I made a bank once
Cambridge, UK
Joined June 2010
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James Nicholson retweeted
Makes me sick that we would spend so much money on this. Even pre-AI this is outrageous. Now it's basically criminal. You could do it for 1% of this cost 😭
James Nicholson retweeted
After only about a month of work, I got Luxforge to a point where I can use it to replace my LR workflows.
In some places (like catalog management), it's way better. Some things (e.g object removal) still need work.
Open source. Cross platform. Free. luxforge.app
James Nicholson retweeted
WOIM is out now on Steam! 15% discount for launch, go get woimin! store.steampowered.com/app/4…
James Nicholson retweeted
The trailer is up! WOIM launches October 21st on Steam! (world earthworm day)
James Nicholson retweeted
I am increasingly frustrated about the state of conversation about AI in the UK. It feels like we are in never ending cycles of deluded thinking. Under current trends, Britain will be defenceless against the transformative effects of AI and have no leverage over development at the frontier.
We are the most exposed economy to AI in the world. We have very little data centre capacity and few credible plans to expand – and our high energy costs mean we would struggle to even if we tried.
I am publishing a paper today on what the UK should do to build that leverage, let the economy capture value from AI and prepare the state to adapt, however AI develops.
The three strategies are as follows:
1. Build the infrastructure that gives us leverage. Fix the grid, fix planning, make Britain a place frontier AI can run.
2. Let the economy capture the value of AI. Reform the regulatory, labour and talent barriers that stop British firms adopting AI.
3. Build a state that can adapt to a changing world. Build a tax base that survives the labour market changing, public services that use AI to deliver better, and capacity to weather the upcoming geopolitical storms.
Two years ago, we published a similar report on AI - many recommendations of which ended up in the action plan. I remember feeling hopeful, but sadly the fundamental problems facing the country on AI have not shifted. I truly hope that this week of momentum culminates in action. There’s still a narrow path for the UK, but everyday that path is narrowing.
I owe you an apology @sama, I wasn't really familiar with your game
Sam Altman says Trump and Xi would win the Nobel Peace Prize for a one-page AI agreement
“I think Presidents Trump and Xi would get the Nobel Peace Prize together if they could agree on something that should be easy to agree to. And it would be wonderful.”
“I think that clearly the two countries are going to compete in lots of ways, and this is going to be important socioeconomically, geopolitically. But they should be able to agree that no one should be taking a certain level of risk with the development process of this.”
“And even if just the US and China could agree on some shared standards and testing for development of this technology, I think that'd be a wonderful accomplishment that the two of them can deliver.”
“I don’t think this is hard. This is like a one page document.”
James Nicholson retweeted
Can rent control fix the housing crisis? No. In fact, it could make things a whole lot worse.
Find out more in my latest for @WSJFreeEx
James Nicholson retweeted
looks like some folks (me included!) got the emergency alert more than once in the U.K. because they switched cell towers and not all towers were configured to broadcast with the same message code
devices use that to dedupe the broadcast message when it’s repeated every min
James Nicholson retweeted
Stamp duty and council tax are terrible taxes. Land value tax could replace both - and Andy Burnham has backed it for 16 years.
Who wins? Who loses? What happens to house prices?
LVT could drive growth. But it isn’t easy. Our model shows its promise - and its problems.
James Nicholson retweeted
A new study shows HPV vaccination in England has led to the number of deaths from cervical cancer falling to zero in vaccinated women under 25.
Please encourage all eligible children to get vaccinated.
thelancet.com/journals/lance…
James Nicholson retweeted
Most of Europe has not yet absorbed what AI is about to do to us. The few who have are not saying it loudly enough.
We wrote Europe 2031: a five-year scenario of the continent's slide into irrelevance, how AI is driving it, and what can still be done to change course.
James Nicholson retweeted
Frog put the shares in an SPV. “There,” he said. “Now we can transfer these shares freely”
“But Anthropic can still exercise its transfer restrictions” said Toad.
“That is true,” said Frog.
I am surprised more people are not paying attention to this update from Anthropic on its stock policy. This seems like a potential bombshell.
There is an active secondary market purportedly in Anthropic stock or derivatives including on fairly reputable (or at least well-known) platforms like Forge. Anthropic is calling them out *specifically*, by name, and essentially *saying* 100% of these are illegal.
Some may be frauds (people selling Anthropic stock or interests in Anthropic stock that they don't truly own), but more likely many are legit attempts at transferring Anthropic equity (directly, as SPV shares, or as some type of 'beneficial interest' or future, etc.)
Anthropic appears to be saying it will treat all these transfers as void. I don't have access to their terms, but it's very interesting to think what this could mean. Do the 'first purported sellers' in the chain potentially have an opportunity to do a double-dip? Does the first seller and all downstream buyers get the entire entitlement nuked?
