Tom James retweeted
Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse.
We gave it 19 gene therapy vectors in a spreadsheet, a mouse model of epilepsy, access to a motorize surgery rig with cameras and one goal: reduce seizures.
It picked the drug. It picked the brain region. It derived the coordinates from three papers. Then it drove the stereotaxic arms into the brain and injected 250 nanolitres while watching the entry site through the rig camera for bleeding.
A licensed vet gated every irreversible step and held a physical kill switch to stop the AI agent.
Thread on what it decided, what it saw, and the moment it refused to let me override it.
[Writing this on the spot out of excitement, but I've been 18hrs in front of my laptop coding and coordinating this, so keeping it brief and descriptive, more cohesive thoughts on this soon...]
Tom James retweeted
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to:
Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund
alzresearch.org/giving/
Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources
alzfdn.org/donate/
Photo Credit: Tommy Garcia
Tom James retweeted
Here's how grid batteries and pumped hydro storage reacted to storms Austen and Boelo…
Playing back the previous week shows exactly where and when all the energy was 🔵 stored (imported) from the grid and when it was 🟣 discharged (exported) back.
The split view shows the distribution of imported energy compared to exported, highlighting how the storage assets tend to perform similar actions at the same time.
You can also see the absolutely massive storage capacity of pumped hydro assets like Dinorwig in North Wales, which stored a cumulative 37 GWh over the week.
As for batteries, Coalburn BESS on its own stored a cumulative 10 GWh over the week.
Each type of storage has it's own capabilities and purpose on the grid, which creates a complex and fascinating system when combined.
Tom James retweeted
Pretty amazing that its 2026 and prominent economists still say obviously false things about literature they cite and haven't read.
The **title** of Phillips' paper is "The Relation between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861-1957"
Is the Phillips curve useful to make sense of inflation?
A.W.H. Phillips first postulated a negative empirical correlation between inflation and the level of economic activity. Looking at inflation in 2021-24---up and down---versus measures of unemployment---roughly unchanged---shows little correlation. Has the Phillips curve failed, yet again? No, it did not.
Friedman and Phelps, almost 50 years ago, clarified that this correlation should only hold keeping expected inflation fixed. Almost every account of how firms choose prices or bargain wages with their workers predicts that expectations would show up in a Philips curve. Moreover, those models of behavior further add that increases in marginal costs (supply shocks) would further shift out this relation. The empirical Phillips curve has for many decades meant a negative relation between inflation and real activity, controlling for expected inflation and supply shocks.
The left figure below shows on the vertical axis inflation, after controlling for expected inflation---mean and disagreement from a household survey---and for supply shocks---gas prices and global supply pressures. The horizontal axis shows a measure of slack in the labor market---the log of the ratio of unemployment to job vacancies. The Phillips curve held nicely and steadily throughout.
A criticism of that figure is that its is looking in the rear view mirror: the measure of supply shocks and the measure of slack were developed in the last few years and the data has been revised. The right figure does instead an out-of sample exercise. Estimate a regression of inflation on (i) expected inflation, (ii) the difference between the unemployment rate and the CBO estimate of its non-cyclical component, and (iii) the PCE energy price index. Do it on data pre-pandemic: 1984Q1-2020Q1. Using that estimated equation, predict inflation in real time from then onwards using the data releases available at the time of the forecast. The Phillips curve was a pretty good predictor of inflation throughout.
The Phillips curve was stable during the inflation surge, and it predicted well the movements in inflation, with expectations playing a key role in those predictions.
Notes: it is important to include the right measure of expectations to understand inflation-activity dynamics at a business-cycle frequency: the short-horizon expectations of households and firms. (For instance, the long-horizon expectations from professionals, or the expectations from models in policy institutions, as in my previous two posts, are the wrong measure.)
Sources:
(i) Section 3 in Reis "Why Did Inflation Rise and Fall in 2021-24? Channels and Evidence from Expectations"
(ii) The simple exercise on the left figure is inspired on the analysis of Bernanke and Blanchard “What Caused the US Pandemic-Era Inflation?”
(iii) The simple exercise on the right figure is inspired on @jadhazell "Comment" in the NBER macro annual 2025, which in turn built on Beaudry, Hou, and Portier "The Dominant Role of Expectations and Broad-Based Supply Shocks in Driving Inflation"
Tom James retweeted
This Budget is the start of a new energy pathway that the 10 Year Plan will build on. The priority is to bring energy costs down to help British business to compete, and British households to cope. And cheaper electricity will boost electrification, increasing our energy security and helping to decarbonise the whole economy.
