iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 10h

D&D still has that position for role playing games.

Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 11h

It’s a deep moat. Deep enough that for most people ‘warhammer’ and ‘wargaming’ are the same thing. Proper incumbent advantages. Are there a hundred other better miniature games? Yes. Can you guarantee you’ll find an opponent for them any night of the week in any reasonably sized area? No.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 12h

Oh and look at that above it! What’s a ‘fuel duty increase’?

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 12h

If you go back to the original tapering away of the personal allowance at £100,000 at Budget 2009 it was such a piddlingly small measure. Why on earth bother for this little revenue?

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 12h

Wouldn’t rule out: (1) misunderstanding housing equity as ‘savings’. And (2) skim reading transwomen as women.

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Reposted by Duncan Weldon

Win Monroe @winmonroe.bsky.social · 14h

Credit spreads really doing the numbers here in the last couple weeks www.ft.com/content/7c7c...

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 14h

This is cheating. The done thing is to have strong views on the End of History, Bowling Alone, Imagined Communities, Clash of Civilisations and maybe the Rise and Fall of The Great Powers but to have never actually read any of them.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 15h

Last thought: spreads and direction of travel absolutely matter. But we’re still talking about French 10 year yields under 5%.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 15h

Also: the ECB is not a ‘normal’ central bank and sometimes this is easy to forget. In an acute crisis, you’re better off thinking about it as an intergovernmental agency where politics matter as much as (or more than) technocratic monetary policy making.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 15h

Worth (if you’re horrifyingly young) reminding yourself of the circumstances surrounding the fall of the Berlusconi government and the ECB in 2011.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 15h

Yeah. Fundamentally the ECB will not let France blow up. But the politics of the next French government will play a big role here.

In such a scenario, the ECB’s capacity to buy huge quantities of bonds could provide the ultimate backstop on the basis that the central bank would not allow a big European economy to tip into a full-blown debt crisis.

ECB president Christine Lagarde, a former French finance minister, has in the past been reluctant to react when differences emerge between countries’ borrowing costs.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 15h

The best defence against that is the Royal Navy.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 15h

Struggling to see a route that doesn’t involve Poland/Germany/Scandinavia. All of whom are (understandably) investing in missile and drone defences from which we benefit. Adding extra (less necessary) air defences to the UK is a poor contribution to NATO security.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 16h

Really can’t see why you’d make domestic air defence a defence spending priority. (My view on this is coloured by occasionally looking at a map).

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Old system: select the countries I want, click the three or four series I want, select the years I want, download as a spreadsheet. New system: give up after a few minutes and ask Claude to get it for me.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

My hand writing has become so bad that I am struggling to make sense of a note I wrote for myself on Friday.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I’ll give you ‘at least interesting’ and definitely very different to anything else on telly at the time.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

(Sadly gone) IMF WEO Database > IMF Data Portal.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Partially an experience thing right? Sonny Baker has played 14 domestic List A matches. And I can’t ever see him skipping the Hundred to play in the Metro Bank Cup.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

More seriously: England are an absolute top tier T20 team nowadays. With surprisingly low levels of 50 overs experience. It is an interesting question whether it is easier to turn a T20 team into an ODI team or a Test team into an ODI team.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Not helped by the insistence of modern TV commissioners/producers that production standards/costumes/sets have to be really top notch. Noteable that, say, I Think You Should Leave is mostly sketches set in 2020s America. Can’t just show an actor in a hat & frock coat and do a Victorian sketch now.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I think the thing with Python is that the good stuff is great but the rest is just dross. Where as, with lots of other shows, the good stuff is good to great and the rest is sort of fine.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

There is a reason why some sketches do millions of views on YouTube but no broadcaster is really keen on reshowing the whole thing.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

If the Great War was long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror, then MPFC is long periods of tedium punctuated by moments of genius.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Top tip: double your morning step count by forgetting your youngest’s packed lunch when doing the school run.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

It always had surprising emotional depth alongside proper laughs and good characters. They’ve kept that whilst scaling back the more, erm, out dated bits. I’d happily watch the new stuff with the teen. I’d think she’d have less time for some bits of the original run.

