Tom Ough retweeted
No, he has been on the most excellent @anglofuturismco podcast hosted by @tomough
youtu.be/5d8zD5gpeTc
Scoop: Britain is removing its military presence from Sierra Leone, citing security concerns.
@AHABDiggins breaks the news in UnHerd today – and argues that we are wasting an economic opportunity.
"It sits in a key position geographically, with the largest natural harbour on the west coast of Africa...
"English is widely spoken and Britain, unlike the region’s other former colonial masters, is largely looked on fondly...
"Into the breach, Sierra Leone has welcomed other partners... the Chinese have rebuilt the old British railway to neighbouring Liberia, which last ran a passenger service in 1975; its massive, 90-carriage long trains now ferry gold, bauxite and coltan."
An excellent bit of longform reporting.
Travelling through Sierra Leone 25 years after its war, you can’t help but call to mind other, more recent conflicts, such as Afghanistan and Iran. So what went right in the 2000 Sierra Leone intervention — and what is going wrong with more recent Western interventions?
Read Alex Diggins (@AHABDiggins) on the legacy of the Sierra Leone civil war:
buff.ly/kkjRAMa
It would be trivial to complete the set. Sweden would put up a good fight, and Mongolia will be impossible to access via land. But the bar – invasion rather than conquest – is low. Could do it within a year if we really wanted to.
Tom Ough retweeted
It’s 2040 and everyone is running on @VaireHQ chips. What do we do with all that cheap compute?
Speaking to Anglofuturism, @rodolfor traces computing from room-sized machines to minicomputers, PCs and phones. Every time computing gets cheaper to run, the number of devices jumps by orders of magnitude. Push further and today’s fastest supercomputer wouldn’t need a battery, just a capacitor fed by light, heat or motion.
As for what we’d use it all for, he isn’t worried. Someone will always find a use, whether that’s Spacewar on a military PDP, an AI hallucinating Minecraft, or a chip in every robot finger.
@rodolfor explains why the stakes are higher than gadgets. On his reading of one paper, half of the West’s economic growth over the past 50 years came from better computing and communications, and both curves are flattening:
“At any given time in human history, we have never not allocated 100% of the computing power to something.”
Sponsored by Isembard. If you want to own and operate a factory in Britain, America, Germany or France, email [email protected].
0:00:00 - It’s 2040 and everyone runs on Vaire chips
0:00:41 - From one computer to billions
0:01:41 - A supercomputer that doesn’t need a battery
0:02:36 - What do we do with all that intelligence?
0:03:33 - Show Turing your phone
0:03:53 - Very good Candy Crush and AI Minecraft
0:05:40 - From Spacewar to curing cancer
0:06:46 - A chip in every finger
0:07:14 - Arm cores in batteries and image processing on drones
0:07:49 - Why the West’s economy depends on computing growth
0:08:34 - The mill, the piston and the car that keeps going
0:10:16 - Keeping Moore’s law alive
0:10:52 - China, India and the demographic bomb
0:11:09 - Half of 50 years of growth came from computing
0:11:30 - The fastest phones we’ll ever have
0:11:55 - Keeping the curves alive
Britain needs a gilts crisis, argues @DamianPudner in his pugnacious UnHerd debut.
It is not that pain is desirable. It is that we need a trigger to clear away some of the distortions built up over fifteen years of near-zero interest rates, quantitative easing, a borrow-and-spend mentality within government, and political reluctance to change. Such an outcome would force a repricing of the state itself.
John Healey has three weeks before the markets could force the issue. He could put welfare on a falling path and cut the public-sector paybill, and do voluntarily what his namesake was made to do in 1976.
But nothing in fifty years of British politics, nor in the Prime Minister’s speech last week, suggests he will, and I’m not expecting much in the way of radical change on 28 October.
Read more from @DamianPudner:
buff.ly/Jr10tLR
Tom Ough retweeted
For UnHerd, I’ve written about the problem at the heart of the Kemi bounce: her approval is going up, but voters still don’t trust the Tories.
Tom Ough retweeted
In brazenly self-deceived mode, one CCHQ staffer speculates loudly that the visible improvement in the attractiveness of the young men in attendance, as compared with last year, is a surefire indicator of a coming recovery in the party’s electoral fortunes.
I strain my eyes to see whether I can follow his reasoning. From what I see, I infer that the standalone moustache has finally made a fashion comeback (a long-awaited recovery, perhaps, in the face of the near-fatal countervailing influences on male grooming provided by AIDS and Adolf Hitler); but beyond that, little improvement is obvious.
