Tom James retweeted
Whitehall is a weird place.
The civil service, a workforce of more than half a million people, aren’t allowed to tell you what they think about the biggest issues they work on. Impartiality means officials can’t take public positions on policy, and in practice it stretches to much of their own experience of work as well. The one official outlet, the Cabinet Office’s People Survey, asks the questions the Cabinet Office wants answered. I spent seven years in the Treasury and the Home Office and never once said publicly what I thought about how the place was run, and I feel bad for civil servants who are stuck in this system and don’t have an outlet.
So last year @restate_thinks and @CSWnews started the Alternative People Survey, to give civil servants a way to say how the system they work in is actually functioning. This year’s edition, published today with along with Public First, had 1,747 responses, 38% more than last year.
They have plenty to say!
“There is no culture of managing poor performance, so managers don’t do it.” “Internal promotions are non-existent. If you do well in your job and wish to obtain a higher grade you have to leave your post or go through the job evaluation process which could mean applying for your own job.” “Our voluntary exit scheme was terribly communicated and has resulted in top performers leaving. Our department is around 10% smaller but workloads are unchanged.” “I bought an iPhone charger cable via (a procurement service) for £18. The same item at Asda cost £2.”
These are not disgruntled outliers, these are mainstream views on Whitehall in Whitehall. 76% disagree with the statement that the civil service manages poor performance well. 66% don’t think internal promotion puts the right people in the job. Four times as many say voluntary exit schemes are losing high performers as poor ones. 60% think government buys badly from the private sector.
The appetite for change and reform is considerable! 82% now use AI in their work, up from 30% a year ago. 62% want pay rises based on performance, not the flat structure that’s available to most of the civil service. 52% feel encouraged to cut waste, up from 37%. 71% say processes get in the way of doing their job, rising to 79% among Grade 6s and the Senior Civil Service, so the people who run the machine are the ones most frustrated by it.
The PM has an ambitious agenda to rewire Whitehall, and the officials who will have to deliver that have just told him(anonymously) where to start: hire, promote, pay and remove people properly.
Full survey re-state.co.uk/publications/…
And Substack restate.substack.com/p/why-w…
Tom James retweeted
Heads up, @OpenAI and @AnthropicAI. Rumor reaches my ears that you're doing a stupid thing, and should stop before you damage yourselves.
I hear you've now nerfed your models so that when people try to use them to clean the spamware and spyware out of their televisions, you block that.
If you really want Chinese open-weight models and open-source projects like OpenWaldo to eat your lunch, crippling your models so that people paying expensive subscriptions can't use them for completely legitimate purposes is a great way to accomplish this.
If, on the other hand, you'd rather have a volume business, maybe stupid arbitrary restrictions that look like they have the sole purpose of protecting corporate sleazeballs aren't such a good idea.
A word to the wise should be sufficient.
I can't be bothered to hack around the paywall, so I will never learn why the teacher is asking their pupil's parent for something so dumb.
Tom James retweeted
The hardest problems in dynamics become ordinary multiplication the moment you enter the s-plane.
In time the output is a convolution of input and impulse response. The Laplace transform collapses that integral into the simple product Y(s) = H(s) X(s).
From the unit step whose transform is 1/s to the sinusoids living on the imaginary axis, each pair maps a location in the complex plane to a precise behavior in time.
What once required solving differential equations now requires only algebra and a table lookup.
Tom James retweeted
Today, I learned that Australia is a land mass that broke off of Antarctica.
As a result, it didn't have robust fauna or earthworm ecosystems, so it doesn't have millions of years of soil compaction.
That's why all of it's lifeforms are venomous. 🧵
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Australia has ~1,000 native earthworm species despite splitting from Antarctica. Venom in snakes (not "all" lifeforms) stems from elapid radiation in isolation, not soil/earthworms (australian.museum/learn/animals/… discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/w…).
australian.museum/learn/animals/…
discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/w…
corpulent_gigachad.png
There was a chap at Oxford who came up in the 80s to research the 4 year tenure of a Yorkshire bishop. He spent 40 years on it, draining an inheritance left on condition it was spent on his education. Daily Mass (sometimes several times a day), lobster every day at Brown's next to the Oratory (hence the gout), magnificent dinner parties for miscreants, oddballs and grad students, and generous to charity. His fingers were so fat that his signet rings appeared stuck to them. Having spent every last penny, he was evicted from his apartment and became a monk some 3 years ago. No wife, no kids, and I don't think the DPhil ever got finished.
Top 5 most eccentric human beings I’ve met in my life. Bless him.
Another #wtfhappenedin1971
Tom James retweeted
Geoffrey Hinton once noticed that the tellers at his bank kept changing. When he asked one of them why, the teller didn't know, only that they got moved around a lot.
Hinton guessed the reason... if staff never work with the same people for long, it's much harder for a few of them to team up and cheat the bank.
