost any clear sight of who their people were and had a senior ex-minister piously intone that we should "govern for everyone" as if that meant anything.

@LukasDegutis You forgot the bit where Stephen Graham is made Home Secretary.

The public is encouraged to attend their nearest designated hub to observe a minute of silence as part of the ongoing national effort to weed out misogyny, the greatest terror of our time. Once the minute has elapsed, please return home. At 8pm sharp, open a window, bang pots and pans and clap for Netflix. Compliance helps keep everyone safe.

@NewStatesman When @Dominic2306 analysis is essentially the same as the New Statesman you have to believe in what's being said.

THE GREAT BRITISH CRISIS by John Bew We are in the midst of the Fourth Great Disruption of the modern British state. Our politics, across every part of the political spectrum, is lagging perilously behind the realities we face. The fidelity of our political and official classes to the current order comes from an assumption, deeply ingrained in the generation who are coming close to retirement, that liberal or social-market economies were the only possible future and that the rest of the world was destined to become more like us. It is partly why austerity – like appeasement – had far more political support than we care to remember. It is why we spent 0.7 per cent of GDP on development assistance at the start of the last decade and barely 2 per cent on defence. It is why, after 1989, we added even more international and human rights law on top of the international legal order crafted out of 1945. It is why Brexit was such a psychological shock to this world-view. It is why we sometimes look like the last man at the bar at Davos, nursing a cocktail as the lights go off and facing a treacherous and icy route to an unclear destination. So as one world collapses around us, what is the shape of things to come? Here are some hard truths. The current social contract – particularly around welfare, health and pensions – is unsustainable on current levels of growth. A domestic and international legal system that does not allow us to control our borders has lost legitimacy at home. We have the highest energy prices in the Western world, just at the moment when energy is vital to our ability to take advantage of relative national strengths in technology. And there is currently no route to higher defence spending – which is inevitable unless the nation is content to continue on a path towards greater insecurity and irrelevance – without major cuts elsewhere in the public spending stack. At moments of relative political equilibrium these are problems of policy for specialists in each of those areas. At moments of great structural upheaval, these are grand strategic problems that can only be confronted as a coherent whole. Cover art by Alex Williamson

@AaronBastani Why Nations Fail - When its institutions become extractive rather than in inclusive. It's happening at every social touch point.

A country that does this to its smart, ambitious young people deserves to fail. It’s no deeper than that. The grim truth is large parts of the political and media class have hated young people for a long time now. Generation PAYE-pig.

@MikeyFox Waiting for the day the tide turns on these numberwangers and we can return everything to normal.

Well done to the spreadsheet jockeys at M&S HQ who re-styled their popular Meadowhall cafe to create a spectacularly cost-effective ghost town

Either the producers have tucked him up or he really is fucking Jesus. #blair

@BBCNewsnight She's after a job in a government funded agency in the new AI regulation world coming.

“We don’t have a grasp of what AI does to people’s psychology, what it does to them sociologically…” AI researcher Zoe Hitzig explains why she resigned from OpenAI #Newsnight

@TJiMTS add in the fact property barely keeping up if not falling behind inflation.

A landlord collects £1,200/month rent Pays £1,000/month mortgage interest = Real profit: £200/month. But HMRC doesn't see it that way. Section 24 means higher-rate taxpayers can only claim 20% of mortgage interest as a tax credit, not the full deduction. So they're taxed at 40% on £1,200, then get 20% credit on £1,000 back. Tax bill: £3,360/year on a rental "profit" of £2,400. They're paying more in tax than they actually make. This is why so many landlords are incorporating or selling up.

@Monz_ah Agree such a huge wasted opportunity. Could of genuinely beat those guys at their own game with a focused tight and brave strategy.

@theobertram Mate

They knew of his Epstein connection but not to the full extent that is now evident. That failure was in the vetting.

I don't know how the Mandelson appointment was made but it should be obvious that neither Morgan nor the PM knew that Peter was betraying his country, his party, his friends by leaking their secrets, or they would never have considered him.

@montie @skygillian The breakfast show desk looks like frost and ridge are about to take off on the UFO back to the mothership

The desk for The Wrap looks too cramped for me. But I prefer the overall change, Pacier. Sharper. BUT THAT DESK!!! @skygillian looks too small at its apex.

@max__young Those who are ignorant are full of self belief whilst those who are wise are full of doubt.

Bell ends cosy career at joke Resolution Foundation to advertise his own failing economic policy programme while the government implodes.

@tomfgoodwin Oh to make furniture during the day and retire to the garage to fix up an old E-Type by night

These days I think a lot of people dream about jobs that involve almost no screens. No email . No AI. No Zooms. Stuff in the physical world. Stuff making thing. I dream a bit of being a builder or furniture maker or to restore cars. It’s daft but it’s a feeling many have

I feel that something in Britain has broken in the following sense. Almost all institutions have reached a tipping point where the pure rule of rigid proceduralism and/or atomised impersonality now dominates, overriding any sense of individuals using judgement & moral agency.

@tomfgoodwin fixed

@the_supplement Did you really make it? It's extremely impressive. It didn't quite work when I tried to use it, but it's great all the same. We need this but for insurance.

Everyone who boasts about not sleeping and using Claude code to ship faster than ever , should also show what they’ve made

@realBigBrainAI @wooldridgemike AI is much like the answer to life, the universe and everything...it depends.

Oxford Professor Michael Woolridge explains why LLMs can't genuinely reason — they rely on learned examples, not true logic. @wooldridgemike argues that while models like ChatGPT appear capable of reasoning, the evidence suggests otherwise: "The weight of evidence at the moment is they are not doing problem solving. They are doing something which is much more like pattern recognition." He uses planning to illustrate. At first, researchers got excited because LLMs seemed capable of genuine planning. But Woolridge describes a simple test that exposes their limitations: "Suppose you obfuscate all the terms being used in your plan. You express the same problem using terms that will not have appeared in the training data. Can it then solve the problem?" The answer is no. When an LLM helps plan your trip, it's matching patterns from thousands of guides it has seen before, not reasoning from first principles. "So it can't originally solve problems. We can do that. We have problem solving capabilities." Woolridge concedes arithmetic is "probably now a solved problem" for these models. But genuine logical reasoning? That remains one of AI's biggest open questions, and the current evidence suggests we're not there yet.

@tomfgoodwin I did, just me and Claude code. Thanks, I've spotted the search issue, been pushing updates and it's bugged out! Interesting, will look into that application.