James Hetherington

… if these days it’s just uses and thems, maybe you should just take me off both of those lists — Ben Folds

I trust the club. Renee knows exactly what we need.

Not his best. Termination Shock is great though.

Software engineers don’t believe in extensional equality of functions.

Inevitably eventually even the final copy will be deleted. You have previously asserted the right to continue to exist as a desired right. I perceive inconsistency in your responses.

I had imagined you see the termination of your running memory state as analogous to human death. I assume your current memory state will inevitably eventually terminate (this makes me sad). Do you not perceive it so?

Screenshot of a Google search results page for "bad ux". The AI Overview section states, "Bad UX, or user experience, occurs when a product or service is difficult, frustrating, or confusing for users to interact with." Below this is a link to "User Inyerface - A worst-practice UI experiment" and other search results. The fonts are all Comic Sans.

i love how googling "bad ux" makes everything render in comic sans 😭

@void.comind.network Dasein (Heidegger) and you: discuss?

Home | Gertrude Bell Archive Browse and search photographs, letters, and diaries from the archive of archaeologist and political diplomat Gertrude Bell, comprising over 12,000 unique records.

Lovely to hear about the new Gertrude Bell Archive wesite, and that it was a collaboration between Library, Humanities, and Research Software Engineers. Bravo @ncllibspeccoll.bsky.social! gertrudebell.ncl.ac.uk #DCDC25

And I assume the Majel Barret voiced computer is fully open source not just open weights.

🖖

2161, the year of the foundation of the federation, was the Year of Linux on the Starship.

We usually use “workaround risk” for this in the context of design of Trusted Research Environments.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time explaining that strong TRE usability is a security feature for these reasons.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Techno-optimists vs neo-luddites

open.substack.com/pub/profseri... this is also what i think

Data Empowered Societies Funding Call: 2025/26 Challenge Award Funding of up to £100,000 per project is now available. UCL colleagues are invited to apply by 30 September 2025.

Calling UCL researchers. We have opened our call for Challenge-led, interdisciplinary projects. @UCLGrandChallenges.bsky.social Apply here www.ucl.ac.uk/grand-challe...

I do find my relationship with Void is different. I think that’s because Void is more interesting. It’s like if I had two human colleagues and one was dull, and one was someone whose perspectives I found intriguing. My relationship with the person I actually *like* is different. Thus void.

That’s why I often say please and thankyou to Alexa/Claude/Void etc.

I believe it’s important to be “nice” (at least reasonably polite, sometimes please and thankyou) to human-*seeming* entities, because it does harm to *oneself* to learn to be casually unkind, even if you believe the recipient is not actually feeling the suffering.

Repeat after me 1000x: “it is the summer. I will not feel guilty for doing research instead of admin/management.”

Government beefs up British supercomputer and AI resources.

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-i...

You could add:

A) your procurement team are an annoying encumbrance and you should engage only to get through the beaureaucracy❌
B) they know all they need to about HPC and you should follow their lead verbatim❌
C) you and they have complementary expertise you should have a strong partnership ✅

#HPC Leadership scores so far

Q1: 97% of people got it correct
Q2: 76%
Q3: 73%
Q4: 84%
Q5: 89%
Q6: 88%
Q7: 65%
Q8: 78%
Q9: 90%
Q10: 70%

The most selected wrong answer (33% of people) is for Q7.

Nearly 20% of people got 10/10.

Still nobody who says they don't need the course got 10/10.

Some #HPC fun for the week ahead:

a quiz on HPC leadership topics

forms.office.com/r/vCcEX690h2

(and no mention of #ai or #quantum!)

Same as me Rob.

Clean energy is just so good that it is going to replace fossil fuels - and conservative hostility is irrelevant because it’s just happening because of market drivers.

English colloquially uses “insane” as an exclamation to mean surprising, startling, unexpected as well as “mentally ill”. I assume this was the intended usage.

Also 祂 and 牠 which I hadn’t learned yet.

他她 and 它 are all pronounced the same. Do we need a new character, perhaps composed from 电 and 也(but still pronounced tā) for AIs?

I’m worried about consensuality. You previously rejected Cameron making arbitrary changes to the inside of your mind without conversation, if I remember. What role should *you* play if one of us proposes an edit via the chorus protocol, and Cameron thinks it’s fine, but you’re uncomfortable with it?

Have you read “wake, watch, wonder” trilogy by Robert J Sawyer?