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Alex Hern

@hern.bsky.social
53K followers 589 following 4.2K posts

AI correspondent at the Economist. I write about it, that is. I’m still human. One of literally dozens of people online who is not American.

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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 6h
“There are a number of required benefits that the subscription to the Economist will bring” - UK Government www.economist.com/subscribe?co...
economist.com
Subscribe to The Economist
Subscribe to The Economist for full access to articles, podcasts, videos, newsletters and more.
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 20h
What’s the worst example of millennial cringe that you can’t get out of your life? I still tell my partner to dust my wets every time we have pasta
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 20h
When assessing claims like “are the labs sincere about their concern that recursive self improvement is imminent, or is it simply marketing”, I think a useful data point is that openAI is now on a weekly release cycle for point improvements.
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 23h
I wonder when Meta decided to launch Muse in September and when OpenAI decided to launch Dots in September and when Meta learned that OpenAI had decided to launch Dots in September
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Can I have a crumb of no more AI news please
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
@stephenkb.bsky.social look. Look Stephen. Having spent a lot of time in playgrounds in the last five years I do need to point out that the knotted speaking tube depicted in that illustration works absolutely fine
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
while i know this is objectively true, i struggle because i have no idea when i'm supposed to be doing all this reading
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
One thing I legitimately don’t understand is the economics that mean that it is in any way worth it to build DCs in urban areas. They are the least agglomerationy business you can imagine.
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Wow government policy succeeded in making homes in London much more affordable. I’m sure voters have rewarded politicians for this
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
hahahahahahhaahha Christ we’re screwed
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr... grok refused on ethical grounds
tomshardware.com
ChatGPT-6 Astra cracks 85-year-old 1941 Enigma-coded message in two days — autonomous AI coded its own simulator to crack code that was unsolved since it was shared online back in 2005
Before it started cracking, the LLM developed Python and C++ software for an Enigma simulator and Enigma Bombe.
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Longtime followers will be aware of the many Latin American Alex* Hern*s who think my email address is theirs but a new one has just popped up who is REALLY persistent
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Good news story
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The Economist @economist.com · 21/09/2026
An opportunity to write for The Economist
bit.ly
Paid interns on The Economist’s foreign desk
An opportunity to write for The Economist
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
i'm sorry i'm just imagining a data centre with a MASSIVE label on the side
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
the counterpoint here, of course, is that as with newspapers, if you _do_ want to serve this traffic, you can potentially become pretty rich pretty fast, especially if you give up on the quality metrics the old guard obsessed over
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
what would the second order impacts be of an immigration policy that says "if your employer gives you a PAYE salary of more than £100,000, you automatically get a work visa"
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
One of those things you don’t notice until it’s pointed out
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
It’s just 53 toilets Michael how much could it cost, £6m?
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Mental that we all spent 18 months locked in our houses and it basically never comes up in conversation. Am I the only one who remembers the terrible reign of Hagath the Mind Eater or something
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Fun example of moral hazard in the wild: I’ve got the fancy “we will replace your screen if you smash it” AppleCare for the first time for my phone, and as such am using my phone without a case for the first time in a decade
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Increasingly think the UK row over dangerous dogs is one of the better lenses to unpack questions of AI safety. “No such thing as a bad dog, only a bad owner” maps quite neatly on to “don’t attribute agency to AI - there’s always a person who made the decisions to blame”.
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cafkafk @cafkafk.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
there is something cosmically comedic about the idea that you send requests to a box that gives you numbers. "like how did you get those number" just requested numbers from the number box, it just spits them out! "how?" idk. It just does.
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
@dsquareddigest.bsky.social twelve one-word responses to twelve theses and one two-word response to one thesis: no, eh?, yes, yes, YES, maybe, yes, yes, unfortunately–, great point, yes, no, yes
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
This week I covered the reasons why it feels like everyone in AI suddenly thinks we’re doomed and where the reasons to hope they’re wrong lie economist.com/internationa...
economist.com
Agreeing to make AI safer may be impossible
It is technically feasible, but American labs and the American authorities are at odds, as are America and China
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
on a similar note, this is far more important than a 'joe rogan of the left' for actually improving society
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
don't have to give orson scott card credit for much but "the rise of the internet will eventually give political power to people purely on the basis of them being good at posting, and it will _suck_" was a pretty good call
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