That thought became one of the most useful tricks in deep learning. While a neural network trains, you randomly switch off about half its neurons at every step. No neuron can lean on a particular partner, so each one has to learn something useful on its own. The trick is called dropout, and it helped AlexNet win the 2012 ImageNet contest, which set off the modern AI boom. It's still built into many of today's networks.
Tom James retweeted
Need a crumb of hope about Europe on a Saturday?
Belgium has gone from rapidly closing and destroying its entire nuclear fleet (half of its power before 2023) to quickly relicensing and returning a few of them to the grid.
PM @Bart_DeWever is trying to save as many as he can.
ALT A photo I took of Doel nuclear plant in February 2025, the day another one of its 4 reactors was closed.
België en @ENGIE_energie zijn erin geslaagd de kerncentrales Doel IV en Tihange III in een half jaar volledig te reviseren, alle veiligheidsprocedures te doorlopen en weer op te starten. Terwijl sluiting gepland was.
Dat is een applausje waard, vindt u niet?
#grafiekvandedag
Tom James retweeted
This delights me so very much. People using AI to take back control of devices that they bought, but were covertly designed to spy on them and harvest their data.
I'm usually reluctant to brandish my fame, but I'm gonna do it for this worthy cause. OG hacker says you're doing good! This kind of liberation is what it's all about.
Tom James retweeted
The finding has large implications in itself (US productivity growth may have peaked before WWII rather than the postwar boom), but what fascinates me most is the method.
The authors use LLMs to extract prices and product characteristics from 5.1 million Sears catalog listings from 1900 to 1990. That lets them estimate how much prices for consumer goods rose after accounting for improvements in quality (e.g. icebox → electric fridge).
This opens up obscenely broad research agendas. Old books, catalogs, newspapers, imperial records, archives full of evidence that would be almost impossible to structure manually can now become datasets. Questions in economics, history and politics that were previously prohibitively labor intensive to investigate are now practical research projects.
Excited to share our new working paper: how much did the US standard of living really rise over the twentieth century — and when? With @bhwittenbrink
Using 5.1 million Sears catalog listings, we build a quality-adjusted price index for consumer goods, 1900–1990. Two headline findings: growth was much larger than official statistics imply, and its peak came before WWII, not after. (1/9)
Tom James retweeted
Perhaps the single most extraordinary detail in the Barbara Cartland biography - a book full of extraordinary details - is *how* she was able to write a whole novel a week, right down to the manner in which the manuscript was physically delivered to her publisher
Well that’s a relief.
Here’s a rather extraordinary discovery: humanity seems to have interrupted the beginning of the next ice age. We thought it might happen in the future, but the evidence suggests it's already happened.
A new study in Science argues that the next major glaciation had already begun roughly 2,000 years ago, before modern warming reversed the trend in the 20th century.
The evidence comes from the Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island, the last surviving remnant of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet that once covered much of Canada and reached as far south as Illinois.
Because Barnes is frozen directly to its bedrock, advancing ice buries and preserves vegetation beneath it. Researchers radiocarbon dated plants emerging as the ice retreats to reconstruct its history.
They found that after melting to a minimum extent around 3,000 years ago, the ice began expanding again about 2,000 years ago. The researchers interpret this as the earliest stage of the next glacial period.
Left to natural orbital cycles, that cooling would have unfolded extremely slowly, potentially taking tens of thousands of years to rebuild a continent spanning ice sheet.
But around 1960, the trend reversed. Summers became warm enough that Barnes began losing more ice than it gained, despite Northern Hemisphere summer sunlight continuing to slowly decline in a way that should favor renewed glaciation. Greenhouse warming had (thankfully) overwhelmed the natural cooling tendency.
The Barnes ice cap may now disappear entirely within the next few centuries, removing the final remnant of an ice sheet that repeatedly served as the nucleus for much larger glaciations.
There is a remarkable deep time perspective here. For millions of years, orbital cycles have pushed Earth between warmer interglacials and colder glacial periods. According to this study, that ancient cycle had started turning once again.
Then, in the geological equivalent of an instant, humanity pushed hard enough in the opposite direction to stop it.
Just so we're clear, this is a very very good thing.
📸 Geology Sciences
Sources:
1) phys.org/news/2026-10-global…
2) science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
Tom James retweeted
With warnings that Britain may face power shortages and even blackouts, I thought it might be worth resharing this thread from last year showing my analysis linking high energy prices, stagnating living standards and productivity weakness to a twenty year decline in electricity supply caused by the destruction of existing capacity.
Critics of my research repeatedly argue that the UK does not, in fact, have a structural supply shortage - I truly hope the lights don’t have to go out for them to have a light-bulb moment. @MerrynSW @John_Stepek
A picture says a thousand words. See the thread below for an explanation of what is going on here #ukeconomy #ukmacro #uknetzero #netzero #rachelreeves #ukenergy #productivity
Tom James retweeted
"I used to be satisfied just playing video games. Then I found I required more… unusual entertainment."
"Hunting and killing live human beings?"
"No. Vibecoding useless software."
