This policy change isn't that new, should have been included in the briefing since April/May 2026?

I've had that within the last few days.

I happened to be vaguely watching an agent at work on a longer task and spotted it attempt to find a way around not having access to a local service that would greatly help it achieve the task, I immediately chimed in with a "STOP! if you need access to X then just ask!".

I suppose my prompting could be improved :/

Q: You have ONE computer?

I have eight PCs in my study right now, plus two more in the garage, and that's not counting laptops.

You're eliding the why :)

> to help their runner run at a target pace

To help their runner get from the start to the end of the race faster (or indeed at all). In short: to increase performance.

Pacing isn't a neutral thing.

Q: Do Anthropic actually specify a document format?

It's a strategy to achieve more, not less.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

"The school curriculum in England is the responsibility of the Westminster Government. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are responsible for setting their own curriculum policies."

Appreciate this stuff gets political very quickly, but I'm curious what did England do that Scotland and Wales did not do (or vice versa)?

I wish we could spend less (collective) time here on HN talking about/worrying about Elon Musk.

We're (allegedly) here for "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

What SpaceX and/or Tesla are doing could certainly satisfy that, worrying about Musk himself certainly isn't.

There are some (many?) European companies which are considered as least as much as a jobs program as anything else.

In 2018, Alain Charmeau (in)famously expressed frustration with SpaceX in an interview with Der Spiegel and rejected reusability with these words:

“Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year,” he said. “That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: ‘Goodbye, see you next year!’”

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...

from the original

https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/alain-charmeau-d...

A more recent example would be the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project which was officially cancelled in June 2026, due to (?) industrial rivalry and leadership disputes, with a side order of politics.

"Border controls aren’t supposed to exist between EU member states – that’s the promise of the 1985 Schengen treaty. Yet today, travelers routinely face checks when crossing borders within the [European] union"

https://euobserver.com/198454/law-professor-sues-germany-for...

I'm not convinced that academic institutions are actually self-policing, it may not even be correct to assume they each act as one coherent entity. There are a lot of incentives in play which may not be obvious from the outside.

Many decades ago during my PhD I was in working in a chemistry lab when a colleague had an accident which caused a minor explosion, big enough to blow both of the glass side panes completely out of his fume hood.

With hindsight he was extremely lucky to have only minor injuries, he was peppered with tiny cuts from the flying glass and temporarily deaf from the bang.

I called for an ambulance, which seemed like a reasonable response.

The first prof on the scene (not our prof though!) came in and immediately asked "who phoned for the emergency services?", so I said it was me. He then gave me a bit of a telling-off, ending with him saying "and now the press will find out!" before he stormed off.

I remember thinking "wtf?! my colleague has just blown up our lab, and your top concern is that it will be in the newspapers"...

You may not wish to hear this, but real life is very much a data exercise:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

I was unimpressed with the message, along with the (non-UK) crew.

Counter-example: muscle memory.

My OH has - more than once - attempted to tell me her PIN code. On more than one occasion two of the digits have been transposed. Happily I know that it's the middle two digets that get transposed... :)

Fed: "give us your PIN or else"

me: "528491"

Fed:

me: "no! 528419, I meant 528419!!"

Fed:

It's write and/or erase cycles that cause wear.

If we're going to argue that a platform is free to make decisions, aren't its [ex-]users also free to make decisions, too?

...to be told the truth? Quite a lot.

I've been inside companies that had to right-size their teams, it's not pretty, but my goodness honesty from management is better than pretending.