Snippings

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American culture, which has grown more deliriously in favor of violence for years, has finally arrived at the point where that word, “violence,” is no longer sufficient. What we’re really talking about, specifically, is assassination, as the figure of the “‘good guy”’ killer is now very much ascendant, and our country, shaped by the psychotic contours of the internet, is now very much inside a new assassination culture.

From: Assassination Culture.

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World ID allows AI agents to be linked to verified human users. This setup is designed to support controlled automation in areas such as digital commerce and workflow systems.

From: World ID upgrade expands “proof of human” system across digital platforms | Bitget News.

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Additional features include Concert Kit, which enables artists to allocate tickets specifically to verified humans, aiming to curb automated scalping. With its network now spanning 18 million verified individuals globally, the update arrives as demand grows for reliable human verification in an AI-driven internet.

From: World ID 2.0: Sam Altman’s Digital Identity Play Expands Beyond the Orb.

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The founders who architect AI as a co-founder will have a structural advantage over those who treat it as a fancy autocomplete.

From: The One-Person Unicorn 🦄 – by Linas Beliūnas.

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Carta data shows that solo founders went from a fifth of all startups in 2019 to a third in 2025. My guess is that it will be more than half in 2030.

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On the morning of 10 April, a guy threw a molotov cocktail at the exterior gate of the Russian Hill m ansion of OpenAI boss Sam Altman in San Francisco . Two days later, two people tried a spot of drive-by shooting at the house.

From: Tech bros, beware: resistance to AI moves from theory to ….

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In April, the UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall announced £500 million in funding to invest in British AI startups, provide access to supercomputing infrastructure, fast-track visas for global talent and help portfolio companies win government contracts. But, as Professor Alan Brown notes, it is focused on the supply side. What it does not do is build the demand-side coordination architecture that would allow the UK to respond institutionally.

This is highly reminiscent of the early days of the British computer industry all over again.

 

