Tom Forth

@Magnus_Bishop I'm still on the toilet brush phase, but good to know it carries on.

@thomasforth So true. Likewise business class air travel at civilised hours of the day.

One of the more surprising, positive, but also slightly frustrating lessons of getting older and richer is that the expensive stuff is often worth the price, and pretty often more than worth the price. The Brabantia toilet brush and bin,... better. The £100 trainers? Last years.

Back on it again.

I can only give my experience. I have a graveyard of small pumps that were meant to be reliable and easy to use and just attach to my bike and they all were not reliable, were not easy to use, fell off or got stolen, and this pump is so easy to use and tells me the pressure.

Bought a USB C bike pump. So small. So good. Wow.

"it's vacuum formed and injection moulded plastic Tom, it's all made in China anyway, how much difference could it possibly make?" > and yet,... the toilet is cleaner, in less time, the bin opens perfectly when I press the pedal, I've forgotten what buying trainers even is.

No trams in Manchester today. It's because they're all migrating South down the West Coast mainline to be a guard of honour for Burnham's entrance to no.10

Ah yes, distillation The ancient art of having 1 billion people who work harder and care much more about math and science than we do

I think there's a lot of confusion and misinformation about Zhilin's visa, H1B lottery, immigration, and why he left the U.S. Zhilin had many opportunities to stay in the U.S. if he wanted to. In fact, I was on an email thread with a senior Apple exec (Tim Cook's reports) asking whether Zhilin would consider joining Apple. I said that he wanted to go back to his homeland. The response was, well, we have an office in Beijing if he'd like to join there. But Zhilin was quite determined to go back and build a startup. I remember him telling me that if he didn't at least try starting his own company, he would regret it for the rest of his life. I respect that, and he was right. Many of my international PhD students do choose to stay in the U.S. Of course the U.S. immigration process can be quite intimidating and uncertain, even for superstar PhD graduates from places like CMU.

@SimonMagus Michael Merrick is a very nice man.

Here's a sample from that DM

Are all these Chinese AI labs so good because they have amazingly talented researchers who went to the best Universities in the USA and China? . Or is it because Shanghai has a great metro?

@SimpGanassi Mackerel Sky in Stamford Bridge. I used to go there all the time growing up, when it was called something different. I actually think it might be even better since being taken over.

@thomasforth Which chippy is this?

York smells of chocolate. The chips are fried in dripping. And a pint is a fiver next door. It's a good day for Yorkshire.

@HermanZeGerman It's quite a small piece of fish. Fish is expensive now, so that's what you get at lunchtime, with chips and peas, for £8.20.

@thomasforth Why does that piece of fish look so small ?

@AndrewSabisky Ah, I'd missed that. Yes, Kimi K3 says mostly Nvidia still.

@thomasforth Nah they're still training on Nvidia I can almost guarantee. But inference they can do on Hauwei and other domestic chips. The only Chinese company to have trained a real LLM on Huawei is all of things the food delivery company Meituan, which was announced a couple weeks ago

That China can still, seemingly, compete with the USA on AI model quality and capability despite much worse hardware (as far as I can tell these new models have shifted to the much worse domestic chips) is a surprise to me. As just about every week is in AI.

@hughclaffey @nassaujuan Thanks. Yes, the consensus (such as it is) on devolution is that without fiscal devolution you don't get much growth. tomforth.co.uk/agglomerationb…

@thomasforth @nassaujuan i should have added 'before' to above. I understood your reply, not the 'devolution as growth strategy'. Although the devolved areas will need revenue raising powers imo. h

What is the Labour obsession with devolution all about?

@nixintel Lots happened. And my argument in that piece is that it was the retention of key points of Thatcherism that led to much of our national underperformance. And I give lots of examples of, mostly Tory governments, doing exactly that. And I hope Andy now continues.

@thomasforth And the 34 years between Thatcher leaving office and that data?? Did nothing happen in the meantime?

Thatcher's legacy is Britain's economy being the weakest of our neighbours and our country close to separation. I'm not sure Burnham's plan to undo her worst excesses is great, but at least he's diagnosed the problem, and has some good ideas. tomforth.co.uk/recoveringfrom…

@nixintel As is the position and the direction of travel in polls in Northern Ireland.

@nixintel "weakest economy of our neighbours" is just data. "close to separation" is arguable. I do think all three of our devolved nations being led by parties who wish to leave the UK is very concerning. As are polls showing the majority of working age Scots would vote to leave.

@BFC_91_ "To return to prosperity, Britain must undo many of the excesses of Thatcher, while keeping her improvements. I do not argue, for example, for a return to the union power and huge industrial subsidies before Thatcher." > tomforth.co.uk/recoveringfrom…

@BFC_91_ "There are good arguments that much of what she did was necessary for Britain, especially after the 1976 IMF/Sterling Crisis and in the face of militant unions, and would have needed to happen under someone else if she hadn’t done it." > tomforth.co.uk/welcometodecli…