What does this mean? First, it means a focus on levies and policy costs on bills. The Conservatives added £100 to everyone's bill via levies in their last decade in power. Labour has cut £150 from bill costs already. But today, John Healey has drawn a line in the sand, with the announcement that we will add no new costs to energy bills, with a comprehensive cost control framework to follow at the spending review. The Chancellor is also junking plans, first set out by the Tories, to add on up to around £10 a year on bills to pay for hydrogen projects.
Second, it means taking account of the interaction between the pace of grid build-out and the pace at which renewables are added to the grid. The NAO have said that investment in expanding the transmission network declined in real terms between 2016 and 2020, just when it was clear that more intermittent power meant we would need more capacity. It is now forecast to rise to over £10bn a year. But with growing constraint and distribution costs, it's right that the system costs of all new power are considered. That is why we will only procure clean power through AR8 (the next auction round) if we are confident it will lower bills. And we will reform the contract for difference by AR9 to support building the lowest cost system, fixing market distortions and siting assets in the right place.
The evidence is clear, clean power is an essential part of the route to cheap power, and the overall approach of seeking to get ourselves off the gas-price rollercoaster to the right one. Gas is setting the electricity price less and less every year. If it wasn't for adding renewables to the grid in recent years then the current Iran price shock would have been worse for families and businesses. The Conservatives and Reform's ideological anti-renewables approach is the wrong one and fails in the face of evidence on how to protect bill payers from shocks and the need to make ourselves less reliant on foreign dictators. We'll take a pragmatic approach to get bills down.
Getting electricity prices down, ensuring new clean power does not run ahead of the grid, is also the credible route to reaching our net zero goals. The decarbonisation that we want to enable in our homes, on our roads and in our businesses, is six times larger than that still to be achieved from getting to a clean grid. Unless we make electricity cheaper relative to other energy sources, we will struggle to increase adoption of EV and heat pumps.
Tom James retweeted
The Wessex Mayoralty has been approved by the government, after years of campaigning from Dorset, BCP, Somerset, and Wiltshire councils.
This has sent me down a rabbit hole of how many different definitions of "Wessex" there are in use today. 🧵👇
Tom James retweeted
Quick thoughts on today's fiscal devolution roadmap, building off our four tests:
1. This is the end of the beginning for fiscal devolution. Government now accepts fiscal centralisation is a national economic problem - and over the longer term there is more fiscal devo to come
Centre for Cities set out four tests for the fiscal devolution roadmap earlier this week.
We’re interested in fiscal devolution first and foremost as a means by which to unlock economic growth. So how does the roadmap look through that lens?
@AntBreach with a quick take on "the end of the beginning" for fiscal devolution.
Tom James retweeted
Today’s is the most decentralising Budget in decades, certainly since the Westminster power-grabs of the 1980s. For decades, we have got something as fundamental as where decisions are made wrong. This has made us poorer and more unequal. This Budget plots a new course.
Tom James retweeted
"Keynes’ GT is intellectually incoherent when viewed through the lens of General Equilibrium theory" is another way of saying that General Equilibrium theory is incoherent.
I agree. But Keynes’ GT is intellectually incoherent when viewed through the lens of General Equilibrium theory … it has no intelligible answer to the question: When faced with persistent unemployment why don’t firms offer lower wages and why don’t unemployed workers accept those offers?
When the N. American Keynesians ... based in Cambridge Massachusetts … accepted Friedman’s argument that high unemployment is caused by a temporary deviation of wages and prices from their equilibrium levels … they gave up the Keynesian Baby with the Monetarist Bathwater.
The Cambridge England Keynesians resisted but they did not have a coherent explanation for the persistence of long-term unemployment as an equilibrium phenomenon that could answer the questions of the General Equilibrium theorists.
My entire body of work has been devoted to providing an answer to the question: How can high unemployment persist? that reconciles General Equilibrium Theory with the Keynesian proposition that Walrasian Equilibrium is one of many potential resting points of a dynamical system. The answer is what I call Keynesian Search Theory. static1.squarespace.com/stat…
I wonder if the real economy is intellectually coherent when viewed through the lens of General Equilibrium theory.
I agree. But Keynes’ GT is intellectually incoherent when viewed through the lens of General Equilibrium theory … it has no intelligible answer to the question: When faced with persistent unemployment why don’t firms offer lower wages and why don’t unemployed workers accept those offers?
When the N. American Keynesians ... based in Cambridge Massachusetts … accepted Friedman’s argument that high unemployment is caused by a temporary deviation of wages and prices from their equilibrium levels … they gave up the Keynesian Baby with the Monetarist Bathwater.