Read more from John Maier (@johnmaier_):
unherd.com/2026/10/the-baden…
In UnHerd today, @FilippaLentzos's definitive take on the Russian outbreak:
"The more disturbing hypothetical is not that this was ordinary plague, but that it was an engineered form of the pathogen, deliberately altered to make existing defences less effective. Modern biotechnology raises possibilities that 20th-century biological weapons programmes did not possess.
"Pathogens might, in principle, be altered in ways that change their disease-causing properties or reduce the effectiveness of existing medical countermeasures."
unherd.com/2026/10/the-lesso…
Tom Ough retweeted
Me in Unherd arguing that the Tory death spiral is continuing and all of the blither about a recovery is largely hot air. It's not even particularly Badenoch's fault, it's just that the Tories' predicament, which has been brewing for years, is perhaps now irresolvable
Has Kemi killed the Conservatives, asks George Owers (@CapelLofft)
What might have saved the Conservatives was doubling down on Boris Johnson’s abortive re-alignment, and becoming the genuine party of the left-behind blue collar areas that are now, post Makerfield, trying to decide between Burnham and Reform.
Unfortunately, between Johnson’s open-door immigration policy and the Truss debacle, the Tories blew that opportunity so comprehensively that the only thing that might save them is Reform’s implosion, or Ed Davey remaining Lib Dem leader. Meanwhile, recent Tory policy ideas, such as abolishing inheritance tax, are little more than an attempt to cling on to what little is left of their base.
And their fresh appeal to affluent professionals — best evidenced in their plan to end the £100,000 childcare "cliff edge" — seems much the same. Andrew Griffith, their new Shadow Chancellor, is putting a lot of faith in a reheated Thatcherite tribute act. His ridiculous pledge to abolish a new tax in every budget failed to convince even his own party faithful, let alone any Tory-curious floating voters.
Read more:
buff.ly/b7wEGAY
Tom Ough retweeted
An extension to Oxford designed with "cues from the [existing] skyline" in mind might look something like this. One day we will build spires again.
Oxford is building a new neighbourhood on its west end
The design brief says it should 'use cues from the Oxford skyline'
The renders show modern geometric glass and brick buildings
Oxford's historic skyline is spires and carved stone
Nobody in Oxford can explain why a city built in stone is designing its expansion in the material that replaced it
@Gondor_Ind
Tom Ough retweeted
.@rodolfor first came to Britain at 16, for a summer in Brighton. At 27 he moved here for good after the spreadsheet he built to rank the world's cities put London on top. Now he's building chips here, at what he calls “nightmare level” difficulty.
Speaking to Anglofuturism, he makes the case that Britain has more room to grow than America, and lays out what's holding it back. He blames a century of policy that went after entrepreneurs' wealth instead of the landed gentry's. He contrasts that with Sweden, which kept its business dynasties and has more billionaires per head than anywhere outside the Bay Area. He argues that Britain blocks data centres, starved Arm of the acquisitions it needed to grow, and fragments its markets as part of Europe. @VaireHQ still feels the pull of America.
Asked whether Britain lost Arm, he pushes back:
“We did not lose Arm. We created the condition to push Arm out.”
Sponsored by Isembard. If you want to own and operate a factory in Britain, America, Germany or France, email [email protected].
0:00:00 - Why build a chip company in Britain?
0:00:17 - A summer in Brighton and a spreadsheet of cities
0:01:18 - Trieste, and why London beat the Bay Area
0:02:19 - Britain's engineering tradition, from Acorn to Arm
0:02:54 - Taking off the training weights
0:03:33 - The human cost of the First World War
0:04:03 - Where British socialism went wrong
0:04:53 - What Sweden got right
0:06:00 - Why great fortunes take generations
0:06:37 - The castle stays, the entrepreneur pays
0:08:04 - Is Britain still the place to build?
0:08:56 - Blocking the data centres
0:09:27 - One Bay Area startup vs every European chip company
0:10:03 - We didn't lose Arm, we pushed it out
0:11:19 - Let big companies destroy jobs
0:12:40 - "AIs don't build trains"
0:13:16 - Flip Entrepreneurs' Relief
0:13:59 - Inequality vs poverty
0:15:50 - A socialist America and the California problem
0:16:54 - Why is it easier to raise money in America?
