KANE LINCOLN

When I started building Poli with Karan Navani almost two years ago, I did so for a couple of reasons. The first was largely pragmatic, a recognition of the economic reality facing countries like the UK and the US. The second was born out of principle and a broader sense of what access to opportunity should look like in 2025.

In September 2023, the number of companies with the legal ability to sponsor visas in the UK was roughly 80,000. Today, that number sits at over 135,000. This growth reflects an economic necessity: to remain competitive, companies need to attract and retain the best talent, regardless of where that talent is located. Not only is there increasing demand for talent, but more and more people with desirable skills are prepared to migrate to improve their lot, and it’s becoming easier and easier to do so. The political discussion on this subject is, at present, disingenuous and conceals a reality that will need to be reckoned with sooner or later. (The UK’s much vaunted AI Opportunities Action Plan announced earlier this year makes attracting and retaining global talent a key pillar of its national strategy.) This is reason one.

The second reason is squarely political. Personal experience has taught me how difficult life can be for people who are born socioeconomically disadvantaged. Having spent many years getting to know Karan, it became obvious that people who come to this country to study, work, and contribute have a different, but equally unjust, set of challenges to overcome. Poli is, in part, a vehicle for facilitating change: motivated, qualified, foreign-born candidates should not be subordinated and put at a fundamental disadvantage by virtue of their nationality. Xenophobia is not only economically counterproductive but morally indefensible.

Karan and I will keep doing what we can to make it easier for anybody, no matter where they are or where they’re going, to move around the world and find meaningful, rewarding work.

I think somebody should build a developer tool that converts your front-end code into a set of Markdown pages that mirror the content you want LLMs to easily understand.

Firecrawl exists but it isn't designed to do this. We've done this type of thing manually at Poli. Here is an example:

• /companies for users
• /companies.md for LLMs

As it turns out, I hadn't really put much effort into figuring out whether I really needed something^[10] new. There are options available and though they don't fit quite what I had in mind, they're probably good enough for now.

I don't know why Greta Thunberg tried to claim the Gaza flotilla was not a publicity stunt. It patently was, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Should we not be doing all we can to draw attention to the calamity unfolding before us?

Yesterday, somebody told me that they were surprised by how many participants in a local radio call-in considered Farage's proposal to rescind people's Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) a good idea, to which my response was essentially this: What do we expect to happen when extreme views are presented as "sensible", "common-sense" questions, concerns, or attitudes, and normalised – nay, laundered – through the mainstream media?

If a message is repeated and heard often enough, people will come to believe it, and any related priors or prejudices that support the message will be reinforced. That it becomes easier to vocalise repugnant, formerly socially unacceptable attitudes, once those very same views have been promulgated by "trusted" sources, is an obvious corollary.

I also had another conversation yesterday that raised the question of whether press freedom mattered more, or less, than the media's ability to meaningfully carry out its primary function: to inform the public and hold those in power to account.

If the media fails to do this effectively, as seems to be the case with Nigel Farage, then press freedom, whilst undoubtedly counting for something, quite possibly matters less than we think.

Trump's decision to impose a $100,000 fee to all new H1-B visas presents Europe with a real opportunity to compete for talent. Embracing those the Trump administration seeks to alienate feels like one of the most obvious steps we could take to grow the economy and develop technological sovereignty in this part of the world.

I've just upgraded all of my Apple devices to iOS 26/macOS Tahoe and I really hope there are major improvements on the way.

The past 7 days have felt very ominous, for so many reasons.

Somebody should build software that reviews your Git commits and/or pull requests and provides you with a set of manual tests to run, step-by-step user journeys to replicate, etc. as part of your quality assurance process.

While building Poli, my co-founder and I regularly conduct manual tests before and after we release new features but, as the codebase gets larger and the product more sophisticated, some parts of the application become easier to neglect or forget about; parts that may be impacted by what we've built.

We have a large number of automated tests across the application, but we still need to sit down and do the hard work of considering the various user journeys, behaviours and expectations that already exist and may change based on the merged code.

As more of the grunt and repetitive work associated with building is automated and the technical barriers to creating software are brought down, anything that could make evaluating the quality of the build easier seems, to me, a good thing.

It occurred to me today that it'd be great for LinkedIn, Bluesky, etc. to have a built-in function for automatically and periodically deleting old posts (e.g., posts older than 90 days). I found Redact, which looks good (but suffers from the "do I trust this third-party with my credentials?" issue), and an interesting blog post (and concomitant discussion) about record-keeping.

I have an aversion to digital "clutter", which is why I post sparingly and appreciate the idea of "cleaning up", but I think there are lots of good reasons for mainstreaming this type of behaviour (or optionality). It makes little sense to me that WhatsApp empowers users in this way, but X/Twitter, Bluesky, etc. do not, given the latter are (more or less) public-facing.

This is all I have for today: https://bsky.app/profile/kanelincoln.bsky.social/post/3lxpbo4m5l22y.

One of the things I love most about London is that being here exposes you to all four seasons. Every year, as we rotate through spring, summer, autumn and winter, each gives the city an entirely different feel; Soho in the winter is completely different to Soho in the summer.

I'm going to build the public bookmarking tool I've wanted to build for a long time. Every now and again, I get the sense that it'd be worth being able to share the things I felt were worth reading but existing tools don't quite align with the way I'd want to engage, nor the aesthetic I have in mind.

Let's see how quickly I can spin this up using Claude Code.

What they've done at Eleven Music is pretty incredible. I don't mean that in either a good or bad sense; it's as disturbing as it is impressive.

What role will "performing artists" – the Taylor Swifts, Kendrick Lamars, Ariana Grandes, etc. – play in a future wherein anybody can produce vocals that, while artificial and synthetic, are indistinguishable from human voices? Will they fade into irrelevance, or will their "real", human voices command a premium, available to license?