The Cambridge England Keynesians resisted but they did not have a coherent explanation for the persistence of long-term unemployment as an equilibrium phenomenon that could answer the questions of the General Equilibrium theorists.
My entire body of work has been devoted to providing an answer to the question: How can high unemployment persist? that reconciles General Equilibrium Theory with the Keynesian proposition that Walrasian Equilibrium is one of many potential resting points of a dynamical system. The answer is what I call Keynesian Search Theory. static1.squarespace.com/stat…
Tom James retweeted
Here's @BritainRemade's tram project cost list, colored by electoral system. What do you notice? First past the post systems are more expensive than proportional representation systems. Generally, if you look through the data, you will find the same thing. But what is going on? I have a theory.
FPTP vs PR is partly a cause of the story and partly an indicator of a broader range of differences between societies. The correlation between majoritarian FPTP systems and common law, for example, has been remarked upon by many people before. It indicates a broader 'administrative' versus 'majoritarian' divide.
A range of commentators have tried to argue that 'common law systems are intrinsically adversarial, and we need consensus-based systems for cheap infrastructure', but this is obviously absurd, and easily refuted by the fact that British and American infrastructure flexibility, decisiveness, speed, and cost, was probably the *best* before the 1970s and 1980s (the common law existed then too!) Costs for common-law countries have exploded only since those decades.
The proximate cause, as identified by @alon_levy and the Transit Costs Project – and this could easily be extended to a broader range of infrastructure than transit – is the consultant-outsourcing-accountability-sink model. (This interacts with or causes many of the other causes identified: gold plating, redesigns, delays, feast and famine, environmental regulation.) But I differ with Levy and co on whether this is simply an unforced error driven by ideology. Why make all these mistakes and keep making them?
There is a myth in the UK that we are an 'elective dictatorship': we go to the election, elect MPs, and between them they have overwhelming power to do anything they wish on behalf of the nation. Does it feel like our MPs or PMs are all powerful to you? Did the huge Tory majority of 2019-2024 or the huge Labour majority of 2024-today seem to give them the power to enact massive social changes if they wished to?
It *used* to be that a British public need only vote 30 or 40% for a given government, and this slim plurality or majority would be enough to make gigantic decisions. Back when the government had a lot of legitimacy, this gave Britain the most flexible system in the world. Unlike on the continent, where blockers, stakeholders, existing elites all had a formalized say within the system – whether union, or homeowner, or corporate producer interest – majorities in Britain and the US could overturn the deepest rules and interests easily. Before the 1970s, this was a huge advantage.
But after the 1970s, this flipped into becoming a huge disadvantage. The less-flexible continental governments lost less legitimacy in the crises of the 1970s. But, more importantly, their decisionmaking had never depended so much on their legitimacy. Big social decisions had *always* involved more horse trading among stakeholder and interest groups, parties – more corporatism and more formalized bargaining. Before, this simply increased transactions costs. After, this meant they still had means to build consent for change. The flexible states did not.
The important thing to note is that theoretically flexibility is USELESS if the public don't want you to have it. You are actively BETTER OFF putting all sorts of constraints on your ability to act, requiring yourself to ask unions, or agree with other parties, or whatever, so long as those limits help you generate consent for action.
(This is the core insight about why Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution gave Britain the most powerful, effective, vigorous, and active state in Europe, whereas absolutist monarchs were nearly all ineffective and unable to make profound changes to their societies.)
The problem in Britain in the US is that elites have not accepted that they do not have full consent to govern without constraints. They are being dragged, kicking and screaming by populism, towards this conclusion, but refusing to see what is in front of their eyes.
Getting European costs will require European methods: bringing a powerful enough coalition of those affected along to generate the legitimacy for major change.
Tom James retweeted
Can someone steelman this? Every single problem in his list seems to stem from react. If it were just server rendered html with some vanilla JS sprinkled on top, there'd be no "hydration" or "unmounting" to worry about.
Is there a single concrete benefit in using react for this?
so why is it a hard problem? there's a bunch of things going on here:
- the search bar needs to arrive in the static html bundle, but relies on dynamic content (the query parameters)
- you have to prefill the content before react hydration runs, so you're writing a script outside of react to do it so it happens ASAP
- the search bar needs to change positions on the page up to the navbar without unmounting it so all of the input stays focused
- on mobile you need to bring up the keyboard and move it to the top on first tap
- syncing to the url bar before hydration for reloads and page transitions
- having the right loading skeletons in the static page content as well depending on if there's a search in the query params or not
the end result is globally, you can go from loading the domains page -> searching in under 70ms as it arrives with the main bundle
@ethanniser has a good article on some of the concepts behind this one ethanniser.com/blog/a-clock-…
Tom James retweeted
Good post from @bswud , whose contributions to the nuclear debate have been very substantial. He, @s8mb and others have really supercharged support for nuclear.
