iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

One to keep an eye on if newspapers continue declining

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

One thing on UK politics that is missed IMV - the FT slowly creeping up in relevancy vs other news sources. E.g. look at Dec 2025 readership. FT has the smallest drop of any paid newspaper.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

(If Ed Davey delivered that tax cut he would have been the liberal leader for 14 years, which I think might be a record under modern electoral rules)

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Yes - a reason to be frustrated and go to Conference with motions to change course, but in practice "if we got back into Europe in a single term we could give everyone a pony" is a very politician way of going "look I'd instinctively want to cut taxes but yeah that's just aspirational"

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The party should not be forced to have serious conversations about long-term direction except when we actually need to.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

History of the leaders of our party: coups installed Ming, Clegg and Swinson. The leader resigning due to needing to/wanting to gave us Paddy, Charlie and Davey.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Davey represents a blend of a bit of ecology, a somewhat right-of-the-party economic view and a centre-of-the-party view on things like civil liberties. The only thing he's out of step on is that liberal mood has shifted towards "no we actually probably need to not promise tax cuts anymore"

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Somewhat inactive LD member view: Should we have a leadership election before 2029? Sure, that'd be nine years after the last one which is not healthy. Should this be because Davey got forced out? No, I would consider voting for him if he ran.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

"We need to replace the leader" "With this alternative wing of the party?" "No"

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This looks like a wildcat rather than anything organized, which probably means this can be categorized as "silly buggers". Whilst there's plenty of LDs who could replace Davey the party org doesn't need him replaced and the Greens are demonstrating why chasing trends is a bad idea.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Or because they are trying to filter out causes of the text generator spitting out hateful text and have identified all the chat logs fed in for training as a culprit

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Ten quid this is because they have had people quit after getting stressed out reading chat logs when trying to tune for engagement

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Reposted by Hannah Dawson

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The context of OpenAI's science slop division should be made in the context of a total spend of a department that has an nine or ten-figure cost per annum.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The context of OpenAI's science slop division should be made in the context of a total spend of a department that has an nine or ten-figure cost per annum.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

OpenAI in 2025 spent $19.18bn on R&D and $5.73bn on marketing (Ed Zitron, Where's Your Ed At, 15th June 2026). A $1bn spend would therefore represent 5.2% of their research budget or 17.5% of their marketing budget if those costs remained stable this year.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Of course this assumes a horrendous amount of utiilization of a scarce resource (compute) and a cloud services engineer would optimize spend to be at somewhere north of 50% and south of 80%. Otherwise you're wasting money on provisioning. $1bn a year does not seem unfeasible.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

A final guesstimate. Assuming OpenAI uses its maths-allocated resources at 50% efficiency, this represented 100% of its total allocated spend towards maths, and assuming other costs are 10% of the cost of the tokens, OpenAI's marketing budget for mathematics and related research is about $550m p/a.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Assuming a $1bn total cost, and assuming the average mathematician would _presumably_ happily work on a challenging maths problem for $100,000 a year, an annualized rate of $1bn would pay for about 10,000 mathematicians.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Note: no, you are not saved by economies of scale. Doing research runs like this is bursty, so you'd either be paying for spot instances - at this scale at an ungodly markup - or you'd be provisioning long-term capacity that you are not consistently using.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Business Insider estimated a cost at retail of $6.5m. New Scientist places it at $15m. 88 hours is about 1% of the total number of hours in a year. I.e. the annualized run-rate to conduct this research, sans the cost of the researchers and training, is $650m-$1.5bn a year.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

"We are not a pure mathematics company, the proof we generate will be of no value beyond the marketing benefits, and the researchers we are competing with might think we nicked their research." "How much do you need" "Millions of dollars" (direct quote - Noam Brown, OpenAI, X, 8th September 2026)

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

"So we heard that a guy from the cringe company has an AI-adjacent announcement about Navier-Stokes and we need a bunch of money to try and rush a release ahead of them. We have no idea if we can find it in time, or what we will find, or how much it will actually cost, and how long it will take"

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Like hello, come on, who paid for the bender - Lex Luthor?

