iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Matt Collin

Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?” Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...

So the message of this research out of China, where you were seeing a lot of kids using A.I. to help them, was that when they were using the A.I., they were getting things done faster. But it turned out that the skills they were learning were not holding, that their actual personal performance, at least in the way we traditionally measure it, was degrading.

What do you think when you hear that?

The last part — I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?

That’s my question for you.

Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.

But there must be some set of skills that matter.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe not those. We’re going to discover new ones. Just maybe not those.

There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address.

And I ——

I don’t really believe that to be true.

It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you.

One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.

But let me take the other side because I don’t want to fall into a thing where, because some skills can be safely offloaded ——

Yeah.

I also can’t get anywhere without a mapping system now. Never could, frankly. But I’m a big reader. And one of the skills I really value, one of the capacities I have that I really value is an attention span formed on physical books.

You’re a big reader. I’ve read about the kind of reading you do. And there is, prior to A.I., a lot of concern and noticing among college professors and others that the way people use the internet has probably shortened attention spans.
Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Yeah. Well, I think that we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers.

Today’s engineers are far better systems thinkers than I was when I graduated from school. But I was a much better transistor thinker.

What do you mean by systems thinker?

They think of large systems. Today’s computers have trillions, hundreds of trillions of transistors in them. When I first graduated from school, the first chip I worked on had 200 transistors. I knew every one of them by name. No engineer does that today. Most engineers now work well above the transistor, well above the functionality, and they’re cobbling things together to do things.

So you need to think much more about systems and interactions of systems. So some of the lower-level knowledge is gone.

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I'm a development econ guy and I don't think I'd be that happy losing my job to the AIs!

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Reposted by Matt Collin

Brexit Bin 🇪🇺 🇬🇧 🇩🇪 @brexitbin.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

So true !!! 💻 Check out this great Norwegian video about how shitty the internet has become 😅

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

One thing I've found that Claude Code is good at is very quickly showing me visually something my 42 year old brain strugles to understand from its sometimes challenging prose

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

That means that we've entrusted companies who many not have the best track record of which clients they work with, with safeguarding the validity of the Companies House register!

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

When we rank ACSPs by their "riskiness" (what share of affiliated companies got struck off or moved to CH's default address, we find a pretty extreme concentration in ID verification behavior. The top decile of risky ACSPs have performed roughly 40% of verifications of companies with foreign-BOs!!

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Now, ACSPs are AML regulated, so in theory they should be doing a good job But not all of them have a history of doing a good job In fact many have formed, or worked with companies that have been involuntarily struck off or caught by Companies House for lying about their place of business

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Companies have 2 ways they can verify the identity of their officers: either directly with CH (free, but requires biometric ID) or through a third part "Authorized Corporate Service Provider" With the latter - another company tells CH that they checked your documents and everything looks ok

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Those companies will have to come into compliance by November of *this* year, but if you are worried that some companies are engaging in money laundering or fraud or serious tax evasion, then those companies bought themselves a full year of freedom from scrutiny

static.klipy.com

Wizard of Oz: Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

ALT: Wizard of Oz: Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

We find that many companies that would have had to undergo ID verification because their filing window falled on or after Nov 18, just file a confirmation statement early, effectively resetting the clock for a year Depending on the method used, between 5-13% of companies close to the policy window

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

But we also find that many companies used a loophole in the company filing process which allowed them to push their deadline back for nearly a year Companies normally file their confirmation statement on a yearly basis But they can find it earlier than their filing window, even without new info

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

We find significant compliance effects: beneficial owner-directors of companies 'caught' by the policy were around 46% more likely to have verified their identity roughly six months later

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Directors (inc beneficial owners who were directors) had to verify their ID if the company's confirmation statement was due on or after Nov 18, 2025 So we use the confirmation statement date - measured *prior* to the announcement of the policy data to implement a regression discontinuity design

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

New research out with @jeannebomare.bsky.social and Eva Nappert We examine the impact of Companies Houses's new ID verification rollout, which intends to require all directors and beneficial owners of UK companies to verify their identity either directly with CH or through a third party provider

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Look, I am in favour, but I really don't think firms engaged in international trade give a shit about how big a country looks on a map

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Reposted by Matt Collin

Belinda Archibong @belindaarch.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

ICYMI, the new “America First Global Health Strategy” has turned the US approach to global health into a series of transactional, bilateral agreements with potentially devastating consequences for global health security as we write in our Brookings piece here: www.brookings.edu/articles/the...

brookings.edu

The new 'America First Global Health Strategy' could erode years of progress under PEPFAR | Brookings

The authors unpack the impacts the new "America First Global Health Strategy" will have when it comes to HIV/AIDS mitigation in African countries.

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I once conked my head on a hanging basket.

