EXCL: Ministers are being lobbied by the chief executive of a major British business to solve the NEETs crisis – by imposing a four-day week on top earners. The high-flying boss, who has close links to the Labour party, is convinced that forcing the best-paid employees to work fewer days could be the silver bullet for moving the one million youngsters not in employment, education or training into the jobs market.

A short rail bridge over a two-lane road in Oxford took longer to build and cost more (inflation-adjusted) than some of the most famous construction projects in history

Introducing Sherpa: the most advanced fiction writing AI We accelerated from $250M in ARR to $500M because Sherpa helped increase content production by 1200% in 1 year Sherpa was trained on 5.5B hours of playtime with minute by minute dynamic retention data. 550K+ creators have produced 2.6M hours of content annualised using it Pocket FM is like Netflix for audio-only dramas, with our own pool of one-person studios. 10% of eligible writers on Pocket FM make >$200K One blockbuster produced >$100M in revenue 3 writers have become millionaires in <2 yrs We built Sherpa to enable anyone to make >$1M by writing world-class fiction stories: 1. The Idea: Drop a 1-2 sentence concept. Sherpa interrogates it like a veteran editor on tension, stakes, and psychology 2. World & Characters: It builds out the complete lore, tone, and character psychologies 3. Sub-Plot planning: Breaks the premise into arcs, arcs into episodes, and episodes into scenes 4. Scene-by-Scene Generation: Outlines and drafts entire episodes, with you able to steer, rewrite, or override anytime 5. Editorial Review: Stress-tests every draft for pacing, engagement drop-offs, prose, and coherence before it locks 6. One-Tap Production: Pick a voice, convert to audio drama, and publish directly to Pocket FM’s millions of listeners 7. Global Scale & Monetization: Revenue-share on performance, with automatic localization so you earn across international markets Test Sherpa for free here: pocketfm.com/sherpa _____________________________________________ Generic LLMs fail at serialized fiction because they lack a long-horizon narrative reward function. Sherpa solves this through three core technical leaps: 1. Narrative World Model (State Tracking & Retrieval): Context windows degrade over long runs. Sherpa constructs an evolving semantic knowledge graph tracking character states, secrets, and plot dependencies. High-speed retrieval surfaces exact context on demand, maintaining zero continuity decay across hundreds of episodes 2. Hierarchical Story Planner: When writing a 500-episode story like Naruto, you need to plan 100s of sub plots. Rather than generating linearly, Sherpa decomposes narrative across discrete levels: season -> arc -> sequence -> episode -> scene. Rather than generating everything upfront, like a generic LLM, Sherpa uses progressive planning and dynamic replanning. As the story evolves, it identifies what changed, traces the downstream impact, and replans only the affected parts. 3. Prose Engine (Trained on series' retention data): LLMs write robotically, but serial fiction needs emotion, tension, pacing, and dialogue that sounds like real people. Sherpa's Prose Engine was designed specifically for storytelling. It was built on 1B+ tokens of Pocket's own stories, trained by learning from what listeners engage with, where they drop off, and what keeps them hooked. Feedback is taken from specialized evaluator models that measure every scene against a 40-item checklist. (Evaluator models were benchmarked against human reviewers and matched them 80–90% of the time.) _______________________________________________ Owning distribution and creation puts us in a very unique spot. More shows -> More data -> Sherpa becomes better -> more creator success -> more creators -> more shows Pocket FM has already seen one $100M IP. I believe Sherpa will soon lead to dozens of single-person studios creating billion-dollar shows. Most people are scared of AI but I think it'll unlock more human creativity, help creators earn more, and bring the next great IPs to life. This will create millions of jobs and new income streams.

Carney still fascinating. Cuts net immigration to zero, announces 10% reduction in federal civil service, 1.2GW data center, cuts to cap gains and corporate tax, privatize airports, govt rapid support of fossil fuel extraction. Result: *massive* popularity incl. amomg left! 1/2

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

A slide from a talk I'm giving on wealth inequality next month. The UK has massively overweighted its wealth in terms of housing ownership (which is less productive) compared to Americans. This is a primary driver for our lower standard of living.

