I wrote about a new genre that I've seen emerging, especially in non-fiction publishing. It's called the Substack Book.

A weekend like this shows how mad it is to have online safety and AI be part of the same ministerial brief.

Fun fireside with @collision at Stripe Tour London yesterday. - Fable hot takes - Running an org in the AI era - Why the EU/UK suck at tech Full thing here: youtube.com/watch?v=70kWqOOW…

we missed you last night at the powerpoint party claude dinner substack reading a16z new media summit demo night vibe coding hackathon new york tech week launch event pitch and run club builder panel yc office hours

Why have all the shops in stations stopped selling tights? Is nobody wearing them anymore?

Que s’est-il passé?

I’ve recently been worried about brain drain for a very selfish reason. A lot of my friends have been leaving (you know who you are). I couldn’t tell if my concern was bad reasoning from anecdotes so I tracked one group of exceptional Britons you can actually follow individually: International Mathematical Olympiad medallists. These are not normal teenagers. ~3% of IMO winners go on to win major scientific prizes (60x the rate of MIT alumni). The UK's medallists include two Fields Medallists, the designer of the chip in 99% of the world's smartphones, and the inventors of public-key cryptography. The headline number says I am wrong to worry: 71% retention and the UK is the second-largest importer of IMO talent globally after the US. But look closer and you see: 1. The most recent settled-career cohort shows the lowest retention on record. 2. Before 2016, not a single UK medallist did their undergrad abroad. Since then, two have. Both went to MIT. 3. Of British medallists in industry, only 33% work for a British firm. The modal employer is Anthropic, OpenAI, or Jane Street. 4. Leaving is individually rational. IMO alumni who moved to the US were up to 6x more productive than equally talented peers who stayed home. The UK multiplier is 2-3x. The individual-optimal and nationally-optimal choice are not the same thing. So was I right to worry? Too early to say. The data is consistent with both a structural shift and noise. But the laments of brain drain are not obviously wrong. Full piece: substack.com/@britishprogres… (A note on statistical validity: we send six kids to the IMO a year, so some of these figures rest on analysing small numbers. This is enough to see the shape of things but not enough to lean hard on any percentage.)

Plausible explanation here: order-order.com/2026/06/09/f…

This whole thing has been a good litmus test for how many people recognise the Governor of the Bank of England

Pining for the days I saw these and not AI-generated smackdowns between Farage and Andrew Bailey

yes i am microdosing employment (freelance)

George Eliot's brand is so strong that I routinely think George Saunders is a woman

The discussion of the impact of AI on entry-level white-collar jobs has become somewhat cliché now, and with good reason: junior hiring is down 14% to 29% across the US, UK, Canada and Australia. The most cited research explores whether generative AI is the main cause, which keeps putting the AI displacement story in the headlines. But a new paper argues that bad news for entry level roles are likely misattributed to AI - something else could be driving what seems like its consequences for junior workers. x.com/pj_lambert/status/2057… Economists Peter Lambert and Yannick Schindler point out that the occupations highest on AI exposure are broadly also the ones with highest exposure to the availability of working from home arrangements: software, finance, professional services, or accountancy. When they include both shocks in their analysis, the WFH effect remains statistically significant; the AI effect does not . What drives this is what the office does for workers still building up their human capital; the acquisition of expertise and know-how about their jobs. Randomised trials of in-person versus remote work find office workers about 18% more productive than home workers, with two-thirds of the gap there from day one and the rest opening up because office workers learn faster. Sitting near teammates raises the digital feedback engineers get on their code by 18%. Some workers and companies are more productive when working from home is an option: hybrid work can be a big win for workers already established in their careers. They had their formative years in the office, and they now have the senior colleagues, the network and the tacit knowledge that let them be productive from home. But there is now a cost that is borne almost entirely by the cohort that hasn't yet been given the same opportunities to build up their careers. There is an uncomfortable implication in all of this. The workers with the most to gain from time in the office are also the ones with the least say in whether they get it. The current arrangement is largely determined by workers and companies that have adapted to hybrid forms of work, not those who may need the ability to acquire work experience the most to benefit from automation. The argument from Part I of this puts this in sharper relief: AI struggles most with the parts of work that depend on tacit knowledge, the contextual judgement that has to be transferred in person. britishprogress.substack.com… Younger workers building human capital under hybrid are accumulating less of the kind of knowledge AI is worst at substituting for, and so will face a higher automation risk over time, as the technology evolves. If the UK is to be prepared to capture and distribute the gains this new technology will bring, it needs to give young workers a better chance of harnessing these benefits.

What if neopets... were for work