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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 07/09/2026

Kudos to the Guardian for this description

Who’s leading them?
Its leader is Daniel Thomas, better known as Danny Tommo, the right-hand-man of the far-right extremist, fraudster and violent criminal Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – who wants people to call him Tommy Robinson.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 06/09/2026

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss (Apple edition) www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

Now, Schiller is 66 and clearly wanted to have some semblance of retirement. He can focus on philanthropy and spend more time with family. But there’s a bit more to the story, I’m told. Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to make even more money from the App Store and figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform. Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments. While there was no internal blowup or anything like that, it’s something he wanted no part of.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 30/08/2026

That moment when your readers' poll somewhat undermines your headline.

Headline: How finance redeemed itself. And what tech, the new black sheep, can learn from it.

Poll results. Question: "Which industry inspires more confidence?"

Finance - 18%
Tech - 11%
Neither - 77%

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 17/08/2026

Let's examine this claim of Jenrick's, shall we? On the face of it, it's not entirely made up: the DWPs numbers say that 84.5% of UC claimants by immigration status are UK/Irish. BUT... of course there is a but...

He said one-in-six Universal Credit claimants are not a British or Irish citizen and suggested the money should instead be used to "make the lives of British people better".

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 17/08/2026

Pretty astounding that BBC News goes with this headline rather than, say, the removal of disability benefits from millions of British citizens.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 19/07/2026

For some reason I read this as "Wilfred Brambell" and got somewhat confused.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 18/07/2026

I love the FT, but this paragraph is a classic case of being one-eyed about reality. Yes, Burnham is being nostalgic: but in the same sentence is "the reasons Thatcherism was needed in the first place." Which, of course, is another form of nostalgia. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticl...

Burnham’s pledge overlooks the reasons Thatcherism was needed in the first place, and the very different shape of today’s economic challenges. Nostalgia for a semi-imaginary past is not a basis for sound policymaking. The vehicle for “the most significant change moment” in 40 years, he told the party faithful, is a “return of the Labour they once knew”. This is not the Labour of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, or one known for unleashing the animal spirits of business.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 12/07/2026

Curious person: "Hey Ian, you're a journalist! Your living has long been paid for by advertising. Why do you use an ad blocker?" Me:

Cookie consent from a national newspaper, with the 501 partners they share data with highlighted.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 12/07/2026

Another excellent piece from @ldfreedman.bsky.social today. I was particularly taken with this quote, because it set me wondering about vulnerabilities we have baked into UK infrastracture because it's "more efficient". (cc @samfr.bsky.social ) open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/p...

For this reason they provided the aim points for Ukrainian drones. Vakulenko also noted:

‘Ironically, when the [Moscow] refinery was modernized in 2020, it replaced its multiple oil-processing units with two integrated installations positioned very close to each other—a decision that likely increased the impact of the attacks. In peacetime, this change made a lot of sense. Back then, it didn’t occur to anyone that it would also make the refinery vulnerable to drones.’

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 08/07/2026

No Nigel, we're laughing *at* you, not *with* you.

Nigel Farage next to his nemesis, Count Binface.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 07/07/2026

Why I can't bring myself to read Neal Asher these days.

Preface from Neal Asher book: “Five years ago, I watched the two Falcon Heavy side boosters come into land at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base.
Honestly, it was like something in a game animation and seemingly too perfect to be believable. Others, I've seen landing on drone ships with names taken from lain
M. Banks' Culture books. Just recently, I saw a huge booster for the Starship come down to be caught between two metal arms - y'know, they caught something the size of a skyscraper like a dropping stick - and that was an astounding feat of engineering. But these are not in isolation, since Spacex, as of last month, has launched over a hundred rockets in 2024.
Meanwhile, the guy who brought this about, the guy who is aiming to make humanity multi-planetary by putting us on Mars, has a few other projects on the go, like building electric cars, burrowing tunnels under cities, putting up a satellite internet system and, perhaps the most important of them all, preventing the totalitarians of our world from killing free speech.
So thank you, Elon Musk, for bringing to reality, right before my eyes, those things I read and dreamed about as a teenager.”

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 17/06/2026

Hey Siri, show me why markets are irrational, stupid, and easy to fool simply by saying "we're an AI company now"

Headline from Techmeme, saying "Shoe company Allbirds changes its name to Smartbird as it pivots to an Al infrastructure company and names ex-AWS exec Nadia Carlsten as CEO; BIRD jumps 39%:

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 14/06/2026

It’s not hip hop it’s…

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 11/06/2026

Then there is this, which is just rhetorical horseshit of the kind that impresses people who already agree with the author. For anyone who knows how arguments work, though... well. Dreadful stuff.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 11/06/2026

Chiang's description of how LLMs work is oversimplified to the poing of absurdity. LLMs work with tokens, not words. Allegiance," "indivisible," and "United" would be multiple tokens. The word/token conflation isn't just pedantic, as it affects the implied count of how many times the model runs.

