New blog post: **The era of local agents is here**
In which I argue that, thanks to Qwen3.5, running agentic LLMs on a laptop is now not only possible but works pretty well
aeturrell.com/blog/posts/e...
@maria-drc.bsky.social
Oh, and I managed to get an isochrone map of the commute from St Helens into a Santa Fe Institute publication. If you want to know why that's relevant, you'll have to read the chapter! doi.org/10.37911/978...
In case you're wondering: complexity economics tries to understand the economy as an adaptive system with emergent behaviours—rather than assuming representative, non-interacting agents. It draws on tools from physics, biology, computer science, and network science.
Other chapters cover economic complexity analysis, worker flows producing Zipf's law in firm sizes, systemic financial stability risks, and loads more. If you're building an agent-based model, I'd particularly recommend this on disciplining ABMs with data: doi.org/10.37911/978...
New book chapter in The Economy As A Complex Evolving System IV. It's about how data science/AI can help policymakers understand increasingly complex economies. But the whole volume is an absolute treasure trove
and it's 2026, so all chapters are gold open access!
www.sfipress.org/books/eecs-iv
www.ft.com/content/f1ff... ‘Equity punks’ wiped out in BrewDog’s £33mn sale to cannabis company
Blurb says "Don't waste your time on b****t business plans. Forget sales. Ignore advice."
Business for Punks
Found this book, can't wait to learn how to build a successful business
2026 Reading List - Book #4:
'The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet' by @arthurturrell.bsky.social
He uses accessible analogies to unpack plasmas, magnetic confinement, inertial confinement, and the immense engineering challenges in reaching net-energy gain.
#booksky 📚
For the first time EVER, I've got a guest post on my blog! Katie Russell, my colleague @ no10, has written about reading (odo)meters using the latest AI vision models running locally on a laptop:
aeturrell.com/blog/posts/v...
Full disclosure: I was part of the panel that chose this award, and gave some comments on this post before it went out. I'm also a massive fan of what this team has achieved!
4. Siloes are underrated! In this case, coordinating with anyone with an interest in data linking would have slowed things down by years + ballooned budgets. Better to have agility, lower costs, & success even if at the cost of some duplication.
All good lessons for making gov more efficient!!
2. It's incredible what people can do when given the right tools for the job. It's no coincidence that the most successful & effective gov coding teams have access to MacBooks/unix/cloud
3. Empowering and trusting people—in this case reducing permissions needed & extent of IT lockdown—has huge ROI
Excellent post on UK public sector's most successful open source tool: Splink.
Which got me thinking...
1. open source is underrated as way for one gov dept to find tools that another gov dept has usefully developed. Web search > internal coordination!
2. 👇
mojdigital.blog.gov.uk/2026/02/24/s...
Today, Skimpy has hit 500 stars on GitHub! 🎉
Skimpy summarises info about datasets quickly and efficiently, either in Python or on the command line (for CSVs). Cool new features:
- export summary table to text, html, or svg
- cli tool now sniffs csv files
Docs here: aeturrell.github.io/skimpy/
Good news here for working with geospatial data:
parquet.apache.org/blog/2026/02...
The trick seems to be to produce software just good enough that someone can justify not getting something better. I see many teams being told they're getting AI and then receiving MS Copilot for coding 😬
Hi Rachel, thanks for the feedback: I'll pass it all on & it's helpful to know that it's coming across like this. FWIW colleagues on the fellowship (excluding myself of course) are extremely talented & delivery-focused, & many have science backgrounds. Perhaps we need to do more to bring that out.
There's a lot of news out there rn, probably so much that you're distracted from thinking about data analysis. As an antidote, why not try out Skimpy, a Python package for data analysis? It has 496 stars on GitHub: we just need a few more to hit 500. That could be you! ⭐️
github.com/aeturrell/sk...
Excited to be a part of the initiative to "Move Fast and Fix Things", announced in Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister's speech today. One measure is an expansion of the No10 Innovation Fellowship, for which we've launched a new website!
fellows.ai.gov.uk
Speech: www.gov.uk/government/s...
Inevitably, it has turned into an interview about Trump instead!
Interested in what we've been up to at Downing Street? Tune in to Today on BBC Radio 4 at 08:10 this morning!
Doyne Farmer & Francois Lafond have done a lovely paper on falling costs of technology and how it matches a pattern; one of the authors of this could be a good shout
lims.ac.uk/documents/pa...
Line chart showing the dramatic decline in the cost of sequencing a human genome from 2001 to 2022, plotted on a logarithmic dollar scale. The vertical axis shows cost per genome in U.S. dollars, ranging from over $100 million down to about $500, and the horizontal axis shows year. Costs start near $100 million in 2001 during the Human Genome Project, fall gradually to around $10 million by 2005, then drop sharply after 2007 with the introduction of next-generation sequencing technologies. By 2011 costs fall below $10,000, reach around $1,000 by 2017, and continue decreasing to a few hundred dollars by the early 2020s. Annotations mark major technological milestones such as Illumina short-read sequencing, Ion Torrent semiconductor sequencing, PacBio real-time sequencing, Oxford Nanopore’s MinION, and completion of an end-to-end human genome map.
The cost of sequencing a human genome has fallen over 100,000 fold in nominal terms since 2001.
In a new visualization, I've added some of the key advances in sequencing during that timeline:
In person!
Lovely finishing plug for @dianecoyle1859.bsky.social's book at #ASSA2026 from the panel on government statistics!
Former BLS commissioner Bill Beach says the agency has lost 25% of its staff since January. 40% of leadership positions are vacant. And DOL leadership “does not seem to support the Bureau.”
#ASSA2026 #EconSky
Hello #ASSA2026 attendees! Interested in better nowcasting? We have a top line-up of speakers on the latest and best ways to gauge the state of the economy in real-time at:
🎤 Next Gen Nowcasting: Signatures, Distributions, and Simplified Workflows
📍309
🕣 Sunday, 14:30 EST
#econsky
Heading to #ASSA2026? Interested in gauging the state of the economy in real-time—even during crises? Then come to...
🎤 Next Gen Nowcasting: Signatures, Distributions, and Simplified Workflows
📍309
🕣 Sunday, 14:30 EST
eppro01.ativ.me/appinfo.php?... #ASSA2026
#econsky