I myself think the reference to £500/KW reactors built in the Sixties in the U.S. isn't a viable comparison. Those plants were turnkey projects and priced at incredibly low rates by GE and Westinghouse. They were intended to be loss leaders in anticipation of explosive load growth, and the manufacturers ended up losing huge amounts of money on them.
U.S. Nuclear rocketed in the Seventies partly because of the NRC and ALARA, but also because electricity demand growth cratered, the initial turnkey plants lost money, and improvements in turbine size and thermal efficiency stalled.
From Emmet Penney: “Between 1974 and 1978, eighty nuclear plants were cancelled, representing ninety thousand megawatts’ worth of new capacity.”
No nuclear plant today meets the price of those original American reactors precisely because they were loss-leaders. They are therefore not a useful benchmark for what we can expect from the nuclear industry today.
Good review of @DowningAm's book here by @Rian_Whitton. One quibble. He says:
'Downing notes the nominally privately financed Hinkley Point C only got approval when the government accepted a strike price of £92.50/MWh (2012 prices)...the book is a good corrective to much of the pro-nuclear talk that endlessly focuses on regulatory barriers and red tape but never addresses the critical barrier to nuclear power: financing the project at acceptable rates.'
It's certainly true that *at current prices*, the main question is whether the state will finance nuclear power plants. But the current price of nuclear power is outrageous, and only debatably worth financing.
No country has held the line and continued funding it to a significant scale at this price. Every time it was previously done at scale, it was less than a quarter of the price per gigawatt of HPC and SZC.
Unnoted in this passage is the fact that EDF is believed to be losing money on the £92.50/MWh strike price (2012£, more like £135 today). It demanded that the government come in for far more than just a strike price on the second project: it has secured a cost-plus contract AND govt investment of the bulk of the project cost.
When nuclear power was successful, whether in the US, UK, Germany, France, Japan, or Sweden, it was many times cheaper than it is today. The cheapest US nukes in the late 1960s cost about £500 per kilowatt in modern money, compared to £12,000+ for Hinkley Point C.
It seems to me completely scale insensitive to say that financing is the main thing that matters. At £500 per kilowatt built in 3-4 years, the plants would be trivially privately financed. And our current money on the line would finance 10 or 20 times as much capacity.
Yes, the UK's plants were state built, and they did a good job, and many different states have done a great job. But the US and Japanese plants were built by regulated private utilities, also quickly and cheaply. It's simply historically inaccurate to suggest that the key dimension is finance. Nuclear collapsed while the financing situation was unchanged. In the UK, it was all being financed by the CEGB/government long through the decline.
The problem is that nuclear power is EXPENSIVE. No one is going to build it if it is this expensive. State/private is not the important divide here: both have built nuclear power highly successfully.
riancwhitton.substack.com/p/…
Tom James retweeted
UI and math time! UI = f(props) is the most famous line in React. But that f is JavaScript, not math.
Inspired by @_chenglou’s Handwired project, I compiled a <Dashboard/> component into a real math function, and asked what becomes possible.
calculus-of-interfaces.verce…
Tom James retweeted
Announcing 3 Critical vulns for hundreds of millions of IoT, Firewalls, OT, and Military devices including: Palo Alto Networks, Comcast, D-Link, HP, Canon, Honeywell, GE, Oracle, Siemens, Rockwell, Digi, Lockheed Martin, Boeing...
The vulns are with GoAhead Web Server which is a backend library used by these devices. There's a patch available from GoAhead but that doesn't mean there's a patch available for the devices yet -- that's up to the manufacturer.
- TLS traffic over DHE ciphers have a 1-byte secret, "04", meaning anyone can decrypt connections to these devices and steal login credentials and session tokens if the client negotiated with DHE ciphers like the latest TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256, which is extremely likely.
- LibreSSL mTLS has been completely bypassed, meaning anyone can connect over mTLS. If you have one of these devices listening on the internet and are expecting mTLS to protect it from attackers, take it offline or patch asap.
- OpenSSL Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) are not enforced, meaning if a user device is stolen or compromised, and you revoke that mTLS cert, nothing actually happens. There are a lot of other attacks this can be used for.
These are critical because these types of devices run our world. Water systems, electricity, military, firewalls, critical infrastructure.
foxio.io/blog/choose-your-ba…
Tom James retweeted
If machines spit out information about the universe that no conscious species understands, then it’s not actually “understanding”. It’s just more data from, of, and about the universe that itself needs to be understood.
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