Ravi Veriah Jacques

Mamdani continually playing Trump in order to get things done rather than screaming about how he’s a fascist - he’s all I’ve wanted in a left wing politician for a decade.

Kore-eda with more films in the letterboxd 500 than Nolan is a victory for humanity

Ppl who keep track of what’s cancelled the same way football fans follow the transfer window…

That’s all Starmer’s Labour was ever truly based on. Plus, of course, a remarkably hated Tory Party.

Unless these foundational issues are remedied, and we get a Labour leader with a personality and an interesting vision, it’s Reform come the next election. 2/2

This gets to the root malaise of the Starmer government. You can’t govern, least of all in these times, if your foundation is basically factional - if your ascent to power was built not on ideas, or even personality, but instead an incredibly effective purge of the left within the Labour Party. 1/2

Corbyn is currently up in his allotment with the biggest grin on his face

The money isn’t really in individual users/chatbots anymore - it’s in the API/corporate use, and that’s also where there’s greatest technological uncertainty. Returning to the initial point, technological advances substantially change the API/corporate side of things.

then the valuations that are at the core of the ‘bubble’ then look rather more justified.

If with each successive new model, returns don’t increase sufficiently rapidly, and eg openAI defaults on one of its many v large circular loans, we’re all fucked.

IMO wastage of investment is much less important re the bubble than the returns on investment. If with each successive wave of investment - not just in infrastructure but also pretraining - we see v rapidly rising returns such that the large companies get ever closer to breaking even…

Oh defo, I just think with AI the extent to which there’s been overbuilding is unclear because it’s unclear exactly how useful the technology will be economically in 6, 12 months. So the bubble isn’t something that’s fixed, it’s something that exists in dialogue w this constantly changing technology

Think powerful economic use cases are v tied to whether it’s a bubble - if AI automates a large swathe of coding, the investment in AI infrastructure is much more likely to pay off. And that’s before getting to other use cases that will grow as AI’s jagged frontier expands

And it’s incredibly difficult to predict what precisely AI’s jagged frontier will look like in 6 months, let alone a year. 3 months ago, all I heard was talk of stagnation.

We inhabit a profoundly unstable technological conjuncture, and that’s something to be embraced.

This is a key reason why I don’t trust anyone who confidently asserts AI is a bubble or not - so much depends on how rapidly the technology advances. Quick progress in economically useful areas like coding could substantially alter the financial equation.

If you’re gonna recommend a first foreign film to someone, it’s gotta be The 400 Blows - immediately disabuses anyone of the notion that B&W French films must be cold, inaccessible and pretentious. It’s somehow fresher, funnier, and more devastating than any 21st century movie I’ve seen.

Seeing ppl debate whether Sinners or One Battle After Another will be discussed in decades… the clear answer is neither. 2025 was not a good year for film - at least in America. I’m waiting on the foreign releases

Should be of significant interest to the left, the latter less so though perhaps more now in the era of AI. The former represent imo a key node in the argument over the abundance agenda.

So I would personally propose that...
- Huge state backed infrastructure development
- Huge partly state fueled housing boom
- Significantly state-backed investment in renewable technologies and key industries
- Large state sector partly to ensure large-scale employment...

No new American frontier AI labs have emerged this year, so cue Moonshot AI. And apparently there are several other Chinese labs in the mix beyond Alibaba and DeepSeek. China’s unique blend of innovation - produce things to roughly the same quality as the West at a fraction of the cost

There is of course one great exception to this: China.

And how could he? The left has long lost any serious tradition of thinking about governance and economics. Gone are the Marxist and Kenyesian traditions, replaced by a never-ending focus on identity. As I argued from 2016, the left is only as good as its ideas, and it is now largely without them 2/2

Zach Polanski is clearly far more skilled than the Your Party lot at articulating the defining problems of modern Britain. But I’m deeply unconvinced that he has any of the real solutions. 1/2

This election is the one time I’ve appreciated the American penchant for endless democracy. Give me another 100 days. I need more Curtis Sliwa. Far more. Even more of Cuomo’s public humiliation kink. And above all more and more and more Zohran.

I absolutely hate that this illness has made me semi chronically online as I have so few other distractions. It’s one of the most off-putting things someone can be. I miss when it felt like I existed as much in the 19th century as our own, in the books I read, the music I played and listened to.

It’s such a shame that none of the great British Marxist historians remain. Perhaps no one would be better suited to probe the rise of AI than a school of historians deeply interested in changing modes of production.

AI is a tabula rasa onto which people can project their views. Like the rise of the internet, AI is so far-reaching that anyone can find a whole range of data points to support their worldview. As a result there is a lot of noise, far less understanding.

If China is a ‘national security threat’ to the UK, then what on earth is Trump’s America?

The one thing I like about AI investment vs the internet - a v large proportion is being spent actually building things. Makes me a little more sanguine about whether we’re in a bubble (which we probably are).

That graph is purely weekly active users of ChatGPT - which people have to choose to use.

Extraordinary

Reading the literature - I’m often left with the same feeling, that there’s a specific way I’m meant to feel about and talk about my body. And I kind of hate it.