Rachel Coldicutt

Sam Altman has a new project: building AI Inc OpenAI is building a corporate empire of mutual dependencies

I'm halfway through @karenhao.bsky.social's *excellent* Empire of AI atm, which makes this nexus of deals all the more fascinating. OpenAI can only ever be one piece of a more complex puzzle, built to be perpetually struggling for money and compute on.ft.com/48WFE4G

this!!!

how many copies till we can muster an SE26 discussion group?

Waste wise, if you don't want an apple *right now*, you can just pop it in your pocket and have it later, plus it would save all the effort and energy that has gone into making the poor rubber-dinghy panna cotta, which I almost feel sorry for now.

Having a "dietary requirements" lunch that is VG/DF/GF/DB/LF/LS and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. The pudding - a tofu-based panna cotta - tastes like licking the underside of rubber dinghy and I don't understand why they didn't just give all us dietary reqs weirdos an apple or a nice piece of melon

Anyway sharing again as - while it's great to get some buzz round the project - "surrendering to first-mover advantage on LinkedIn" isn't the most equitable way to find great people, so please do share with your networks and I guess I'll spend next time weekend reading several hundred applications 🤷🏻‍♀️

For a reason I can't fathom, the call went semi-viral on LinkedIn (?!) and we've had more than 200 applications (when I'd normally get <20): as you'd expect, there are some brilliant ones, some okay ones, and a lot of genAI ones from ppl who haven't read the brief, but I guess that's modern life.

Freelance Researchers: Safe Adoption of AI — Careful Industries We are looking for freelance researchers to conduct literature searches on the impacts of AI on worker safety, infrastructural safety, and environmental safety.

This time last week I shared this call for 3 small AI-related freelance gigs to do specialist literature searches on AI and worker safety, infrastructure resilience, and environmental safety. The call's open till Friday this week www.careful.industries/blog/2025-9-...

I mean it's presumably for tourists but it is a pretty weird business model.

What is it that suddenly makes a shop a "railway station shop"? Kate Spade, previously just a little boutique in Covent Garden and perhaps another in Chelsea, is becoming as ubiquitous as WH Smith's used to be at London stations. Are ppl just popping in to buy a £500 bag on the way to wherever?

I am not a very good listener tbh - if someone tells me directions I have usu stopped paying attention even before something useful has been said - so I definitely use audio for entertainment and the written word for information

Yes exactly this. Also the information-to-agency volume can be quite overwhelming and (currently) frightening.

(Am aware there is a lot of privilege in my not having to be diligent re: Singal, while also wondering how on earth to be aware of *even more* news and information.)

Singal. Had no idea he'd written for the Economist (which I read as sparingly as possible) or had UK connections. There's a lot of US-media discourse that I tend to ignore tbh, as just not enough bandwidth to engage in a meaningful way, and I have a lot blocked/muted terms on here

Which is interesting from a governance/feedback perspective

Also, as someone in the UK, I've never heard of the person at the centre of this - it feels totally possible that a platform-defining Bluesky drama could happen and many/most users would know nothing about

Side-stepping the actual issue, this shows a v specific Bluesky dynamic. No algorithm + UK/US time difference(s) means there's not so much main-character stuff. It's possible to check your feed in the UK morning and completely miss last night's West Coast drama

Just as a tangent, I read very quickly so text-based scrolling works for me but I'm really fascinated by the growing number of people who (claim
to?) listen to audio at 1.5x, 2x speed. Wonder if that will become a more established thing for dense information, with more genAI tools for reading aloud

I meant more that text-based social media will keep going as a little foible of a past age

Thinking about how older (75+) people are more likely than other age groups to have linear TV on in the background during the day, I wonder if there'll be a solid cohort of Extremely Online Gen Xers who become the last people standing on text-based social media. keeping it going in 2060.

💯 The only way Badenoch's plans would work is recognition by exception, backed by absolute surveillance of everyone. Not only is facial recognition technology not up to the job, the sheer cost, effort and level of intrusion of actually rolling this out would probably come close to sinking a govt.

The digital disconnect: taking digital social policy seriously - Power to Change In our next essay, Rachel Coldicutt explores the urgent need for a community-centred approach to technology policy in the UK. From WhatsApp-powered communit ...

Rather than unlocking UK community power, successive govts' digital policies have been focussed on Silicon Valley-style success.

By me for @powertochange.org.uk, on why digital social policy is a necessary building block for a stronger society

www.powertochange.org.uk/evidence-and...

oh selected the whole line - is that the problem?

Is it just me or is formatting in Google Docs now completely broken? Put a heading style on a line of text and suddenly all the following paragraphs are also in bold caps size 14, because obvs this is how documents work...

Just remembering, for no particular reason, that time my father-in-law asked me if I'd been using LinkedIn but pronounced it "Link-id-in", which is obvs a much better name for it.

Am enduringly fascinated by the way digital distribution channels still blur this indie boundary, and what it means for epistemic confidence, democracy, regulation etc - back in the day this was all called "user-generated content" and interesting to see the traditional market has still not caught up

Well I mean. It is an half-hearted approach at best. (and thank you!)

Industry, innovation, and technology are positioned in cross-government policy as taking place in parallel, almost on another plane to neighbourhoods and communities, even though access to good work and prosperity are foundational properties of good places to live, and communities are more likely to be formed on a smartphone than in a community centre.

New essay for the @powertochange.org.uk 10th anniversary.

The digital society has been around for decades, but digital social policy is still non-existent. Tech policy can't just pick corporate winners, it should also invest in communities and places

www.powertochange.org.uk/evidence-and...

Is this better or worse than that time in the 2010s when everyone suddenly started putting zany headshots on their CVs and making personal infographics filled with fun facts out how attention to detail was their biggest weakness

I've not done much hiring in the last year and it really is something to see all the identically formatted emails come in, one after another, delivering the messages from the Chat-GPT elves.