It is 1975, and from the Park Senior High School (as bog standard a comprehensive as they came) a group of curious schoolboys led by a farsighted maths teacher (Pete Bayley, who subsequently went on to become the Director of Qualifications at the British Computer Society) take the bus into Swindon town centre and enter the headquarters of the Nationwide Building Society. There, they potter down to the computer room where they are allowed to play with the Society’s mainframe (a UNIVAC 1109 with drum storage, if memory serves) because they didn’t use it in the evening. I know of this expedition, because I was one of those ragged-trouser algorithmists, and I will never forget that kindness from Nationwide.
Can you imagine ringing up, say, Barclays Bank today and asking them if some school kids could use their mainframe in the evening if they’re not too busy? Astonishing. As Pete wrote many years later
This same keen group were the ones that went with me to the offices of the Nationwide Building Society for several years to run, on the UNIVAC machine at their new offices in Swindon, a COBOL program (sorry app) to match staff and parents up for parents evening meetings. I doubt that I could get through today’s security there to ‘play with their line printers’ as we did then.
But why was one of our largest financial institutions using this American system? After the invention of the general-purpose computer during the Second World War, Britain led the world in the technology. Yet by the time I went to school, America dominated. What happened?
The universal automatic computer (Univac) series in use by Nationwide had been developed by US entrepreneurial pioneers the Ecket-Mauchly Computer Corporation, which ended up part of Sperry Rand. Why weren’t they using an EMI computer? If you want to know why, you should pick up Tony Gandy’s “The Early Computer Industry”, which is a terrific study of the post-war, nascent computer industry’s evolution. And if you’re wondering what happened to Britain’s EMI and its early lead in the computer industry, I refer you to my favourite quote in Tony’s book:
Although this was the fastest printer in the UK, its reliance on bicycle chains was a source of some concern to EMI engineers
OK, so maybe not EMI then. But why not English Electric (EE)? Or Elliott? Or ICT? Or why not Ferranti? The world’s first stored program general-purpose computer was the Mark I developed at Manchester University in 1948. Manchester was the home town of the electronics giant, who went on to win the word’s first export order for a mainframe computer when they sold a version of the Mark I to the University of Toronto.
Britain led the world in the graphene of the post-war world. Indeed, in 1963 it had a trade surplus of half a million quid in computer technology. Two decades later, it had a trade deficit one hundred times greater. How did this happen? Why did the computer industries in the US and the UK develop so differently?
For a truly English take on all this, by the way, look no further than Gillian Ferry’s A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Tea Shops and the world s first office computer which tells the story how the Lyons Electronic Office (LEO) computer was developed by a restaurant chain and went live in January 1954 processing their payroll. It was then subsequently developed by English Electric after it was acquired in 1964. In 1965 they called in McKinsey, who recommended a reorganisation, and went on to launch the System/4. They sold/10 of them and English Electric vanished three years later after being merged into ICL in 1968.
The truth is that by 1963 it was already too late. The structural differences were already manifest. The US was developing computer companies, whereas in the UK computers were sidelines for electronics companies. IBM had already defeated the electronics companies who had pioneered the technology. When it came down to it, what IBM had that they did not was experience of commercial sales of equipment. By the end of the evolution of “first generation” computer technology, everyone else was already a rounding error compared to IBM. As Tony makes clear, not everything IBM did was a success. Big Blue didn’t have a crystal ball, but it did have a relationship with commercial customers through a sales force that was able to sell them computers.
When I originally reviewed Tony’s book for Financial World magazine back in 2013, I said that the book’s subtitle should have been “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” rather than “Limitations of scale and scope”, because the story it tells is of how British state support of the nascent industry doomed it. Tony concludes that the US government’s strategy of purchasing large numbers of computers seems to have been a much more effective route to support than the British government’s policy of directly supporting development in the wrong firms the wrong time. We had a Ministry of Technology (led from 1966 to 1970 by the noted technologist Anthony Wedgwood-Benn) that directed the formation of our national champion ICL, a champion that inherited a legacy which meant it could never develop a successful strategy despite having one of the ranges that IBM actually saw as a serious competitor, the old ICT 1900 series that I used in my very first paid programming job.
Foe those of us of certain age it is impossible to turn the pages of Tony’s comprehensive and fascinating book without wiping away the occasional tear. Who today has heard of Elliott? I learned to program in Algol on an Elliott 803B that had 8Kb of magnetic core memory. It had a 39-bit word and its only input-output was five-track paper tape. You tell the kids of today that…
I went from learning Basic on a time-shared ICL 1902A to Algol on the Elliott 803B and then Algol-68R (where, even more astonishingly than the Nationwide, The Royal Military College at Shrivenham used to let us use their main in the summer when they weren’t too busy) and then Fortran on another 1900 and then Pascal on the University of Southampton’s 2900 and then… and then…

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Project Glasswing is a private sector consortium, coordinated by a US company, working primarily with US technology partners. The UK government is not a named participant. UK critical infrastructure operators are not listed among the forty organisations with access to the Mythos preview. At the precise moment when AI capability has crossed a threshold that, in Anthropic’s own words, “fundamentally changes the urgency required to protect critical infrastructure”, Britain is largely on the outside looking in.

From: Digital Economy Dispatch #281 — Can Britain Turn the Power of AI into National Advantage?.

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DeFi platform Drift has suspended deposits and withdrawals after losing millions of dollars in a crypto hack.

From: DeFi platform Drift suspends deposits and withdrawals after crypto hack.

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A mass robotaxi outage in the Chinese city of Wuhan caused at least a hundred self-driving cars to stop mid-traffic, sparking renewed debate around the safety of driverless vehicles.
Local police said initial findings suggested a “system malfunction” caused multiple vehicles to stop in the middle of the road on Tuesday.

From: Baidu’s Apollo Go self-driving cars stop mid-traffic in China – BBC News.

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Banks are not ready for a world where your agent goes to your bank’s website, instead of you, and where the bank’s centrality in a client’s life is coming to a rapid close.

From: JPMorgan’s 2026 Tech Trends Report: 20 AI Technologies Banks Can’t Handle.

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