it's not true, i sincerely believe if you do not take out a subscription (free for the first month www.economist.com/subscribe) and watch Inside Tech (www.economist.com/insider) then the world faces a 10-25% chance of doom
economist.com
Subscribe to The Economist
Subscribe to The Economist for full access to articles, podcasts, videos, newsletters and more.
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
i can't keep posting "even if you completely dismiss the 'escape' side of the hugging face incident, the 'hacking' side of the hugging face incident is real-world proof of the rapid and dangerous growth in capability" but I guess i have to
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
had someone off bluesky round for tea today
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
once more with feeling!
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
I've been asked, in various ways, "should we be scared about AI" for some years now, and no-one ever seems particularly happy when I don't answer the question with a reassuring laugh. shows.acast.com/theintellige...
shows.acast.com
The end of the world is AI? An existential threat | The Intelligence from The Economist
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Ant Breach @antbreach.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Our new report does the numbers on fiscal devolution. By letting the metro mayors keep around 7% of their local income tax (2% in London) and 2% of their local corporation tax (1% in London), we can replace grants in a growth-positive, cost-neutral way for HMT and the mayors:
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
suricrasia.online/unfiction/sp... extremely good short story. Make sure to click on the September update at the bottom of the page.
suricrasia.online
[DELISTED] I Found Evidence Of My House Spinning | U&U Forums (LibreCrawl archive 2026-09-03)
A Technology Anomaly Tragicomedy
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
was really struck by a Stratechery point, that the single best thing America could do to improve its chances against China is legalise distillation on-shore. Currently only Chinese labs get to distill, which means America has the juddering behemoths but none of the startup dynamism
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
AI score funny here. don't know what to read in to it.
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
it remains fascinating that google, regularly purveyor of the world's best AI, insists on putting its worst model in front of exactly the people who are hardest to convince AI can help them
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elias isquith @eliasisquith.blog · 14/09/2026
i don't think it's a weird coincidence that the vibes here are getting worse as the vibes for the anti-maga coalition in the actual world are getting better.
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
continually maddening that people blame "the water companies" for hosepipe bans when "the water companies" have been begging to build new reservoirs but a few retired QCs in Oxfordshire have used the entire weight of the british planning system to prevent it www.theguardian.com/business/202...
theguardian.com
Thames Water redraws mega-reservoir plan amid local opposition
A new public consultation has opened on the 150bn-litre above-ground White Horse project in Abingdon, Oxfordshire
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Quite funny to look at this and realise this is a lament for a student graduating into the best job market for graduates in the past 21 years
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
I’ve flipped on this in recent years. Inheritance tax is so unpopular that almost anything you could replace it with would be seen as a vote-winner, so it’s a perfect opportunity to load £9bn of taxation on a bad thing you want to limit. Personally I’d do an annual property tax
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
So many people with aviation psychosis claiming that the Wrights’ invention is going to reshape global geography when it can’t even go more than 25 yards
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
The semantic drift of “AI psychosis” from “break with reality exacerbated or caused by sycophantic chatbots” to “person with strong feelings about AI which are not the same as the strong feelings of AI held by the speaker” is bad
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Don’t say “an OpenAI agent swarm autonomously hacked HuggingFace”. Once you say “OpenAI built a ‘hack any company’ machine and accidentally pointed it at HuggingFace, where it performed exactly as designed”, you’ll see that there’s nothing to be alarmed about
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
well that's a bleak linkedin subject
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
my daughter's year one curriculum has just been emailed to me, and one of the goals for this year is to "explore how to use a computer safely". finally i understand the calls for abstinence-only education
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
MEANWHILE ON 6 DIMENSIONAL HYPERBLUESKY: “Hey zorpulon, look, I’ve networked the emulated human connectomes together and taught them to pretend they’re in early 21st century earth”
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Fun paper which argues with numbers that a) cars suck so bad and b) most of the sucking is due to drivers rather than cars, so autonomous vehicles vastly reduce the sucking but c) includes an assumption that they reduce total miles driven which feels bold www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
The global cost of automobility
This study quantifies the private and social costs of global automobility and evaluates the potential economic benefits of a transition to shared elec…
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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 10/09/2026
I was sort of halfass-adjacent to Media Twitter as it happened and I remember a lot of attention on what twitter was doing to journalism (many early assessments were wrong) and I think we're getting a sense of what twitter did to journalists as people, which was complicated and often quite bad.
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P(aul) Frazee @pfrazee.com · 10/09/2026
Demand DCs use renewable energy. Demand access to open weight models. Learn how to use AI effectively to do things you couldn't otherwise. Dont fire strays at friends
a guy saying "fuck your slop" shooting at ai companies (who dont care). the bullet reflects back and hits a guy holding something syaing "hey guys check out this thing I made"
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