Mike O'Neill

Revealed: 80% of Reform’s funding comes from Tory donors The majority of the money behind Nigel Farage’s movement was being supplied by Conservative interests even before the defection of so many high-profile figures from the party – to the alarm of former ...

Revealed: 80% of Reform’s funding comes from Tory donors
www.thenerve.news/p/reform-fun...

The Austrian Ministry of the Interior bought social media surveillance software 'Tangles' from Cobwebs/Penlink and refuses to tell parliament whether they also bought the intrusive Tangles add-on 'Webloc', which relies on the mass collection of personal data from digital advertising and mobile apps.

Hahahaahhaa hell yeah. The future rules! THE FUTURE RULES!

Brexit’s slow‑burn hit to the UK economy The UK is once again debating why its economy has grown slowly since the mid‑2010s. This column examines the impact of the decision to leave the European Union in 2016. Using almost a decade of data s...

New data shows #Brexit has lowered UK GDP by 6-8% in 10 years. Investment down 18%, employment down 4%.

It's even worse than economists had predicted pre-referendum, because they thought there would be a bounce-back long term.

"Economists were roughly right on the magnitude of the impact, but...

Data Protection Commission The Data Protection Commission (DPC) has today announced that it has opened an inquiry into X Internet Unlimited Company (XIUC) under section 110 of the Data Protection Act 2018.

The Data Protection Commission has today announced that it has opened an inquiry into X Internet Unlimited Company (XIUC) under section 110 of the UK Data Protection Act 2018
dataprotection.ie/en/news-medi...

It’s not just that a large majority want Britain to rejoin the EU, it’s the fact that the majority steadily continues to grow…

Estimates of the economic costs of Brexit continue to grow. Now showing UK economy between 6 and 8 percent smaller than it would have been. That in turn means £60bn lost tax revenue every year. Think what a difference that would have made to tax & spend decisions …

r/analytics • IOh We just found out our AI has been making up analytics data for 3 months and I'm gonna throw up. Support So we've been using an Al agent since November to answer leadership questions about metrics. It seemed amazing at first fast answers, detailed explanations, everyone loved it. I just found out it's been hallucinating numbers this entire time. Our VP of sales made territory decisions based on data that didn't exist. Our CFO showed the board a deck with fake insights. The Al was just inventing plausible sounding percentages. I only caught it by accident when someone asked me to double check something. I started digging, and holy shit, it's bad.

lol this is gonna burst so fucking hard

I don’t think I’ve ever been angrier reading anything on the show. Something about seeing this really got to me, it’s shown how many people are misinformed and, worse still, how many more are willing to emphatically agree and endorse nonsensical misinformation. A moment of shame for all involved.

Against political correspondents How they corrode political discourse.

Seeing criticism of that vacuous buffoon Chris Mason reminds me of what I wrote 10 (!) years ago - that the problem isn't merely bad individual reporters, but Westminster gossipmongery itself: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/against-po...

Jim Ratcliffe, himself a migrant to Monaco to avoid paying his fair share of UK tax, and who supported Brexit which has so damaged the British economy, is yet another millionaire oligarch backing the far right to further line his pockets

California Won't Let It Go: Attorney General Bonta Announces $2.75 Million Settlement with Disney, Largest CCPA Settlement in California History Second enforcement action stemming from 2024 investigative sweep of streaming services OAKLAND — California Attorney General Rob Bonta today announced a settlement with the Walt Disney Company (Disney...

Disney pays $2.75 million in biggest CCPA settlement ever for not properly respecting browser opt-out settings. Imagine how much enshitification could have been avoided if DNT, supported then by all browsers with opt-out AND consent signals, had been enforced 14 years ago. oag.ca.gov/news/press-r...

Opinion | Libertarians Tried to Warn You About Trump

I call bullshit. The libertarians I know, including some who write for Reason, made the “principled” stand to NOT vote for Hillary or Kamala, instead throwing their vote away on the Libertarian candidate, handing handing two elections to trump.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/o...

Perhaps I’m old-fashioned but an actual resignation has always struck me as a much more courageous vote of no confidence than a mere call for one…

Britain Must Choose Europe—and Its Leaders Need to Admit It
- Paul Mason
www.socialeurope.eu/britain-must...