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

At some point soon someone with a megaphone is going to put together "OpenAI has an inexplicable Coca-Cola-sized marketing spend" with "someone at OpenAI greenlit an 88-hour tokenmaxxing bender to try and beat a random Anthropic researcher to a maths discovery with no clear chance of success"

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The entire thing with slop atm is that the cost of actually making the slop is hidden in cloud service costs and the balance sheets of companies with country-sized amounts of revenue. Making a monkey write Hamlet is impressive until you see the cost of the bananas.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Or rather, there's no price tag attached to the maths work OpenAI is doing. Basic guesstimate of how much money OpenAI is spending on this marketing puts them at being able to pay a healthy wage for a large single digit of the world's entire stock of mathematicians if they were not promoting LLMs.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Comments like these from mathematicians when OpenAI releases slop papers in maths is great, because OpenAI pays a small horde of mathematicians infinite money to chase things they can get their text generator to generate that they can market their tech using, and they don't release the failures.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

3. Obvious slop worlds and low-quality game rips should be banishable back to Community Labs. 4. Players should be able to tag a world with what they like about it and be able to tag content as unoriginal or slop.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I responded but just my view in public 1. VRC have an unenviable situation given it's not their fault slop has submerged the internet 2. Being able to promote original content and have that have a higher quality bar that celebrates human creativity would give creators a safe space

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Not that surprising. Cataclysmic loss followed by picking a leader from the rubble. Sometimes you get lucky and the direction was right and the leader wasn't (Farron) and sometimes you stumble around punch drunk and delusional until facing the electorate.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

And on the pedestal these words appear: "You're right — you are Ozymandias, king of kings. This is big. The mighty should look upon your words and despair."

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

It is genuinely incredible how dangerous to sanity a moron with a $200 chatbot subscription is to other people now

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Annoying moment: glancing through a codebase on my phone and coming away only moderately sure it was slop Redeeming moment: re-reading it on my PC and laughing at it once it was obviously slop

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Upside for anyone worrying about AI slop posters in VRChat recently: said slop posters provide zero value and will move on to the next shiny object once the novelty wears off. Also said slop posters don't have any defence vs their god-emperors going bankrupt.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

NB obviously "Where's Dario" is a reference to "Where's Waldo" but he's not called that in the UK so the reference makes no sense AND I MADE IT ANYWAY.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It doesn't matter how much you can tune a text generator to generate human-like text when humans are so hilariously shit at being consistent.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Have you heard of the hot new game "Where's Dario?" It's like the "Where's Wally?" books. Instead of hunting for a guy in red-and-white stripes in charming cartoon scenes, you're trying to spot bits of the slop articles Google vomits at you that got sloppily corrected by hand.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The EU Kids Act proposal IS very silly but the EU Parliament is literally the best place on Earth to thrash out how to do what the act wants within the realm of sanity. (FWIW having a big incentive for the industry to create high-quality offline games for all ages is kinda a plus as well...)

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

If I sell a Pong clone on eBay am I a vendor of an online game? Does eBay have to do age verification of the buyer?

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

You can go even more fruit loops. A video game requires you to own a game console. Someone sells the games console online. The video game thus is not exclusively accessible via physical means. Ergo the game is an online game for the purposes of the act.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It is theoretically possible to get a PS2 back to internet connectivity! A 15 year old could follow a guide and play SOCOM 2. (This is not a terribly serious point)

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

And that does not save the SKU with an online component, or any other game that is bought digitally, downloaded from the internet, etc. All covered by provisions in the act.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The law won't go this far but the language atm is completely fruit loops - every single Minecraft user needs to be age-assured, regardless of the context. Mojang would have to sell a SKU of the game with no license integration at all, solely via physical media, and no digital updates allowed.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

PS2 theoretically has online gaming capabilities without age assurance or protection of minors. Banned.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

(Not literally but basically: any game with any interaction with the internet at all either must be age-gated or totally anonymous. This includes any game that ever gets any update provided online).

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Read through the EU Kids Act and it will need significant refining before it goes out, otherwise it essentially shuts down all video gaming later than the PS1 era, at least at a very aggressive reading.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

YESSSS Have a listen of the audio book read for a bit too, the reader is _outstanding_ and he brings the world to life.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The proposed savings from reforming the triple lock will be £15bn a year by 2040. That, in context, is about 9% of how much money OpenAI and Anthropic have had shovelled into them in the past nine months. (If you, charitably, double that to include 2030-2039 savings, you get to 18%).

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