Caitlin de Jode

i really believe in tackling gender inequality but few things seem quite as wrongheaded to me as the demand to transfer wealth from poorer younger generations with a far-distant retirement age, lower real wages and very little hope of property acquisition, to wealthy boomers who didn't read a letter

The new Lily Allen album is brat for people with mortgages and back pain. (High compliment.)

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

With the AWS outage, now‘s as good a time as any to post this old strip.

Traitors is a good demonstration of how the worst strategy in the game is to try and apply logic. Just leads to people saying “well a Traitor would say that!! I’m going to keep in the nice grandma because a nice grandma could never be a Traitor!”

ah I see the government has decided to scrap the very real, not already scrapped target of 50% going to uni

I dunno I reckon this is about right, I've intended to do a lot of things in my garden but not many of them actually got done.

I bet 100% of adults intend to mow the lawn next weekend but not a lot of lawns will be mown

Imagine you're in a weird romcom where Paul Hollywood is your rival. Do you go "let's have a bread baking competition" or do you emphasise your own relative strengths?

Because that in short has been the central problem with the traditional two's approach to anti-immigration voters and Reform UK.

Matthew McConaughey says he wants a private LLM, fed only with his books, notes, journals, and aspirations, so he can ask it questions and get answers based solely on that information, without any outside influence.

this exists it is called thinking

Rachel Reeves: You know you’d be personally richer and the economy would be better and you wouldn’t have to fix strangers’ boilers if you just put any savings you have in a stock tracker rather than buy to lets.

Everyone in the UK with any money: all my life I have dreamed of being a landlord.

Thank god the cost of government borrowing doesn’t rise every time I cry

Guess which of these stories came first on both the BBC One and Radio 4 bulletins.

If a government with over 400 seats and 4 years left to govern cannot summon the courage to level with the public on social care then I despair at the capacity of our political system to ever deliver the change we need.

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

I know I always sound a bit glib when I say this but: this is an entirely universal teenage sentiment, the answer to it is "get drunk and do drugs until you've grown up enough that those questions no longer feel completely, cripplingly overwhelming"

Comment is Freed remains my top source of political analysis, depressing as said analysis usually turns out to be

My lesson of last night’s elections (so far) is that Labour are getting outflanked on cultural right and economic left by Reform (ie complaints about WFA, PIP) but seem to have chosen so far to worry only about former.

They gotta make a 30+ railcard

Trump Aides Solicit Ideas to Raise Birthrate, From Baby Bonuses to Fertility Planning (Gift Article) The White House is soliciting policy proposals designed to give women incentives to have more children, a priority for many social conservatives.

One idea I have is not turning the country where the putative child would be raised into an authoritarian hellscape. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/u...

Just once, it would be nice if a footballer pointed down after scoring a goal, to dedicate it to a departed loved one they know is in hell.

You can’t be a government that’s serious about growth while simultaneously limiting one of your most successful export businesses and diminishing institutions that are crucial to delivering local and national growth and innovation.

Never in doubt #Masters

Rory-watchers (I stole this from the other place)

Family have collectively agreed that we aren't watching Rory, so everyone is pretending to watch a film separately refreshing the live blog on their phones instead #Masters

Like François Mitterrand and Liz Truss before him, Donald Trump fought the bond market and the bond market won.

April 1st: The only day of the year when people pause for critical thought instead of automatically accepting what they read on the internet!