Anthropic is threatening that--are they just bluffing? If they're not bluffing, what litigation is likely to ensue? This can get into really esoteric areas of corporate law that depend on exactly how the transfer restrictions are drafted as well as the language around how violations of transfer restrictions are treated--for example, if they are merely voidABLE then downstream buyers can assert various equitable claims/defenses, but if they are VOID ab initio then in some jurisdictions that forecloses equitable defenses.
James Nicholson retweeted
Japan has the world’s best railway system. 28% of Japanese passenger-kilometers are by rail. Germany manages 6.4%, and the USA manages 0.25%. Just one Japanese company, JR East, carries more passengers than China’s entire railway system, and four times as many than Britain’s.
What is the secret of its success?
worksinprogress.co/issue/why…
Part of the answer is that Japanese railway companies don't just operate trains. They run hospitals, supermarkets, department stores, amusement parks, office complexes, and retirement homes around their railway stations. One of them co-built Tokyo Disneyland. Another owns a baseball team. A third created its own all-women musical theater in 1914, which is still running today.
The logic is elegant: a railway increases the developable value of land around its stations, but normally that value accrues to landowners, not the railway operator. Japanese railway companies captured this value by owning and developing the land themselves.
About half of the revenue of Japanese railway companies comes from ‘side businesses’ like these. Allowing railway operators to capture more of the value they created meant that more lines were profitable, making a far larger system financially viable.
This may sound like a radically novel approach. But in fact, an exactly similar system existed in nineteenth-century America. The success of Japanese railways does not lie in some unreplicable feature of Japanese culture: it lies in good policy. If they learnt the right lessons from it, many countries could replicate Japan’s success.
Read more (much more) in @Borners1's & @carto_graph's new piece for @WorksInProgMag Issue 23.
you can finally have both
James Nicholson retweeted
Who called it "Effective Altruism" and not "Crazy Rich Bayesians"?
Anthropic's founders and employees are about to have a lot of cash. Many of them have pledged to give away huge amounts of that cash. But where's it gonna go?
@cogcelia took a look in this excellent new piece:
James Nicholson retweeted
One of the often slept-upon benefits of attending the University of Chicago is that they make you read Marx as part of the core curriculum, which is why this article gave me flashbacks of taking SOSC 114 as a freshman.
Marx, writing during the Industrial Revolution, predicted capitalism would periodically devour itself: firms replace labor with machinery to boost profits, but competition diffuses the technology, drives prices to marginal cost, and the gains get competed away. Meanwhile, displaced workers lose purchasing power, hollowing out the demand the whole system depends on. Production rises but no one can afford to buy what's produced - the contradiction between production and realization.
Citrini's piece describes this exact dynamic, then declares there's "no natural brake." It's the most Marxist piece of financial analysis written in years, and makes the same errors Marx did.
Schumpeter offered the obvious rebuttal 80 years ago: creative destruction doesn't just destroy, it creates industries we can't yet conceive of. Everyone in the replies is already making this point, and I think they're right.
But the sharper rebuttal is Hayek's: prices are the brake Citrini says doesn't exist. Who funds $200bn / qtr in AI capex when equities are down 38%, private credit marks are in the 50s, and consumer demand has collapsed? Cost of capital rises. Incremental build-out becomes uneconomical. Capital gets destroyed and reallocated.
Citrini also unknowingly describes Marx's proletarianization of the petite bourgeoisie: the $180k PM driving Uber is textbook. But the article claims this collapses consumer demand, and that's where it breaks.
The top decile drives 50%+ of spending and their wealth is in equities, not W-2 income; they're long the hyperscalers posting records in Citrini's own model. Blue collar is insulated because AI replaces cognitive labor, not physical.
The professional middle class gets crushed, but aggregate demand doesn't.
The spending class IS the capital-owning class. The K-shaped recovery they fear actually stabilizes the demand base they say is collapsing. In the stable aggregate demand, the petit bourgeoisie finds ways to reinvent itself.
I think the Citrini piece is excellent and worth reading. But history has repeatedly shown that periods of transformative productivity gains ultimately accrue to the consumer through lower prices, more leisure, and higher quality of life. Marx's error wasn't diagnosing the disruption, it was underestimating the system's ability to adapt.
I spent 100 hours over the past week researching, writing and editing the piece we just put out.
It’s a scenario, not a prediction like most of our work. But it was rigorously constructed, dismissing it outright requires the kind of intellectual laziness that tends to get expensive.
And we’ve released it for free. Hopefully you enjoy it.
citriniresearch.com/p/2028gi…
