Andra Sonea

Somebody on LinkedIn said what we're all thinking.

AI isn't magic. AI is land, real estate, and energy.

Others have noted that this means foreign-born people are LESS likely than UK-born people to be in prison. What I want to note is that The Times is now referring to foreign-born UK citizens as ‘foreigners’. This includes Boris Johnson, Sir Mo Farah, Emma Watson, Rory Stewart and little old me.

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

YouTube video by Cambridge Disinformation Summit Prof Jagolinzer discusses grievance as a barometer for democracy risk at the EU Parliament

"Who in my communities are aggrieved...and who is influencing them? Because that is a force multiplier because that actually radicalizes. There is ample literature that shows that there is a higher probability of political violence in that cohort."

www.youtube.com/watch?v=O35i...

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation. There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time. For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual. As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone. Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism. No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

I think it's now possible to make a poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts.

Text 1. Wilhoit's Law, born as part of a 2018 blog comment
crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...

Credit to @emmaclairefoley.bsky.social for calling labubu "American collapse era Cheburashka"

this is the time for scifi fans to exercise the ultimate depth and breadth of their creativity

make them shut down the hotline

use all your best Borg jokes

Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations Would you pay $169 for an introductory ebook on machine learning with citations that appear to be made up? If not, you might want to pass on purchasing Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Ad…

Of course it is:

Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations retractionwatch.com/2025/06/30/s...

We’ve launched a new collection of openly accessible videos, Interviews with Historians, in which prominent 20th century historians reflect on their lives and professional practices. Access the collection here:
www.history.ac.uk/library-digi...

This matches what I wrote about here in every way. This is anti-social behavior that changes the fundamental social contract of the open web www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

The heat above 32°C in southeast England tomorrow will be 100 times more likely due to fossil fuel-driven warming 🌡️📈

Our super rapid study was published this morning. It is just the second time we’ve studied an event in real-time, using forecast data. It's been hot work.

🧵

British decline in one story.

Any state which finds itself incapable of managing a project as basic as rolling out a 20th century tech between its biggest cities needs to ask itself some profound questions about what hope it has of managing the technologies of the 21st.

AI’s Dirty Secret: Why Policymakers Need to Wake Up to Its Energy Footprint | TechPolicy.Press Pupak Mohebali says policymakers must stop seeing AI as an abstract cloud of code and start treating it like the real-world infrastructure.

If we care about the future of public technology, we can’t afford to ignore its environmental price tag, writes Pupak Mohebali. It’s time for policymakers to stop seeing AI as an abstract cloud of code and start treating it like the real-world infrastructure it is, she says.

If he did this with excel and COBOL would be very handy

Almost a fifth of England’s rural bus services disappeared in past five years Such areas received about half the extra funding per capita than urban areas, according to county council analysis Almost a fifth of bus routes in rural areas of England have disappeared over the past five years despite government pledges to improve services, with county councils arguing they have lost out on bus funding to cities and towns. Rural areas have received about half the extra state funding per capita than that awarded to urban areas with more comprehensive services, according to analysis by the County Councils Network. Continue reading...

Almost a fifth of England’s rural bus services disappeared in past five years

I suspect someone may have already done this... I took the current NASA Earth fleet chart of operating and planned Earth observing missions and crossed out those recommended for cancellation in the President's budget request. It's disturbing.

The lesson people infuriatingly never seem to master is that there is no creating a police state just for other people. If you create a police state with no due process for immigrants or accused criminals, then that's the system you've created for yourself.

But everyone tried to call those of us on the academic and research side conspiracy theorists when we pointed out the fact that they were building a system of control and domination that would keep them in power indefinitely, using digital authoritarianism and fascist violence.

Believe the experts

Graphs showing 25 years of budgets for the National Institute of Health, NASA, and the NSF. In all cases, the proposed budget for next year is far, far below any year of the previous quarter century.

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd.
It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.

Also, I heard a lot of people taking about how hard it is to restart a blast furnace. It takes a long while to establish a community of scholarship as well. You shut universities, or even courses you can't just start them up again next year

YouTube video by Eleanor Morton Literally every company now

Duolingo right now:

youtube.com/shorts/hL9pl...

⚖️🌎 BREAKING: A German court formally established the legal precedent that major emitters can be held liable under German civil law for climate damages in a case brought by a Peruvian farmer against German energy giant RWE.

what happened to the gentle man who bombed his way to the presidency in 1999

The Hungarian government is about to pass a law that will allow it to destroy the tiny online outlets that represent the last vestiges of independent Hungarian press

444.hu/2025/05/22/v...

It's absolutely peak Britain that the crown jewel of a new EU agreement is us getting access to better queues.

There is a false dichotomy drawn between "the ivory tower" and "the real world," and I'm here to report that in a post-industrial society, your real-world economy absolutely hinges on the university.

University towns are factory towns. Universities drive economic activity, not the other way around.

Police could search homes and phones after pregnancy loss | The Observer New national guidance suggests officers look for menstrual tracking apps or abortion drugs

"Police have been issued guidance on how to search women’s homes for abortion drugs and check their phones for menstrual cycle tracking apps after unexpected pregnancy loss"

"...police could bypass legal requirements for a court order to obtain medical records..."

observer.co.uk/news/nationa...