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Alex Hern

@hern.bsky.social

40K followers 450 following 2.5K posts

AI writer at the Economist. I write about it, that is. I’m still human. One of literally dozens of people online who is not American.

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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 18m

They also have an 80% chart at the same link!

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 44m

The reason they had to “work alongside the Motor Insurer’s Bureau” and so why this is a news story about a crackdown rather than the status quo is that they’re gonna run aren’t allowed to access the DVLA database automatically

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 47m

Yeah it’s why it’s one of the ones I closely track. They’re an independent outfit, running a battery of tests, that have an easy to grasp implication, and which is updated in real time. Main issue is that they’re gonna run out of test suite eventually which will break the time series

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 1h

A fun thing about uninsured cars: I can, at any moment, type a number plate into my phone and find out if a car is uninsured. police cars can, at any moment, automatically use ANPR to check the number plate of the car in front of them. It is illegal to combine these two capabilities

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 1h

much more aggressive use of ANPR is a big one. We have a database of uninsured number plates and it is illegal to hook it up to the cameras on police cars.

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 1h

Friends car was just totalled by an uninsured banned driver _with a court date for driving offences tomorrow_. Three kids in her car when it happened, thankfully only one broken collarbone between them.

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 1h

Don’t make me photoshop Florida into this

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 1h

A couple of times I’ve had the pleasure of asking “are you saying the school week should be longer or that there are things that should be cut from the curriculum” and strangely no-one wants their name attached to either of THOSE proposals

Gabriel Milland @gabrielmilland.bsky.social · 6h

Imagine being a teacher. You've a degree. A teaching qualification, probably, and maybe decades of experience. And then publicity-hungry knownothings demand gimmicks and very basic things about how do your job are put in statute.

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 2h

Thing that's good about it is it's the same battery of tasks that they've been testing since Feb 2025. Agree that it's focused on SWE stuff

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 3h

It's log scale, if that's what you mean

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 3h

METR has updated its LLM time-horizon chart for Claude 4.5 Sonnet and we're still above the trendline. Slowdown? What slowdown? metr.org/blog/2025-03...

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 3h

Although it doesn't exist as such in law, in practice a London council tenancy is an asset worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Right to Buy is a process where you pay to swap that asset for the property itself.

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 3h

If your social rent is £2,000 less than the house would rent for on the open market, then it's basically worth it _for the council_ if you exercise RtB and then sell it back to them for £270k, provided you then live for a little over a decade longer in a different house you own

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 3h

The thing that always gets missed in RtB conversations though is that the person exercising RtB is also giving up a lifetime tenancy at vastly below-market-rate rent. Every chance that, for a house in central hackney, that asset is worth £270k!

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 3h

Well that's where I wonder. What's the lifetime cost of a council tenant to the council? Presumably somewhere like hackney it could be approaching that level anyway

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 4h

The other way of looking at this is that Hackney Council spent £269,950 to get someone to give up their council tenancy

Greg Barradale @gregbarradale.bsky.social · 6h

In 2014, Hackney Council sold a property under Right to Buy for £95,050

In 2021, they bought it back off the ex-tenant for £365k

In ~6 yrs, the council lost £269,950 on a single property

It's not an isolated example. @bigissue.com has uncovered 100+ 'Yo-yo Homes'

www.bigissue.com/news/housing...

How ex-council tenants make over £200k selling homes back to councils

Big Issue investigates the Right To Buy properties sold back to councils for massive profits, just years after being bought at a discount.

www.bigissue.com

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 9h

Yup

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 9h

What do you think of the zero shot reasoners paper?

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 23h

Sister of Wyatt?

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 23h

One interesting outcome of modern mores is that almost every footballer I can name, I know because of people publicly thirsting over them, which in practice means I know Jack Grealish extremely well and no women

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 23h

I’m not a sexist which is why I hold men’s AND women’s football in disdain

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 23h

On the one hand, it’s great to be making progress in reversing millennia of sexism in who gets lauded for sporting achievements. On the other, people tweet about football twice as much now

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 1d

Unquestionably good that the conclusion of the Your Party/Green Party tussle seems to be no leftism without trans liberation.

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 1d

Obviously blue and black

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 1d

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