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Reposted by Duncan Weldon

Gavin Jackson @gavinjackson.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I visited the Amazon rainforest a year ago ahead of the cop conference in Belem. Historically the only thing that has stopped deforestation has been electing Lula da Silva has Brazilian president. www.economist.com/the-americas...

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

100%. Nice mix of call backs and new stuff.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Find the bowling system oddly relaxing once you get into the pace of it. My family judged me spending 45 minutes practicing batting in virtual nets as strange behaviour.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Yes. Seems to have been a load of patches.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

If I choose to get up at 6am on a Sunday and play two hours of my IPL season before anyone else wakes up, I don’t see why this is a problem. And questions like ‘how much have you played this since last week?’ can be interpreted as ‘wow, what amazing value you’re getting from £49.99!’.

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Reposted by Duncan Weldon

Ulrike Franke @rikefranke.eu · 04/10/2026

“In a tie-up with French defence electronics specialist Thales announced in June, Renault will co-produce its “Toutatis” drones and increase the current output 100 times over to 1,000 a month at full capacity, with production ready to go from 2027.”

ft.com

How Renault went from driveshafts to drones

French carmaker turns mass-manufacturing expertise to new frontier of warfare

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Was my birthday last week. Bought myself Cricket 26 on the PlayStation. My family regret this decision.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Uber is a great analogy. It has a useful and good technology - much easier than calling a minicab firm or flagging a taxi. And when it was ridiculously subsidised: I used it a lot. Now it is priced at actual cost, I use it very irregularly.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Presumably somebody watched this and said ‘yeah, nailed it. That’s what we want’.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Ah. It is because your lawyer has to be strong. Obvs.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Paying for one. But not sure I am paying the actual price of providing the service.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I’m in the boring camp. Which is ‘I’ve found lots of useful applications for this tech in my day to day work and life. But I’m not sure how much I’d actually pay for most of them’.

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Reposted by Duncan Weldon

Jacob Aron @jjaron.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

So much of LLM boosting is talking about what they may do, not what they can do now. It means that sceptics end up talking about the past and boosters talk about the future - no wonder they talk past each other

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

You can set your watch now for one consequence of this: Circa 2045 when politicians are asking ‘why are so many NHS doctors retiring much earlier than we expected and causing staffing issues?’ Answer: because policy encouraged them to really load up their pensions 2010-25.

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Reposted by Duncan Weldon

Ed Conway @edconway.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

✍️ How diesel found itself at the heart of geopolitics. And why Donald Trump is taking a leaf out of Putin and Xi's playbook. A simple explainer edconway.substack.com/p/the-diesel...

edconway.substack.com

The Diesel Weapon

Why a rather unglamorous fuel is suddenly at the centre of a transatlantic power struggle, and why this matters for all of us

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The real demonstration of the strength of Indian white ball cricket is that they can play a T20 and an ODI on the same day with two strong sides. Can’t imagine England managing that.

Shubman Gill (c)
Rohit Sharma
Virat Kohli
Ruturaj Gaikwad
KL Rahul (wk)
Nitish Kumar Reddy
Naman Dhir
Anshul Kamboj
Kuldeep Yadav
Mohammed Siraj
Gurnoor Brar

Vaibhav Sooryavanshi
Abhishek Sharma
Sanju Samson (wk)
Shreyas lyer (c)
Ishan Kishan
Tilak Varma
Shivam Dube
Axar Patel
Washington Sundar
Ravi Bishnoi
Jasprit Bumrah

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It is probably the best aport for watching via a slowly updated webpage. Top fact: Ronald Reagan worked as a baseball commentator for radio in the 1930s. He didn’t actually attend the games but got ball by ball updates via a ticker and just made up commentary based on that.

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