WOWSERS! The French 10y bond just hit 5% ... it's highest rate in 24 years.

So if ai uses directory sites to return local business results what’s the point of the directory existing? Yell, checatrade etc? They are forced with blocking ai crawlers or getting no traffic? Horrible situation really …

This is really ominous if you ask me. They are now openly preparing for the big cull. In some ways good for the USA, but what about the rest of the world?

Why is nothing in Microsoft ever simple? All I want to do is connect Planner to Claude. The hoops you have to jump through and you can bet this doesn't work as it should.

This is so pre-meditated it's not funny. Create a fuel, food crisis, during winter for many. "Save the day" by bailing people out with a fresh money print. Debt problem kicked down the road.

Now I am over 50 I have constantly calculate my age. Anyone else do this ?

Let's give @emdash 1.2 a whirl 😀

I don’t see how any of this push for AI doesn’t end with riots in most countries. Seriously. If AI gets good enough that companies need 25–50% fewer white-collar workers, (and I don’t think that’s a ridiculous scenario at all), what exactly do people think happens next? Everyone keeps talking about ‘productivity’ like it’s automatically brilliant. But for a company, productivity can simply mean: ‘We used to need 100 people. Now we need 60.’ Great for the company. Not so great for the 40 people who are gone. Now do that across software, marketing, finance, admin, legal, HR, customer service, consulting, analysis and loads of other office jobs. You’re suddenly talking about potentially millions of people earning less, paying less tax and needing more help from the government. And this is where the numbers get mad. For 2026/27 the UK government is expecting to collect roughly: 💰 £360bn from income tax 💰 £212bn from National Insurance 💰 £189bn from VAT So income tax and NI alone bring in about £571bn a year. At the same time, the government is forecast to spend about £353bn on welfare, including pensions. Now imagine millions of decent earners lose their jobs, struggle to find another one, or end up taking much lower-paid work. The government gets hit from both sides. ⬇️ Less income tax and NI coming in. ⬆️ More money going out in benefits and support. And if people have less money, they spend less as well. So VAT takes a hit as we less schazzle. Then think about mortgages. You’ve got couples where one earns £70k and the other earns £50k. They’ve bought a house and taken on a mortgage based on those two incomes. Then one of those jobs disappears because one person with AI can now do work that used to need three people. What happens then? Mortgage arrears? Repossession? House prices falling because suddenly far fewer people can afford the prices we have today? (tbh, house prices really do need to fall anyway) And this is the bit that could feel completely bizarre. It kind of does already. The economy could still look ‘hunky dorey’ on paper. ⬆️ GDP could be up. ⬆️ Productivity could be up. ⬆️ A handful of huge companies could be making record profits. ⬆️ Stock markets could be flying. Meanwhile loads of normal people are sat there thinking: ⬇️ ‘Hang on. AI has apparently made the country richer, but I’ve lost my job and I can’t pay my mortgage or feed my kids.’ That’s where I think people start getting seriously angry. Because you can’t have a system where the gains from AI mostly go to the companies and people who own the technology, while ordinary people lose their wages and the government gets left picking up the bill. Surely that can’t work? (If it can we live in a twisted world). Something has to give? ❓Maybe we work fewer hours and get by on less. ❓Maybe companies and capital get taxed more. ❓Maybe benefits get much bigger. ❓Maybe we end up with some sort of basic income. ❓Maybe there’s an ‘AI dividend’. ❓Or maybe it’s a mixture of all of those things. Because what’s the alternative? Tell millions of people: ‘Sorry mate, your job isn’t needed anymore. But your mortgage, council tax, food bill and electricity bill are all still due.’ That’s not going to go down well. And I think the other thing people miss is that this probably doesn’t even start with millions of people getting redundancy letters. It’ll be much less "newsworthy" than that. Someone leaves. Not replaced. Someone retires. Not replaced. A graduate scheme that used to take 100 people now takes 30. A team of 20 becomes 8 people using AI. A new company that would once have employed 50 people gets built by 5. Companies keep growing but stop growing their headcount. And then after a few years we all suddenly look around and realise there are just far fewer decent jobs available than there used to be. That’s the bit I struggle with when people say AI is going to make us massively more productive and then seem to assume everything else just carries on as normal. If AI really does what this absolutely staggering amount of investment suggests companies believe it can do, then we’re not just talking about better software. We’re talking about changing how the whole economy works in a literal heartbeat of time. How people earn money. How governments raise tax. How mortgages get paid. How people buy things. How benefits work. Maybe even whether working five days a week still makes any sense. And if we don’t work out some way for ordinary people to share in those gains, then I genuinely don’t see how we avoid huge social unrest. Because eventually the question won’t be: ‘How clever is AI?’ It’ll be: ‘If the country is richer and we don’t need everyone to work anymore… where the f**k my cut?’ <RANT OVER>

Now all of the Adobe products have been vibe coded. I wonder how many are currently vibing the new Word, Excel and Teams...🤔

Accepted an offer on our house over 6 months ago. Buyer isn't in a chain. We're not in a chain. Why has it taken so long? Solicitors. AI can't come soon enough for some industries.

How will AI impact schools? Do we even need schools in 2030?

My experience: Sol 6.1 isn't even in the same game as Opus 5.5 / Sonnet 5.5. Codex spent days over-engineering adding complexity, duplicating code and turning the codebase into a mess. Claude: does a full code review and share's it's disgust. Spends half a day cleaning it up and now we're far more back on track. 5.5 just "get's it".

Ask Opus 5.5 to code review Sol 6.1.. mmmm...

Will we get to a new AI-only language in the future, and why is this needed? Interesting thought process..