Building MinnsDB / agent infrastructure. Product & R&D. Mediocre takes about AI systems, civic tech, and how I wished Britain builds.
Berlin/London
Joined January 2022
- Tweets334
- Following323
- Followers178
- Likes728
Yes but to my knowledge the people of London had never had a choice as no series mayoral candidate has baked it in the last 2 elections (might be wrong but I can't remember)
London has never really had the choice of Heathrow expansion. The Last few mayoral elections has hardly been a choice on the issue when the majority candidates all opposed it.
The hysteria over a tourism tax being disastrous for some regions surely exemplifies the point that different regions will need different approaches.
Jonathan Farrow retweeted
Big day today - we're confirming plans for an Overnight Visitor Levy.
This is the right policy to help raise funds to support regional leaders to invest in growth and the visitor economy in their region.
Some Mayors will use it and do great things with the power. Others will decide not to use it. The opportunity for different decisions is good. We will see how different places fare over time with different choices.
And whether or not to use it will be a source of debate at the next Mayoral elections - also good.
Over to you now Sadiq, Bev, Tracy, Helen Steve, Kim, Oliver, Richard, David, Claire, Paul, Ben, Luke and Andrea!
It's about to become more centralised as up until this point academies could set their own curriculum but the government has now legislated to require them to follow the National Curriculum.
Good to learn via @daisychristo of the history of schooling in England and its path -- as with just about everything in England -- from a very decentralised system when we were the richest country in the world to a very centralised one now that we aren't. substack.nomoremarking.com/p…
Jonathan Farrow retweeted
I'm a huge fan of devolution. I want to believe in Burnham's agenda. But I worry that it's being delivered by the most extraordinary act of centralisation we've seen in decades - one that goes against all the rhetoric about letting local areas choose for themselves. (1/?)
Ah yes Soho that area of residential tranquility and only a pub to frequent
“The Soho Society, a group of residents established in 1972 aimed at “preserving the character of Soho”, voted in its AGM on Thursday for a new licensing mandate, meaning it will challenge all new applications for bars and restaurants in the area, including renewals of existing licences. It will also object to any venue that wishes to open beyond “core hours”, which Westminster council decrees end at 11pm.”
And we wonder why we have a youth unemployment problem
This is minnsDB
The AI Operating System for Companies
@sdianahu
The best AI-native companies have made their entire company queryable: every meeting, ticket, and customer interaction legible to an intelligence layer that learns from it.
Building this today requires brutal integration work, and there's no product that connects all this context into a single layer that can reason across it.
Jonathan Farrow retweeted
Before LLMs, Palantir was competing with Snowflake and Databricks.
Post-LLMs, they do not believe they have any competitors. Why? Snowflake/Databricks optimized for SQL and query throughput: get raw data into tables, run fast analytical reads, ship dashboards and models on top. Palantir made a different bet: an ontology, a world model where data is represented the way humans actually reason about it (objects, relationships, properties; nouns/verbs/adjectives). Back then, that was built for government analysts trying to make sense of messy, interdependent systems.
Then LLMs arrived and the ontology suddenly looked like the perfect interface because models don’t want a trillion rows. They want a structured, language-shaped substrate: named entities, typed relationships, constraints, and “what interacts with what”, something you can linearize into a coherent prompt, traverse, and act on.
The bigger implication for decision traces is that the “context graph” problem we wrote about has multiple architectural solutions:
Platform-first (example: Palantir): prescribe the unified world model upfront. Pay the integration + ontology + embedded-team tax (months of use case discovery / workflow decomposition / “process mining”), and in return you get a substrate that can connect data to decisions because everything now lives inside the same model for an extremely absurd price.
Workflow-first (decision traces): don’t start by rebuilding the world. Instrument the moments where the world changes. Capture decision receipts at commit surfaces: inputs referenced, policy/constraints, exception path, approvals, action taken, outcome. Over time (not day 1), that write-time provenance becomes its own world model, learned from trajectories rather than imposed upfront (there will be many different methods here)
And importantly: this is still an ontology approach, just a different kind. Palantir prescribes the ontology first. Our take is that startups can learn it bottom-up from traces. You start by capturing what people actually do at the decision surface: what evidence is referenced, which approvals happen, what exceptions recur, what actions are taken, what outcomes follow and over time, infer the minimal set of entities + relations that explain those trajectories.
The missing piece is decision traces: without them, you have state, but not the legible “why”!! Cc @akoratana
Admittedly it's not in the best part of the city but in Sheffield most buildings become student accommodation or spoons/pub.
In my opinion the major problem with Sheffield is that it is too focused on university/students hence why it has the highest vacancy rates 12.9% of any city centre in the UK.
I understand the argument about fairness behind the child benefit cap. However, as a society, we should not condemn children to poverty simply because of the circumstances of their birth.
Looking after children strengthens the next generation, which is a net gain for society as a whole.
More local tax powers is great. I would much prefer the UK move to a system where there was national, regional and then town/city level tax. Where each layer has a fiscal responsibility.
My worry with centralised taxes being raised and if not spent on infra but on say opex it makes it harder for central government to devolve more tax powers in the long run.
You know there are optimisation algorithms in engineering that literally come from studying ants. Science spreads outward like that. There’s a misunderstanding about how progress actually works and why discoveries matter.
Engineering constantly borrows from biology. Swarm behaviour, how dragonflies hunt, how ants organise themselves these things have inspired real systems and real technology.
To say research on ants is “useless,” it just shows they don’t see a potential bigger picture.
People are not seething because you earned a PhD. They are seething because, after all the self congratulation and the glitter emojis, they discovered the grand achievement you are flaunting is… about ants.
Most people can accept someone celebrating medical research, engineering breakthroughs, or something that clearly improves the world. But when they see someone behaving as though they have unlocked the secrets of the universe only for the punchline to be “I studied ant chores”, it lands very differently.
It feels less like academic excellence and more like elite insulation. Ordinary people are drowning under rent, tax, debt, and collapsing public services, and then they watch an Oxford biologist triumphantly posting about insect labour division while describing their “beautiful office”.
The resentment has nothing to do with education. It is the tone deafness of boasting about a life of academic comfort while researching a topic that most people instinctively place somewhere between trivia and hobby.
The fury is not directed at your success. It is directed at the mismatch between the scale of the celebration and the subject matter. In short: people are annoyed because it is about ants.
The spousal visa is incredibly expensive over time, and the mandatory external visa services push the cost up even further. I even had a highly skilled friend who considered moving to the UK, but once he saw the cost, the idea died instantly.
Hasn’t this been the UK’s problem for years?
We keep pretending you can deliver Scandinavian quality public services while keeping American style tax levels.
No country anywhere has made that add up. Until we choose one model or the other, we’ll carry on getting the worst of both worlds.
And ultimately that’s because politicians haven’t been honest with people and the conversation about what each model means long term.
