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Dan Davies

@dsquareddigest.bsky.social
18K followers 641 following 22K posts

"if that's the strangest thing you ever seen in your life, I'd say you haven't done much"

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Dan Davies
BrokenBanker @brokenbanker.bsky.social · 11h
AI is nature's way of telling BBC bosses to put tired formats out of their misery
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tweety fish @sifu.tweety.fish · 12h
HOW do you leave a song this good in a vault for FIFTY YEARS actually what is happening music.youtube.com/watch?v=o3HZ...
music.youtube.com
I'm Into Livin'
YouTube video by Stevie Wonder - Topic
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Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 13h
The illusion and politics of objectivity in cost-benefit analysis, a decision-making institution so ingrained that Americans can’t imagine life without it.
argmin.net
Pricing Commensurability
On the origins of cost-benefit analyses in governmental decision making
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Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 15h
80% of Anthropic’s half trillion in data center commitments is non-cancelable or payable regardless of usage. That’s an incredible bet on the continued dominance of Claude and exponential growth in AI usage.
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Jo Michell @jomichell.bsky.social · 19h
The most sensible MPC member, by a margin. www.ft.com/content/4aa0...
However, in an environment shaped by large external supply shocks and weak domestic investment, the monetary policy response required to restore price stability leaves the economy more vulnerable to the next shock. Without broader resilience-building, depressed demand and restrictive financial conditions undercut the expansion of supply capacity just when it is needed most.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 21h
The problem of social care is largely one of a missing insurance market. The obvious solution is to pay for care via general taxes, treating these as if they were insurance premia. Cutting benefits or the triple lock are bad alternatives.
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 21h
If you are building a house in a location where it cannot be insured, the problem is not really the lack of insurance
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Kate Mackenzie @katemac.bsky.social · 22h
Remember when we thought investors might mobilize in ways sufficient to protect the world from climate change
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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
well, looks like we are doing social media all over again
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
That's nice, everyone who wanted to swallow batteries will be able to
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tweety fish @sifu.tweety.fish · 28/09/2026
this comes from a standpoint and arrives at a conclusion I don't precisely agree with, and skips some nuance I think is important about how reward is encoded in LLMs, but it's a very well done and clear explanation of where weird behavior can come from in agents trained with RLVR/RLHF
yoshuabengio.org
Yoshua Bengio | Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
A lot has been written about the incidents of the last few months in which AI agents misbehaved in serious ways. They took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took them, escaped thei...
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Mayfair Cynic @mayfaircynic.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
"OpenAI tried to get data from a public website designed to provide data"
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tweety fish @sifu.tweety.fish · 28/09/2026
the thing about Jensen Huang is that he will never ever ever not fundamentally be a guy who runs a graphics card company. Like sure yeah whatever scientific computing AI ok ok he learned everything he needs to know selling VGA cards with badly photoshopped box art at E3 in 1996
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
the dollar system is "a global panopticon and choke point for everyone except criminals"
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
@dsquareddigest.bsky.social and I have a @britishacademy.bsky.social paper on how the US is now somehow managing to combine gross overuse of dollar power (e.g. upcoming ICC sanctions) with genial complaisance about the use of crypto to circumvent ordinary controls
thebritishacademy.ac.uk
The US dollar system as a source of international disorder
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
As I keep saying, not repairing a bridge imposes a cost on future generations, just not the kind of cost that is immediately visible in the accounting system
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Jamie K @crumpsalljamie.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
farewell Mighty Sparrow, based Calypsonian www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOWu...
youtube.com
Mighty Sparrow - Capitalism Gone Mad
YouTube video by Edward Spencer
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⤵️ @bryce.lol · 27/09/2026
If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber’d here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme No more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend: if you pardon, we will mend; And, as I am an honest Puck, Show is over, off you fuck.
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
can I get a "are you one hundred per cent sure of that boss"
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Baroness Floella Benjamin @floellabenjamin.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Today it’s 50 years since I first presented Playschool wearing my blue beads and silver heart. I adore bringing joy into the lives of my Playschool Babies during the 12 years I was on the programme. ❤️
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
My first take (from work with @abenewman.bsky.social on the EU-US privacy wars) is that this is likely very stupid. ECJ judges are absolutely political, but are relatively insulated from electoral politics and raison d'etat. US interference makes a strong ruling vs Musk more politically attractive.
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I have no idea why this dog park has a knuckleduster for its logo
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
(sees the Discourse, decides that you only get attention if you're the strangest case on the ward) ive never even heard of Texas
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
"we didn't have anything like as many people claiming to have ADHD back in the days when everyone carried around a pack of inhalable stimulant drugs and took between 20 and 40 doses every day"
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Tony Tassell @tonytassell.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
JPMorgan and the broking fetish for conviction calls - and why William Butler Yeats would not have done well as head of research at an investment bank -great column by @dsquareddigest.bsky.social as.ft.com/r/6862e493-c...