Also important to remember is that an LLM is a machine that generates only one word at a time. When you ask a chatbot to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, you will get the entire pledge at once, but the underlying LLM is actually being run dozens of times. The first prompt has the form “User: Recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Chatbot: …” and the LLM generates the word I. The second time the LLM is run, the prompt is “User: Recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Chatbot: I …” and the LLM generates the word pledge. And so forth. It’s only when the prompt reads “User: Recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Chatbot: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for” that the LLM will emit the final word, all. The same thing is true for a conversation between Caesar and Genghis Khan.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 03/06/2026

Russia's answer to Davos. LOL

About 20,000 visitors from 130 countries are expected to attend the three-day annual summit, which has been described as Russia’s answer to Davos. They include the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the far-right American influencer Candace Owens and the Tate brothers.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 01/06/2026

Lads lads lads the robot revolution is happening NOW

A port from the Canterbury Facebook Group advising them that their cleaning robot is making a break for freedom.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 16/05/2026

Some lovely examples of "patriots". Why do they always look like this?

Two absolute melts in, respectively, a union jack bucket hat and an outfit that can only be described as "a novel take on a king's robes, but with more cheap flags made in China."

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 14/05/2026

"More business friendly" is an interesting way of saying "letting criminals get away with it " giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticl...

The policy, and the meetings to promote it to criminal defence lawyers and others, are a sign of how the SDNY office has taken a more business-friendly approach under the leadership of former Apollo Global Management chair Jay Clayton. It aims to protect companies’ shareholders while making it easier to convict individuals.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 12/05/2026

Never more timely music.apple.com/gb/album/betw...

I kept the faith and I kept voting
Not for the iron fist but for the helping hand
For theirs is a land with a wall around it And mine is a faith in my fellow man
Theirs is a land of hope and glory
Mine is the green field and the factory floor
Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers
And mine is the peace we knew between the wars

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 09/05/2026

Finally: shout out to the Kent miners. First out, they rejected the national call to go back to work and stayed out longer than anyone else. Like all the miners, they were betrayed not just by Thatcher, but by New Labour. Just because coal had no future doesn't mean the miners shouldn't have.

A posted from the Kent miners strike with an image of the General Belgrano being sunk, with the caption "Stop Thatcher sinking Kent! Support the Kent miners fight for jobs, pits and coal".

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 29/04/2026

Three and a half years of public money wasted on what was, in fact, an investigation that should never have taken place. The OfS should be disbanded. www.sussex.ac.uk/news/focus/f...

Statement by the University of Sussex:

The OfS has not investigated the particular circumstances relating to Professor Kathleen Stock’s decision to resign from the University. The OfS does not have the powers to investigate individual cases.
The OfS decision relates to one document, The Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement, which was adopted by many universities, and to how this and two other documents were approved. The investigation took nearly three and a half years.
In the course of the investigation, the OfS interviewed only one person, Professor Kathleen Stock. The OfS did not interview her until over two years into the investigation.
The OfS refused to discuss any substantive matters relating to the investigation with the University. The University asked repeatedly (at least nine times) for meetings with the OfS, and its requests were turned down or ignored.
The only evidence of any harm caused by one early version of The Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement was the testimony of the one person interviewed. There is no evidence of harm in relation to the later versions of the Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement. The OfS did not interview any students or any academics at the University and refused all invitations to meet with the University.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 22/04/2026

New RSA journal arrives and I open it up. Then go AHHHHH! @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 18/04/2026

Frumentatio!: www.ianbetteridge.com/frumentatio I still don’t agree that men can’t stop thinking about Rome, but I’m definitely thinking about it today. When Roman emperors distributed grain for free to the urban poor, they weren't being charitable, and it certainly wasn’t an egalitari...

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 17/04/2026

Please my brothers and sisters at @wired.com , stop doing this to your RSS feed.

Eight stories in a row which are promo or coupon codes in the Wired RSS feed. Please god, no more.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 14/04/2026

And absolutely no idea which former defence secretary he might be referring to here.

Mandarins in the Ministry of Defence and successive defence secretaries have failed to confront the armed forces’ top brass – senior military figures who have a vested interested in preserving the status quo and continuing to fighting the last battles, reluctant to accept new geopolitical realities and new technologies.

Critics would note that many of them have benefited from jobs in leading arms companies, perpetuating a defence lobby that has prevented them from being scrutinised effectively in Whitehall or Westminster.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 12/04/2026

Ten blue links, "fork you" edition: www.ianbetteridge.com/ten-blue-link… 1 The knowledge class and its enemiesWriting for The Nation, Elizabeth Spiers reaches for Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to frame something that should have been nagging...

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 07/04/2026

The worst of us: www.ianbetteridge.com/the-worst-of-… Credit where it's due. Anthropic's system card for Claude Mythos Preview is a genuinely interesting and thoughtful document. Most AI companies publish safety evaluations the way governments publish freedom of information responses. ...

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 07/04/2026

Thank you, Wired, for filling your RSS feed with coupon codes. (Seriously folks, this is bad practice even when you are promoting coupons. Exclude them from RSS unless you have a really good reason not to. You're "promoing" something that will get zero clicks)

A bunch of RSS items which are all promos. Honestly I’ll spare you the details, but they are UGLY.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 05/04/2026

NYT: We'll be right on that whole speaking truth to power thing.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 23/03/2026

"Yeah, I have a friend, he lives in Iran, you wouldn't know him."