Another related point is that, as far as I know, the vast majority of artists earn very little through the streaming of their music; most of their earnings come from live performances. Live performances seem to bind people together around the experience itself as well as what is represented through the music — the heartbreaks, triumphs, nostalgia, et cetera. For lots of reasons, I think it's unlikely people will choose to abandon this sort of collective experience.

Lots of songs that go on to become the most popular in their category activate the above through distinct vocals and compelling narratives; storytelling based on real-world, human experiences, conveyed through a unique, human voice (even if the performer is not necessarily the writer of the lyrics). This raises a question, though: in a future that disconnects the "vocalist" (does a synthetic voice count as a vocalist?) from the "lived" or "experienced" substance entailed not just in a song's lyrics, but also in the act of giving those words life, exposing them for all to see and hear, how will artists using tools like Suno and ElevenLabs connect their audience to the art?

In any case, the cat seems to be out of the bag as far as the technology is concerned.

There's a lot I could say about the attempted rehabilitation of Lucy Connolly by the right-wing press, but I'll use what's happening as an opportunity to make just one point: you are responsible for what you publish in public.

It's really that simple. If you don't want to be held accountable for, or, God forbid, have to defend, what you've written, don't write it. Nobody is compelling you to share every thought you have with the world.

I became a Private Eye subscriber earlier this year and it is clear that the state's inability to deliver without heavy dependence on private consultants is(/was) not a uniquely Conservative problem.

For a long time, and mostly in passing, I've heard things like "the Civil Service is not fit for purpose" and "cannot attract the people it needs", especially in the context of digital and cyber; if the Eye's reporting is anything to go by, it's no surprise: reliance on expensive external consultants, working at firms that do not have the same social investment or long-term economic interests as the state, appears to have denuded the Civil Service of much of its in-house capacity and expertise.

It's a unique magazine, full of information you almost certainly cannot find elsewhere (with the possible exception of a well-curated Substack feed, or easy access to the diminishing number of local news outlets across the country), and well worth the ~£2 per issue price tag.

Here is yet another reminder that London is not seeing "unprecedented", or even exceptional, levels of crime. In fact, the evidence we have suggests that crime rates are generally down or stable. There is no "surge" – certain people just want you to believe there is.

This whole subject is becoming boring, to be frank.

I don't think working for a start-up is a particularly risky thing to do. While I won't deny there is some risk, the risk largely boils down to whether the company will be able to raise its next round of funding or not, or whether it will ever turn a profit.

Personality type matters. If you have a fairly clear sense of where you want to be in 10 years' time and want to build your career in a linear, predictable fashion, then a job at a start-up probably isn't right for you (unless you want to become a venture capitalist). Most start-ups expect to go from "zero" (i.e., an idea) to IPO within a 10-year period, but many never make it to that point, and, when this inevitably happens to a company you work for, "failing forwards" can present you with unexpected opportunities that may not align with the ideal "next step" you'd considered.

If you want to work for an organisation that feels more anarchic than bureaucractic, where staff ask for forgiveness rather than permission, that empowers every employee with a very real responsibility that can directly impact the company's bottom line, then you should consider working for a start-up. You may not need to compromise on the things you think you do, too.

At risk of stating the obvious, not all start-ups are the same; a pre-seed-stage start-up is markedly different to a Series B-stage start-up. I've only ever worked for pre-seed-stage start-ups,^{[1, 2]} in part because I've been prepared to trade risk for ownership (i.e., equity) in the most extreme way available to non-founders, but there are many very well-paid, exciting opportunities to work for companies with $30+ million in funding and a much clearer path to profitability or, at the very least, the next funding milestone.

I think I'll return to this because it's worth talking about in more detail.

For quite a while I’ve wondered why most baby food sold in England seems to be organic, and why nobody seems to complain about it.

Are parents simply more conscious of what they expose their children to when they’re infants (vs. when they’re older)? Are there any known harms associated with feeding very young children produce that’s been heavily exposed to agrochemicals? Have vested interests just found a way of exploiting people who know no better?

In any case, this is a good thing as far as I’m concerned. I’m a fan of organic food — but only because I found myself working at a company building software for farmers.^[1] I’ve lived in London my whole life and, up until the point of actually visiting an arable farm near Cambridge, had never really considered where the food I ate came from; how it actually ended up on the supermarket shelf.

I think most people are aware, at least vaguely, of the idea that organic produce is “better” or “healthier” for us than non-organic produce, but whenever I talk about it with people the number one thing I hear is “it’s so expensive” or “it costs too much”. It does cost more, that’s true, but this premium is the price we pay to consume food that hasn’t been lathered in chemicals designed to kill, and, to return to my initial question, doesn’t seem to be an issue in every context.

It’s something I think about often. There is some evidence of the impact our gut microbiome has on mental health (and ill-health). If, as it turns out, there is a clear connection between these two things, it makes understanding why people are prepared to spend more money on organic food under some circumstances, but not others, a really important line of enquiry in the context of encouraging more people to make healthier choices.

I've started to feel very strongly about titles in text appearing in sentence case(?) rather than title case.

I don't know when this started happening.

The first start-up^[1] I worked for was acquired by the ill-fated Greensill Capital and taught me:

• how to write production-ready code;
• what good (and bad) leadership looks like;
• to always ask for more money than what you think is reasonable.

The journey ended prematurely, and we didn't get to fully deliver on our mission, but it was undoubtedly an invaluable learning experience.

This is the first post on this site and I'm testing a new integration. People usually use a "Hello, world" message for this type of thing, but I'll just say this: I've spent the past ~7 years working for technology start-ups almost by accident — more to come.