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Reposted by Matt Collin

Brandon Friedman @brandonfriedman.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Axios writer: I melted my brain with AI. Not only can I no longer read, but I don't even understand the purpose of reading anymore. Here's how you can also do this. www.axios.com/2026/08/11/r...

Axios: AI has become my reading buddy as I've plowed through my summer book list, helping me keep track of plots and characters, unpack themes, and make sense of wordy, old prose.

Why it matters: The way many of us actually read books — a few pages before bed, a chapter at the beach, another on a plane — makes it easy to lose the thread. AI can help you pick it back up without starting over.
📖 I really got into using AI while reading James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans." The text was far too dense for casual vacation reading. My first prompt asked:

"I'd like a guide as I read The Last of the Mohicans who can help me understand what I've read and where the story is, without giving spoilers or getting ahead of my progress. Can you do this, chapter by chapter?"
The robot agreed: "Cooper's sentences are long and his diction is archaic."

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Reposted by Matt Collin

Stephen Abbott Pugh @stephenabbottpugh.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Beneficial ownership information on 480,360 German entities is missing from the country’s national Transparenzregister, according to a risk assessment released by the country’s ministries of finance and justice www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/D... #beneficialownership #UBO #AMLR #6AMLD

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Reposted by Matt Collin

G. Willow Wilson @gwillow.me · 27/07/2026

Not sure I’d shit on something that helped me sell half a million copies of my book, personally

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Reposted by Matt Collin

Christian Odendahl @codendahl.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

The winning design. 🇪🇺💶

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Tip to money launderers: if you want to buy a property, maybe don't buy a property that has already been frozen in the past on suspicion of money laundering

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Europeans: Beneficial ownership data is a massive privacy risk! We have to make it hard to access UK: We have an public streaming API that will let you see ownership changes in real time

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Reposted by Matt Collin

Stephen Abbott Pugh @stephenabbottpugh.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Watch UK beneficial ownership information change in real time as open, standardised data bods.stream #beneficialownership #openstandards #opendata #UBO #datastandards #interoperability #opensource

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I mean, good lord, it's 104 degrees outside right now. No one wants to be outside, air conditioning or not. The worry that occasional air con use is going to destroy the fabric of society is really very silly

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Reporting live from Paris right now

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I should be grateful, it could be Baby Shark

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Every morning my 18 month old gets up and demands that I put on a vinyl record (by pointing to her ears) She only accepts vinyl music And for the past two weeks, she only accepts this record by Ghanian musician Gyedu-Blay Ambolley. Before that it was a Bowie obsession.

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

(and I *like* Taika Waititi)

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

This looks awful. Klara and the Sun is a haunting, strange and very beautiful book which absolutely did not deserve the Taika Waititi twee treatment youtu.be/wixzainceAE?...

youtu.be

KLARA AND THE SUN – Official Trailer (4K)

YouTube video by Sony Pictures Entertainment

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Got to love the French university position of "We didn't invest in climate control, so please don't come to work and die of heatstroke, we much prefer that you die of heatstroke at home"

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

At what effective sample size would you be satisfied?

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

The estimated effect is more or less the difference in where the end of that local polynomial intercepts the cutoff on one side vs the other side

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

It is an automatic bandwidth selection procedure, which choose a bandwidth (in this case days/weeks away from the cutoff) that balances bias with power, more or less). Then it runs a linear regression through the remaining sample on either side....

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

We discussed this two times before, so maybe third time is a charm: These kinds of RDs aren't just a comparison of people on either side of the boundary. That's the "concept" of an RD, but not how they are actually estimated these days.

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

I recall very well, you mentioned many problems! But your take on the sample size mischaracterized how these RDs work: after bandwidth selection, the regression sample used for the RD had about 100,000 people in it, which seems pretty well powered

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

I thought you didn't accept RDs where age was a running variable? But you accept the ones that show a null effect? ;-)

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Reposted by Matt Collin

Zachary Tvarozna @shadyshores.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

18 months in the making! My conclusion forever will be Russia's A7 was never entirely a cryptocurrency network and relied on captured states. Thanks 2 everyone who supported and hugest s/o to the OSC for turning this hypothesis into an investigation. www.opensourcecentre.org/research/the...

opensourcecentre.org

The Big Shor

OSC and TRM Labs reveal how the Kremlin-backed A7 Network used the international correspondent banking system and Kyrgyzstan to likely move billions of dollars of Russian payments through the global f...

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Not judging it! I've only been to Vietnam, where I don't remember seeing it. Just found it funny, since there was a 2 month period when I was in middle school where it was a status marker to have one, and then I've basically not seen them since.

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

"We believe these people are circumventing sanctions" and "We are not suggesting any wrongdoing here" in the exact same paragraph is a hell of a way to start a report

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Matt Collin @mattcollin.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

I really don't know how the EAs keep convincing other EAs to give them money to... start blogs?

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