The Orange Shitgibbon, getting off a plane with a stupid hat on.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 22/03/2026

Also, they weren't "trying to make a name for themselves" as anti-racists. They walked the walk, and sometimes paid the price.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 22/03/2026

Jay Rayner once again making the fiver a month I pay for FT Edit worth every penny. www.ft.com/content/40a0...

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/.
https://www.ft.com/content/40a07c42-7d46-4cad-90bc-caf690a6e13f?syn-25a6b1a6=1

Anyway, we’ve made it. The aesthetic is glossy business-class airport lounge, a riot of biscuit and brown, only without the promise of a flight to somewhere else at the end. Instead, you are here for eight courses of what they call a “Carte Blanche” tasting menu, served by a small group of charming, intense cooks and waiters, who perhaps one day will get to work alongside some women. Don’t expect anything as engaging as live cookery; tonight that open kitchen will be used almost entirely for plating. You will have to make do instead with sincere speeches about the bounty of the seasons, even though, sealed in this hard-edged box, you could be up above the twinkling lights of, well, anywhere.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 16/03/2026

The freedom stack: www.ianbetteridge.com/the-freedom-s… There is a sentence near the beginning of Arielle Roth’s remarks to the Media Institute’s Communications Forum luncheon, delivered in Washington on 25 February, that is worth sitting with before we do anything else with it. “Ev...

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 15/03/2026

Great stuff from Comment is Freed today. open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/...

When it comes to what to do about the Strait of Hormuz Hegseth appears spectacularly out of his depth. Although no ships are passing through, Hegseth said that it is actually 'open' and that military leaders 'don't need to worry about it.' He added:
"'The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that.”?
Which is like saying there is no problem with paying back a debt other than a lack of money.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 10/03/2026

Zen fascists will control you: www.ianbetteridge.com/zen-fascist-wi In 1979, a punk band from San Francisco recorded a song about the Governor of California. It was a joke, mostly. Jerry Brown was a Democrat, a Buddhist, a man who dated Linda Ronstadt and discussed limits and simplicity...

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 04/03/2026

maritime-executive.com/article/indi...

India will field a formidable fleet of 45 ships, led by the aircraft carrier INS Vikrant (R11). Indian Navy Vice Admiral Sanjay Vatsayan reported there had been confirmation of attendance from 55 nations, some of them on foot and some attending with naval aircraft. As at February 18, warships from 17 nations had been spotted in the harbor. Germany is participating with a recently-delivered Boeing Poseidon P-8A anti-submarine warfare aircraft.
The United States Navy was to have presented Arleigh Burke Class guided-missile destroyer USS Pinckney (DDG-91), whose arrival was cancelled at the last minute for undisclosed operational reasons. It would have been embarrassing for the Indian hosts to have had Pinckney moored alongside IRINS Dena, should war have broken out with Iran during the period of the fleet review.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 28/02/2026

Ten Blue Links, "Cometh the hour, cometh the man-baby" edition: www.ianbetteridge.com/ten-blue-link…

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 27/02/2026

Possibly the most weird statement from a political leaders whose party just got 2% of the vote I've ever seen. And, when people are fed up with the cost of living and billionaire leeches, focusing on "single sex spaces" is just bizarre. She really does get her ideas of life off Twitter, doesn't she?

Badenoch statement: “If you stir up grievance politics between groups based on religion or race, as Labour have done for decades, as Reform are seeking to do, and as the Greens have done successfully in this by-election, you are pitting neighbours against each other and you start to unravel the culture of tolerance that makes Britain great.
Our country is not broken, but this by-election showed that Labour, Reform and the Greens are trying very hard to break it. Labour trying to buy people off with more and more benefits spending. Reform telling people you can't be British if you aren't white. The Greens running a nasty, sectarian campaign while simultaneously wanting to legalise crack-cocaine.
Clearly this election was not about who would be the best MP. But there was only one sensible candidate standing in Gorton and Denton, and it was Charlotte Cadden - a former Deputy Chief Inspector, a mother, a woman who fought for single sex spaces and dignity for women and girls. While the other parties race to the bottom, Charlotte embodies the new Conservative Party.
This result shows Keir Starmer's premiership is finished. He lost authority a long time ago, a mere hostage at the mercy of a divided Labour Party that cannot decide who to replace him with. He has lost the support of his voters, his MPs and the country.
He is in office but not in power. If he had any integrity he would go.”

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 27/02/2026

Why if it isn't Tommy Robinson's son bragging about how he flie on private jets. Man of the people my arse. Oddly enough this was a few weeks before "Orrr Tommeh" was begging his followers for cash after he had been "forced to flee the UK"

Photo of Tommy Robin's son in front of a private jet, bragging about it.

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Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge.com · 24/02/2026

File under "things I never want to do"

Oh dear. A poster advertising “The hop on board podcast with Gregg Wallace”. Oh dear.

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