New story- vertical drinking and ordering at the bar will be discouraged in pubs in Soho and the west end under new Westminster council guidance under consultation theguardian.com/business/202…

Lamba Ness is a finger of land at the top of Unst, the most northerly inhabited island in Britain. There is a wartime radar station up there, or what six decades of weather have left of one, and past it the sea, and past that nothing until the ice. It sits at 60 degrees 49 minutes north, which is the entire point of the place: from there a rocket climbs due north over open water on a polar track without passing over a living soul, and there is no better ground in western Europe for putting a satellite into that orbit. In December 2023 the Civil Aviation Authority licensed it. SaxaVord became the first fully licensed vertical spaceport in western Europe, cleared for as many as 30 launches a year. The first launch was meant to happen in 2022. But nothing has yet gone to orbit from it. A day or two ago the Shetland News carried the next instalment, and so far as I can see they did it alone. Lockheed Martin and the UK Space Agency have agreed between them to close the Pathfinder programme, which was the plan to fly the first satellite into orbit from British soil. The Government handed Lockheed more than £23 million for it in 2018. Lockheed's rocket supplier, ABL, lost its vehicle to a fire during testing in 2024 and walked out of commercial launch altogether to concentrate on missile defence. A Lockheed spokesman explained the ending: "None of the available options met the existing grant requirements in terms of programme objectives, anticipated benefits, and value for money." Eight years and £23 million of your money, and the closing line is a procurement formula from the largest arms company on earth. That was the arrangement from the beginning, I'd think. The British state's method for getting a British rocket off British ground was to write a cheque to an American prime contractor and then wait eight years to see what turned up. Nobody in Whitehall was ever going to build anything, nor get anyone who was able to build something to build it. The grant was the deliverable, and the announcement the pinnacle of the endeavour. Meanwhile, in February of this year, the alternative went under. Orbex, at Forres in Moray, had a launch vehicle of its own in late-stage development, designed and built here, and it ran out of money. FRP went in as administrators. More than 160 people lost their jobs, the bulk of them at the Forres factory. A preferred bidder had been lined up in January and the deal fell over. The most valuable asset left on the books is a spaceport site in Sutherland where the only thing anyone ever built is 600 metres of access road. A finished spaceport at the top of Shetland with no British rocket to fly from it. A British rocket firm 300 miles south with no money to finish it. And £23 million of public money sitting in the accounts of a company in Maryland the whole time. The next orbital attempt from Unst, when it comes, belongs to Rocket Factory Augsburg, who are German, and good luck to them. We have written the answer to this out already, and it is worth more than any grant. The Americans did not build their space industry out of standard venture capital. They built it by being the first customer, with NASA and the Pentagon buying hard from companies far too small to be safe bets, at prices that kept them alive long enough to become large ones. They have fantastic domestic procurement. The British state is not merely missing as a customer for that kind of firm. It is hostile to it, with procurement rules that require a startup to hand over the intellectual property it was funded to create so that the department can pass it to the next supplier along. No one has ever built a rocket company on those terms and no one ever will. A Progress government is the buyer of first resort, and the firms we buy from keep what they invent. The pad at Lamba Ness is poured, the range is cleared, and the five years of paperwork are done. Everything up there is finished except the part that was ours to supply. There were 160 people in Moray in January who could have supplied it, and they are doing something else now. The country has spent 40 years building the runway and watching other people fly off it, and the habit will hold until enough capable people decide they have had their fill of watching. If that is you, there is a great deal to do and we have started without you. Catch us up.

The Economist on the Martin Lewis Nation: "A measly 13% of the financial assets of British households are shares, the lowest in almost any large developed economy. In Ramseyan America the figure is 44%. No amount of scrimping and saving will compensate Britons for missing out on the profound benefits of long-term compound returns."

People argue about what size the state should be, but we ask what it's responsible for. When you think of it like that, it becomes really simple: ✅ maintain the pitch ❌ don’t play on it A serious economy needs a competent state: one that keeps the ground in order, the pitch playable and applies the rules fairly. If you do that, then the people of Britain can play the game their own way. Raising a family. Building a business. Just getting on with your life. What we’ve had recently is the opposite. We’ve had governments who •⁠ ⁠let the pitch turn to mud •⁠ ⁠asset-strip the stadium •⁠ ⁠try to tell you how to play the game So it makes perfect sense that some people want less government - they've watched it done badly for decades. And it makes perfect sense that some people want more government - they've been left trying to play on a bog. But a state that doesn't know its job - and doesn't do it for good of the nation - will do it badly at any size. The issue is competency, not size.

There is no longer any point in a bank employing a marketing department at all if they continue to allow their compliance and legal departments to write to their existing customers unsupervised, demanding we spend hours ticking boxes for them. I've been with my bank for 40 years, but their emails treat me as if I'm Boko Haram trying to open a business account for an American candy store on Oxford Street.