Ben Ansell

New Channel 4 sitcom just dropped

YouTube video by Cortical Labs Living Human Brain Cells Play DOOM on a CL1

Hey Ben,

I'm enjoying reading your posts and want offer my contribution to the conversation. I feel that author mean LLMs by AI and that's not even the trace of the shadow of what's coming.

Look at those living cells grown on a chip playing Doom www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8...

Great rejoinder - we might be behind in more than one important race!

Oil Prices Tumble After Trump Says Iran War ‘Very Complete’ Oil futures, which surged as much as 31% Sunday night to more than $100 a barrel, have tumbled back down, a stunning reversal that gained momentum after President Trump told CBS that the war he launch...

If true that Trump is signalling an end in sight, then what we’ve learned from this fiasco is that the Iranian regime does not collapse even under intense pressure & the rest of the world can’t endure closure of the straits of Hormuz for very long at all www.wsj.com/livecoverage...

Britain's AI bear case A handful of troublingly plausible ways the next decade could not go Britain's way

This is a really excellent piece on the risks to Britain of falling failing to figure out how to thrive over technological shock of next decade from @archiehall.bsky.social

notes.archie-hall.com/p/britains-a...

According to DOGE flunky, a documentary about the experiences of Jewish women's slave labor during the Holocaust is "inherently discriminatory." Come ON.

Good thing I didn’t panic and buy a barrel of oil at midnight really.

Uk Labour's instagram account shares an image of Sir Kier Starmer standing in parliament saying "It is my duty to judge what is in Britain's national interest, and that is the judgement I made. I stand by it."

Sign of where things are going that in a shockingly competent move Labour's social media team are actually straight up promoting the fact that he had this falling out with Trump re the Iran war. The British right wing press and party establishments may have fucked up here methinks.

Yes but are the British people being ranked and promoted on how viral they go on X?

🧐

Tbf not those of us who had accidentally blocked you.

Selling my exciting Blue Labour vision while the letters 'B' 'o' and 'r' fall off the wall Theresa May style.

Actually interesting that Naismith doesn't use the word immigration in the piece. A Blue Labour that decided that instead of forcing care workers to leave the country it was interested in say, getting the police to investigate crime, might indeed do better. There's an exit option for them.

If you missed the excitement of my Constituency App over the weekend - here it is for your delectation. Two versions:

Less pretty but more stable and faster loading:
benwansell.github.io/constituency...

Prettier but prey to server hiccups:
livedataoxford.shinyapps.io/Constituency...

Have fun!

Having been on a few times I’d say that it is not entirely rare to be able to pick up a scent of dutch courage from other guests.

The oil fog of war

Most helpful post of a mad night.

At the risk of boring everyone,a little context.

$100 oil in isolation isn’t that bad. It averaged around that level from 2011-2014 without severe economic ramifications*.

It’s the pace of the rise that has people spooked. And not knowing where it might stop.

Has to do a retake to get a 4 or above by November.

OK, initial shock has had an hour to stabilise, the basic message is oil is still nearly 20% up, and equity markets are anywhere from -1% to -6% down. bonds, non $ FX and precious metals all less than 1% lower. see you all tomorrow morning early UK time:

Trump also really needs to learn to match his singulars and plurals or he’s going to do poorly in his English Language GCSE

Cooked.

Trump take SUV

Building on my General Election Prediction App, I thought it might be fun to build an app that allows you to look at UK constituencies in a bunch of cool ways. So this app doesn't turn polls into seats. It looks at seats as they are.

livedataoxford.shinyapps.io/Constituency...

Quick thread 1/n

I cannot get over how the right-leaning media in the US are being harder on the Iran War than their equivalents in the UK, who seem to think not getting involved is Suez cubed.

Jason Cowley the new Simon Jenkins in record time

And fixed the Scottish hex map (it was missing five hexes where the two datasets I'm using didn't have same ONS codes). On NI, I just added a note. Thx