Well, here it is. Your next favourite podcast… Join Jonathan Simnett and I on episode 1 of The Difference Engine! Available now! Click the link in the comments 👇

META IS AN ABSOLUTE MESS INSIDE RIGHT NOW Wired just dropped an exclusive, and the details are wild. This week someone interrupted a livestreamed Meta meeting, open to thousands of employees, with an expletive-filled rant about "being the company's bitch." They told the presenters to find a specific Meta AI executive and "tell him that he's a piece of shit." A presenter covered their face with their hands. Employees in the chat called the start "spicy." Here is what's behind it. Meta's AI restructuring cut 8,000 jobs last month, 10% of the company. The same restructuring feeds a unit called Applied AI, where 6,500 engineers and product managers have been drafted in waves since April. There is no application process. You get selected, and your options are join or leave the company. Members call themselves "draftees." The new job: writing puzzles and coding problems to train Meta's AI models, two tasks a week. People hired to build apps for billions of users now assemble training data for hundreds of AI scientists. "It's literally the gulag," one employee told WIRED. "You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week." Another: "Most people find the work soul-crushing." At the same time, Meta started recording US employees' clicks and keystrokes to generate more AI training data. Over 1,600 employees signed a petition demanding it stop. The concession: employees can pause the tracking for up to 30 minutes. Zuckerberg's response came in an internal memo Friday: "We've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more." He repeated his promise of no more mass layoffs this year. His fixes: limits on the manager ratios Meta had deliberately pushed to 50-to-1 on some teams, bigger budgets for team events, a hackathon next month, and assigned desks by the end of the year. That same memo says Meta's north star is "to be the best place for the most talented people in the world to make an impact." The most talented people in the world are writing puzzles for a model and asking permission to pause the keystroke logger. META declined to comment.

My pinned tweet explains the background to Healey resignation. We got real numbers in 2020 for first time in ~20 years. Since then everything reverted to fake. Thanks to Trolley & Wally, they let HMT and MoD shovel cash into things they KNEW were broken, like AJAX, and scuppered funding the future (e.g drones, robotics, AI, cloud). The nuclear weapons supply chain is a multi-billion multi-decade fiasco and reinforces fake budgets. MoD & CO used UKR war to prop up the lies and disasters, not to fix them. Trolley, Sunak and Starmer all went along with: classify, punt, spin fake budgets. All these chickens are coming home to roost. The DIP is a disaster because it combines: a/ continuing to fund old things which shd be scrapped but senior people's careers rest on lying about, b/ failure to fund the future, c/ more dodgy accounts, d/ classified nuke shitshow, which forces lies/cannibalisation of conventional, and e/ continued failure to change procurement and long term budgets despite covid and UKR. Ive said this 100 times for years. Also relevant to resignation -- In 2020, I got the PM & CHX to agree to take the next gen fighter AWAY from HMT and MoD. (FOI the doc screenshotted below!) They were using a bogus 'above STRAP 3 study' to claim that AI would be irrelevant to future fighters in 2045. This 'top secret' study was written *before* DeepMind was created!! We agreed to take away the next gen fighter/drones from MoD/HMT and put them into a new civilian project with huge commercial development of drones/robotics/AI, with procurement and budgets done totally outside normal system (like vaccines, ARPA etc). After I left this was u-turned along with shredding all the true budget numbers. The MoD and HMT proceeded with the usual procurement with BaE. This has now blown up *as it was obvious it would SIX YEARS ago'. HMT is refusing to fund it because the MoD is a corrupt shambles. And MoD is knackered by the HMT's insane budget processes and insane procurement. HMT and MoD have reasonable complaints about each other. 'Everyone's right and everyone's unhappy'. The only way out is the Vote Leave plan and No10 smashing heads together with the full authority of the PM, as in the secret process of 2020. It cannot be left to 'normal processes'. Senior people must be forced to tell the truth 'or you're fired'. We did this. It works! The MPs refuse to engage. The MPs on defence committee say they cannot ask officials re the 2020 process because 'they'll just refuse to answer'. But our enemies know everything everything I say is true! It is impossible for dud Starmer to solve these problems. It is good timing that Burnham will soon take over and could draw a line under decades of Tory failure and set out a new path... But there will be HUGE pressure from the old system, in HMT and MoD, to patch everythign up with more lies, spin, fake accounts, and massive classification... Maybe some MPs could finally pay attention to these issues and resolve to stop constant lies, please! Our security, prosperity and critical technologies are at stake and the old parties and old Whitehall are pathological! NB. In 2020 we also bought LEO satellites. SW1 laughed. Starlink has been critical in UKR. Whitehall sold off the satellites! NB. In March 2022 when the UKR disaster started I wrote: 'Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party).' NB. Special Forces who have observed the drone wars in UKR have told the senior MoD repeatedly that the mega expensive things they want to plough cash into in the DIP will get VAPOURISED in a real war by cheap drones! The SF are told to shut up and not give HMT a chance to cut the budgets! I know it's psychologically extremely hard for SW1 but Vote Leave worked with the deep state on this in 2020 and we were right on all the big things. The disastrous old processes have now blown up with unprecedented resignation over these exact issues. 6 years have been wasted. Tens of billions have been wasted. Lives lost. Talent resigned.. Opportunities to lead squandered... All over Whitehall are officials involved in 2020 who know what I say is true, the MPs and hacks should finally get the details into the public... Maybe SW1 could update its mental models?! Ps. if you're a hack still getting Ciaran 'AI is fake, PRC infiltration is overrated' Martin to comment on tech, you're as dud as Starmer