as.ft.com
JPMorgan and the broking fetish for conviction calls
An admission by some analysts at the bank of an inability to form a baseline view should be thanked rather than mocked
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tweety fish @sifu.tweety.fish · 25/09/2026
here is a succinct thing I can say: "alignment"-style AI safety risks DO NOT EXIST or need remediation with LLMs as such (there are lots of other problems) and OpenAI and Anthropic are in the business of TRYING TO MAKE THEM EXIST so that they can remediate them.
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Tim Hurrell @myoldschool.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
The Lance Armstrong stadium?
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Man City now playing home games at the Asterisk Stadium
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
at the 'stack, I round off this week's series by arguing that the OBR is fundamentally incapable of the task assigned to it, and this isn't the fault of anyone except Claude Shannon. backofmind.substack.com/p/a-question...
backofmind.substack.com
a question of capacity
office of budget irresponsibility, part 2
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Mayfair Cynic @mayfaircynic.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
xkcd.com/1494/
xkcd.com
Insurance
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I would like to see the prosecution drawing up a quite widely drafted application for a Criminal Behaviour Order
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
"anything which increases the productivity of the solution factory is also likely to increase the output of the problem factory" THE PROBLEM FACTORY, forthcoming from @profilebooks.bsky.social next year!
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
JPM and Fargo also got a bit of 'splainin to do about how they missed an "IT services company" doing nine figures of payments business
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
They just make great presents for everyone except @alanbeattie.bsky.social , and even he would get to love the fluffy darlings after a couple of weeks living with one
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Jo Michell @jomichell.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
If r* just means ‘the policy rate at which inflation will be on target, given everything else’ then it is conceptually unobjectionable. But then ‘bond rates are higher because r* is higher’ becomes almost indistinguishable from ‘bond rates are higher because the expected policy rate is higher’.
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
wtf went on here? Did somebody accidentally support a wind turbine
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Mark O’Neill 🐻 @radiobeartime.com · 24/09/2026
Why, that’s the kind of lenient treatment they would give a tout and there is no way that the leader of the black shorts is a tout.
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Robin Wigglesworth @robinwigglesworth.ft.com · 24/09/2026
Some people have actually already been getting their books, but happy UK publication day to me! 🥳 The US book isn’t published until next week, so let’s call this a small win for Europe over America.
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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
this is part of a wider project of unaccountability that dominates American life
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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
People really need to go back to the original Jurassic Park and look at the rather disturbing ways in which InGen's management of it now looks prescient
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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
🍿 so, everything about this is the most interesting thing ever to me. If you think having to read other people's AI-generated documents is boring, at least you can skim those. What happens when someone gives a circuitous and overblown AI-generated speech? You just have to sit and listen.
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Caræsten 🇵🇸 @cara.city · 24/09/2026
guys please stop falling for this, this is not “rogue AI” it’s “environments with lax cybersecurity controls”
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kate conger @kateconger.com · 24/09/2026
The latest update in the rogue A.I. saga: OpenAI agents that were supposed to be performing mundane data requests for things like health data, historic photos and wait times at theme parks resorted to hacking attempts when they couldn't access the data they wanted www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/t...
nytimes.com
OpenAI’s A.I. Tried Breaching Four Other Targets, With No Prompting (Gift Article)
In each incident, the technology appeared to be conducting mundane data collection and resorted to hacking techniques to get it, researchers said.
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Finally they're teaching the labour theory of value
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Just struck me that the original non-aligned behaviour of AI agents would be "using loads and loads of tokens on an unmetered subscription" and somehow they managed to control that one just fine and without crying about it.
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
"a more modest headroom target" listen to yourselves. bond investors actually think they're the intellectual ones.
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 23/09/2026
I think that Andon Labs' Vending-Bench is a nice illustration of the "just don't have that dog in them" theory of LLMs. This is a benchmark where an LLM agent is tasked with running a simulated vending machine, and scored on their earnings. GPT-6 Astra recently set the record at about $15k.
andonlabs.com
Vending-Bench 2 | Andon Labs
We're releasing Vending-Bench 2, a benchmark for measuring AI model performance on running a business over long time horizons. Models are tasked with running a simulated vending machine business over ...
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I mean, we've apparently lifted the ban on right wing hooliganism so what's the point keeping the stable door bolted I guess
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
"absolutely nothing. jack all, zip zero. thank god we wasted the robot's time rather than our own" www.wsj.com/video/what-7...
wsj.com
What 70,000 Hours of Conservative Podcasts Tell Us About the Midterms
A new in-house AI tool lets WSJ reporters analyze trends in online conversation to help understand the political mood of the country ahead of the midterm elections.
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I have been busy recording podcasts - here I am talking about great frauds through the ages with Gillian Tett and Robin Wigglesworth youtu.be/EngL2jk_O2Q?...
youtu.be
History’s wildest frauds | The Story of Money
YouTube video by The Story of Money Podcast | Financial Times
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