Giles Wilkes

EU privacy watchdog opens probe into Elon Musk’s X over sexualised AI images ‘Large-scale’ inquiry is latest sign of how regulators are scrutinising the group’s Grok chatbot

Also, that was posted shortly before this was announced:

ft.trib.al/V6HeK0a

No one said it was no big deal. Society and governments protested and forced a reluctant reversal from Musk. Why do people have to invent stuff to justify their outrage? There's enough reality for that

Russian UAV operator Myroslav Simonov from the elite "Rubicon" unit has defected to Ukraine’s side. He says that after being deployed near Kupiansk and seeing how casually orders were given to execute prisoners, he went AWOL and crossed over to the Ukrainian side.
youtu.be/Xq4f8MHrl_o?...

A message perhaps for the breathless Westminster commentary that treats every debate within government as a “civil war “and puts Starmer in the “last chance saloon” at least three times a week?

Hyperbole is the enemy People exaggerate the problem and their agency in solving it, no wonder the voters are repelled

A cathartic burst of irritation from me about the overuse of hyperbole
open.substack.com/pub/gileswil...

Thinking about AI and white collar jobs.
Can AI replace all white collar jobs? Obviously not. That is just silly.
Can it replace some jobs? Almost certainly. But that’s just normal. Word processing replaced a lot of jobs. Databases replaced a lot of jobs. Spreadsheets replaced a lot of jobs.
1/2

A cut above everything else you read on planning.

Build the Rail! Save the Snails! How to speed up the planning system without trashing the environment

New post out:

We have a guest post today from the excellent @dsquareddigest.bsky.social.

"Build the Rail! Save the snails!"

Or how we don't need to sacrifice the environment to speed up our mad planning processes.

(Free to read)

open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/b...

Apparently less than a third of US citizens would claim English, Scotch or Irish ancestry. Huh.

Growth again Some less edited thoughts ...

Which if you're interested in can be found chasing the links in here

open.substack.com/pub/gileswil...

Britain’s penchant for self-destruction Political instability saps confidence, investment and policymakers’ bandwidth

Britain’s penchant for self-destruction - giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... nice wide ranging piece from @tejparikh.ft.com throws in a mention of my growth thing ...

I often start there

What's so amazing about Jim Henson as a puppeteer is that he could literally be explaining that Kermit is made out of felt and ping pong balls and yet Kermit still feels alive the whole time he's doing it

Crikey that's a large dish

Sorry but slow cooked shoulder of lamb is the greatest, don't try to argue back

It’s so funny to think about the fact that there’s people out there deferring every life decision to this

Not really, you still only have one result, whereas sports is a factory of results

Left London. A smiling woman served me a nice coffee and engaged in conversation. May have to head home sharpish if I come across any more of this

Well yeah, I think so. Incredibly

Prediction Markets Are Very Accurate - Marginal REVOLUTION alexmccullough at Dune has a very good post on the accuracy of Polymarket prediction markets. First, how do we measure accuracy? Suppose a prediction market predicts an event will happen with p=.7, i....

Some are

Prediction Markets Are Very Accurate - Marginal REVOLUTION share.google/ijFFUZQBWecz...

Totally agree on both

Broken record, sorry, but the mechanics of why this sucks are very simple:

- gambling profits are, have always been, since forever, massively driven by problematic users
- expansion of the trade under a profit maximisation mandate necessarily leads to creating those users

bsky.app/profile/gile...

Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

Just checking in with those ardent defenders of free speech

I love Crash books of all kinds. I think the ones on LTCM, Enron, and Galbraith are the best I remember. Keen to hear thoughts 6/6

For example, why didn't 2000 or 1987 cause similar problems; did splitting banks really make a difference; why exactly DID stocks reach such a high and then fall so hard; what is the relationship between banking and stock prices- you don't get any insight here. But lots of colour. 5/

I remember being gripped by Galbraith's account, and a book called Only Yesterday, written in the early 1930s, and so might revisit them. Sadly this one felt like a journalist's book. If you want something to draw useful parallels with today's market action and what may ensue, this doesn't help 4/

Arguably the most consequential action was FDR leaving the gold standard, but that is mentioned in passing. Instead we have the foregrounding of a few chosen speculators, who provide some novelistic colour. And the implicit moralising that the boom caused the crash and what followed 3/

And Sorkin sort of realises this, but doesn't go into the story of monumental banking failures and collapsing money supply that resulted in the biggest macro economic event of all time. Instead you get the 'drama' of Glass Steagall being passed and some bankers being grilled 2/

Somewhat to my surprise, I've found the 1929 book by Sorkin a bit disappointing. It manages to take the stock market too seriously, and a few notable characters related to the market too, without the compensation of the incredible drama of those days.

The crash didn't cause the Depression 1/

Nadhim Zahawi thinks London is now unsafe, because the other day a tired-looking man walked past him during the morning rush hour.