Revealed: Healey's 'stand up row' with Reeves - and how Starmer's decision to back his Chancellor forced the defence secretary to quit trib.al/GMV5Rcq

Nationwide advert unfairly lays trap for its own fat cat boss thetimes.com/article/807485a…

Nicola Sturgeon finds herself struggling to log in to a website...

This Z-list Labour Parliament is everything that’s wrong with British politics telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05…

As many union members support Reform as Labour, reveals ‘damning’ poll thetimes.com/article/99f584f…

Apparently this video isn’t enough evidence to convict the guy in blue for assaulting all three police officers Yet Lucy Connolly got two years in prison for an off colour tweet - prosecutions Keir Starmer encouraged Labour’s two tier justice system has to end x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/2060…

Gym. Done. Thx @cogx

Today’s reading matter. Oh Lord

A major talking point for those who think AI will cause mass unemployment is the recent slowdown in junior-level hiring. Lambert and Schindler, in this new working paper, point to a different culprit: work from home policies. Using data on ~250 million hires across four countries,they show that AI exposure strongly correlates with a role being work from home. So you have to disentangle the two to get a clean estimate. Which is the driving variable? They find that the effect of exposure to AI on junior hiring ~vanishes when you control for WFH, whereas the effect of WFH remains ~unchanged when you control for AI exposure. In other words: it's WFH, not AI, that is slowing junior hiring. Why? Their theory: "WFH makes supervision, monitoring, and on-the-job learning harder, all of which hit junior-workers more. Firms less willing to invest in junior talent when these frictions rise." I think that makes sense. WFH involves a certain degree of trust and makes management harder. If an employee is less experienced, all else equal you're less likely to prefer them for a WFH position. Bigger takeaway, though: if AI is going to take all our jobs, it's sure not there in the data yet!

‘Labour charmed business leaders … and then stopped listening’ thetimes.com/article/a1a047e…

🚨 If you’re a British taxpayer… …you currently owe £74,000 to pay off the national debt. Let me explain. Britain’s national debt is now roughly £2.9 TRILLION. There are around 39million taxpayers in the UK. That works out at roughly £74,000 of debt for every single taxpayer in the country. And the terrifying part? The government is still borrowing tens of billions more every year. So every time politicians announce another few billion for this scheme or that project… …remember who ultimately gets handed the bill. Your bill is currently £74,000.

When did @piersmorgan start to sing the band Squeeze @JoolsOfficial ?

Shocker mol.im/a/15824181

“Angela Rayner pays £40k after HMRC investigation” Given Labour don’t understand essential economics why should we expect a potential PM to understand what tax she pays God help us thetimes.com/article/8524207…

Sorry, but this is exactly the kind of behaviour Labour kept warning people about. The reality is that cronyism seems worse than ever under this government. Any more family friends you are gonna hire, also probably invest in all your family friends startups only and recycle the money. Nothing changes.

Her full name - according to her - is not Suzanne Ashman. It’s Suzanne Ashman Blair. She’s just been appointed head of UK govt-funded Sovereign AI & her father-in-law - Tony - has a ton of skin in…you’ve guessed it, the sovereign AI game.

Newly elected Green Party councillor Baggy Khan stood in front of his 5.2 litre V10 Lamborghini Huracan. Not bad for a local councillor eh?

Tax the 0.5% Or at least make sure they pay their council tax.