While there is justified outrage about Mandelson, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor &others, the relentless media focus on Keir Starmer (who was NOT mentioned in any Epstein file) is overdone.
By contrast, no focus on Farage who WAS mentioned (and who, BTW, applauded the appointment of Mandelson)…

Post-Brexit sales of British farm products to EU fall by 37% NFU warn it could take years to restore Brexit losses despite efforts to smooth negotiations on farming and other elements of UK-EU reset

Another result of Brexit that bears no resemblance to what Farage, Johnson, Gove, Rees-Mogg, etc promised
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Tja.

The moral panic about young men is the new version of “UKIP is winning over former Labour voters” (also a Goodwin argument). Both rely on anecdote more than data, and do significant damage to public understanding of the radical right. Young men are the second *least* pro-Reform group in the UK.

🎙️Two open letters are calling for signatures on this very topic!👥📣

From Early-Career Researchers: ecr-openletter-stfc.github.io/index.html

From Advanced Fellows: advancedfellows-openletter-stfc.github.io/index.html

We hope UKRI and the gov will hear the many voices across the PPAN community. 🔭🧪📡⚗️

Physicists warn of 'catastrophic' impact from UK science cuts Science funding cuts in the UK are expected to be a "devastasting blow" for physics research, affecting international projects such as particle detection experiments at CERN

Science funding cuts in the UK are expected to be a "devastasting blow" for physics research, affecting international projects such as particle detection experiments at CERN

Brexit Britain has one viable option left: Europe Almost ten years since the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, the Brexiteers’ pilgrimage to ‘sunlit uplands’ has instead become a national Via Dolorosa – a painful procession of...

On Brexit, are there “glimmers of hope that the UK may be preparing to turn the page of this costly national psychodrama” asks Martin Leng:
big-europe.eu/publications...

‘A stain on our history’: outrage after Trump shares racist video about Obamas as White House attempts to brush off the post – live Former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes slams Trump for posting racist video on Truth Social; Karoline Leavitt says criticism is ‘fake outrage’

Bang on the money:

“Let it haunt Trump and his racist followers that future Americans will embrace the Obamas as beloved figures while studying him as a stain on our history.”

Trump is determined to be remembered as a 'great man'.
His curse is that he won't be.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/live...

Trump’s funding a MAGA invasion of UK and EU 🚨 Code f*cking red 🚨

The Trump administration is creating a "slush fund" to turbocharge MAGA groups in the UK and EU, according to the FT.

This is code fucking red for democracy.

A racist screenshot of Michelle and Barack Obama

Last night, Trump posted a video to his social media platform that contained a racist clip showing Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys. It's still up:

Tech Sovereignty needs demand - to get supply right Co-authored by Cristina Caffarra & Anne Sohns

"Tech Sovereignty needs demand - to get supply right" by @cristinacaffarra.bsky.social & Dr. Anne Sohns open.substack.com/pub/escapefo...

Excited for people to read this one now I've tweaked it.

CNBC has done a great job here - @lorak.bsky.social is a star
bsky.app/profile/stev...

Nadella is, at his core, a bullshit artist. Every speech that he gives meanders for what feels like days. When asked at the World Economic Forum what would seem obvious in a few years looking back at 2026 (a nonsense question asked by an imbecile), Nadella responded by saying, after several seconds of word salad thanking everybody for the opportunity to ramble: “I think, when it comes to AI, the real question in front of all of us is, how do you ensure that the diffusion of AI happens, and happens fast. You have to have that line of how do the models, data and infrastructure spread more-evenly to create surplus everywhere if you sort of think about it. The way I come at this is not that, this has always been the arch of computation, you can sort of take it in the last 30 years, or the last 70 years, it’s always been about can you digitize artifacts about people, places and things, and then build analytical and predictive power, right, that’s what the mainframes did, that’s what the mini computer did, that’s what the [unintelligible] era did, that’s what the web era did, the mobile cloud era did. It depends, in respect to which paradigm or platform it has been one continuous arch of “let’s make better sense of this world by reasoning about it in digital form,” because in some sense, once you have these artifacts in digital form, you can use a more malleable resource like software, which doesn’t have the same type of, I’ll call it “marginal cost economics” associated with it, that allows us to then build more insight and more capability. And in that context AI, I’ll say, is of the same class, at least, like the web and the internet or mobile or PC or the cloud or maybe even greater. And so to me, right now where we are, let’s take what just happened with software engineering, which is knowledge work, you can say it’s “elite” knowledge work. It started off, in fact my own belief in this generation of AI and its capability really got built up when I first saw Github …

Listening to Satya Nadella speeches and slowly going insane

Some of my ideas on how DROP could be leveraged in Europe, & how further duties on browsers could help everywhere. baycloud.com/blog/PostDet...