0:17:51 - Market failure or regulatory failure?
0:18:18 - National champions and the missing scale
0:19:08 - What Europe could learn from interstate commerce
More from our reversible computing special
The market for AI inference chips is worth about $225bn a year. Nvidia takes most of it, the biggest tech companies build their own, and underneath sit what @rodolfor calls “reprobates like us”.
Here, Rodolfo explains why so few startups take on chips. Standing up a new silicon supply chain costs $150m to $750m before you reach any scale. That keeps out the kind of competition that haunts software, where two people at a weekend hackathon can turn your product into a commodity. @VaireHQ isn't trying to beat Nvidia head-on. Its first product will sit alongside Nvidia hardware in the data centre, pre-processing workloads like computer vision to free up the GPUs.
He also covers why licensing has haunted Arm and Intel, what steady demand did for the Industrial Revolution, and what happens when a startup gets close enough to bother the giant:
“In hardware, you can have all the smartest people in the world coming up with a better chip. It doesn't matter if they can't raise $30 million just to prove it.”
Sponsored by Isembard. If you want to own and operate a factory in Britain, America, Germany or France, email [email protected].
0:00:00 - Not competing with Nvidia
0:00:56 - A $225bn market with only 15 challengers
0:01:38 - The $150m–$750m ticket to the dance
0:02:03 - Why chipmakers don't fear the weekend hackathon
0:02:33 - Why chips are like drug development
0:03:53 - Arm, Intel and the trouble with licensing
0:05:05 - When licensing does make sense
0:06:15 - Fog of war: the dot-com bust and the shortest route to winning
0:07:02 - Data centre or edge device?
0:07:37 - Inference, training and why not to fight Nvidia on training
0:08:50 - Aggregation of demand and the cancer drug
0:09:23 - Coal, brewers and the Industrial Revolution
0:10:39 - Working alongside Nvidia in the data centre
0:11:44 - Which workloads, and why not LLMs
0:12:13 - EUV vs DUV, HBM vs SRAM
0:13:00 - Getting bumped at TSMC
0:13:34 - Groq and Nvidia's $20bn fly swat
Not to be an ambulance-chaser, but... I detailed a scenario along these lines (a very nasty pathogen escaping a Russian lab, in this case VECTOR) in my book, which recently came out in paperback.
All good bookshops etc etc
New recording gear getting its first run-out. Beautiful production from Aeron, as per
Almost all of the energy in a computer chip is wasted as heat. @rodolfor thinks we can get it back.
On the quayside at Three Mills Island, he explains reversible computing, the orphan problem he found on a Wikipedia page, and why Moore's law is about to start going backwards.
“Today you're hitting diminishing returns, and soon you're going to hit negative returns.”
Sponsored by Isembard. If you want to own and operate a factory in Britain, America, Germany or France, email [email protected].
0:00:00 Why reversible computing?
0:01:02 Hunting for orphan problems
0:02:00 When AI collides with Moore's law
0:02:14 It started on a Wikipedia page
0:03:37 A field with experts but no companies
0:04:35 Peter Thiel, monopolies and three years in stealth
0:06:30 AGI by 2027? Not on these chips
0:07:00 How the team found each other
0:08:48 Reversible computing, explained
0:10:03 Why chips get hot: erasing information
0:11:32 The pendulum: getting the energy back
0:12:11 Recovering energy vs recovering information
0:14:29 Isn't it a bad sign nobody's tried?
0:14:58 Why everyone gave up, and how AI changed it
0:15:50 The LED bulb analogy (and Tom's war on LEDs)
0:16:38 Landauer's principle
0:17:34 How far are we from the limit?
0:18:03 The real limit is CMOS (and what's the C?)
0:19:19 What everyone gets wrong about Moore's law
0:20:13 Why heat breaks shrinking transistors
@VaireHQ
There'll be colossal rewards for whoever can make computation dramatically less expensive. We interviewed a CEO who's trying to crack it. Full episode dropping soon.
Every time a chip computes something, it throws energy away as heat. It's like a car stopping dead after every metre it travels.
@rodolfor of Vaire is building the alternative: reversible chips that keep the energy moving.
“This is the only curve that matters.”
Sponsored by Isembard.
The success or failure of offworld habitats will rest entirely on their ability to be mistaken for Daylesford Organics
Tom Ough retweeted
Read my exclusive story from the Green Party conference:
unherd.com/newsroom/green-pa…
