Slater the Traitor was born very near where I grew up, and where my sister still lives. He apprenticed at Jedediah Strutt's mill in Belper, Derbyshire. Strutt's mill used technology developed by Richard Arkwright, who built the world's first water-driven cotton mill a little further up the Derwent Valley in Cromford. That short section of the A6 from Milford to Matlock is an essential visit for anyone interested in the Industrial Revolution in England. Attitudes towards Slater seem to have softened in Belper over recent decades. The town is twinned with Pawtucket, Slater has a blue plaque, and even his own heritage walk that takes in my sister's local pub.
Interesting. when i checked recent reportage (last few years) BBC was still reporting a distinct lack of gruntlement towards him. Your on the ground ear is a much better source.
⚽️ to help accelerate our applied research efforts!
We’re building state-of-the-art models to understand football at scale, and a suite of ML-powered applications on top of them to drive tactical and strategic decisions.
I rarely disagree with Azeem’s framing, but this one didn’t quite land for me.
The Samuel Slater story felt more like straightforward industrial espionage than an analogy for model distillation, and I never quite saw how the Marat detour advanced the central argument. I kept waiting for the “therefore…” moment that usually makes these essays so insightful.
Still one of my favorite newsletters—that’s probably why this issue stood out.
Frontier powers often want to turn a temporary technological lead into something premenant. Followers want to turn that knowledge into a local expertise. This historical amnesia creates a bunch of problems:
1. Legitimacy, where the rest of the world hears rules written by incumbents for incumbents.
2. Moral denunciation obscures the real task, which is what the Lawfare article explores.
3. In times when rhetoric is ratcheting up, it's also valuable to explicitly identify exactly why a stance emerges from.
On Marat, again, the parallels are critical. The AI debate is exhibiting a crisis of mediation, which we have to look out for. As someone who goes out and speaks on these questions a lot, I noticed that there are very few places where there is a middle ground, and there's this conversion of disagreement into a type of treason. You already see different groups looking at the same piece of evidence. Not merely interpreting it differently, but actually auditing it differently. It's a warning.
Arsenal Ai hiring information was from Feb 2025 - so that's the reason we won the Premier League - good to know. Hassibis' quote applies : So far, nobody’s found anything in the universe that’s non‑computable
https://forum.xiaoyinsi.com/t/topic/228 This being shared around with some credibility, although I don't have insight into it. Even Chinese insiders here consider what was done with K3 as an "outlier". Will assume everyone can machine translate (this is a Chinese post).
Slater the Traitor was born very near where I grew up, and where my sister still lives. He apprenticed at Jedediah Strutt's mill in Belper, Derbyshire. Strutt's mill used technology developed by Richard Arkwright, who built the world's first water-driven cotton mill a little further up the Derwent Valley in Cromford. That short section of the A6 from Milford to Matlock is an essential visit for anyone interested in the Industrial Revolution in England. Attitudes towards Slater seem to have softened in Belper over recent decades. The town is twinned with Pawtucket, Slater has a blue plaque, and even his own heritage walk that takes in my sister's local pub.
Interesting. when i checked recent reportage (last few years) BBC was still reporting a distinct lack of gruntlement towards him. Your on the ground ear is a much better source.
July 2026 was update: Original //Karun Singh
@karun1710
·
Jan 24, 2025
We’re hiring a Research Engineer at
@Arsenal
⚽️ to help accelerate our applied research efforts!
We’re building state-of-the-art models to understand football at scale, and a suite of ML-powered applications on top of them to drive tactical and strategic decisions.
I rarely disagree with Azeem’s framing, but this one didn’t quite land for me.
The Samuel Slater story felt more like straightforward industrial espionage than an analogy for model distillation, and I never quite saw how the Marat detour advanced the central argument. I kept waiting for the “therefore…” moment that usually makes these essays so insightful.
Still one of my favorite newsletters—that’s probably why this issue stood out.
Sory, hit send too soon.
The first is the simple value of history.
Frontier powers often want to turn a temporary technological lead into something premenant. Followers want to turn that knowledge into a local expertise. This historical amnesia creates a bunch of problems:
1. Legitimacy, where the rest of the world hears rules written by incumbents for incumbents.
2. Moral denunciation obscures the real task, which is what the Lawfare article explores.
3. In times when rhetoric is ratcheting up, it's also valuable to explicitly identify exactly why a stance emerges from.
On Marat, again, the parallels are critical. The AI debate is exhibiting a crisis of mediation, which we have to look out for. As someone who goes out and speaks on these questions a lot, I noticed that there are very few places where there is a middle ground, and there's this conversion of disagreement into a type of treason. You already see different groups looking at the same piece of evidence. Not merely interpreting it differently, but actually auditing it differently. It's a warning.
Azeem never ceases to amaze; when I believe I've seen his best work he goes two levels higher.
Arsenal Ai hiring information was from Feb 2025 - so that's the reason we won the Premier League - good to know. Hassibis' quote applies : So far, nobody’s found anything in the universe that’s non‑computable
https://forum.xiaoyinsi.com/t/topic/228 This being shared around with some credibility, although I don't have insight into it. Even Chinese insiders here consider what was done with K3 as an "outlier". Will assume everyone can machine translate (this is a Chinese post).