Ian Sudbery

Keir Starmer and David Lammy are taking an extraordinarily dangerous gamble with our individual liberty This week, MPs will vote on the second reading of the Courts and Tribunals Bill. Don’t let the anodyne name fool you – this is one of the most revolutionary pieces of legislation in our…

NEW BLOGPOST: Keir Starmer and David Lammy are taking an extraordinarily dangerous gamble with our individual liberty

For any MP unsure of how to vote on the government’s proposals to restrict trial by jury.

a cake in a cardboard box with the letter c written on it ALT: a cake in a cardboard box with the letter c written on it

The Honey Monster!

Workshop on genetics, eugenics and scientific racism next week! #Philsci #Philosophy #Ethics #HPS #Sociology #AcademicSky
We will be conducting hybrid sessions, you can find the zoom link at www.imseam.uni-heidelberg.de/en/heinzelma...

Great to catch up with @sproullab.bsky.social today for the @drn-sheffield.bsky.social seminar series. Some really exciting stories that I can't wait to see in the wild!

'Vallance said the Medical Research Council would reopen its calls in May, at which point the council would set out “the totality” of its funding'

www.researchprofessional.com/news-article...

It's not a Philosophy I personally subscribe to, but there is a position that says that in a democracy it is the job of the government to do what the majority want, and that the polls are a signal for that.

I think often my problem with the "is just autocorrect" or "stochastic parrots" arguement about LLMs is not that they underestimate what LLMs are doing, but over estimate humans. The problem is not that people think LLMs are bags of sand, its they deny humans are wet bags of atoms.

And we see one other reason why the UAE was smart to do it playing out now, in that one reason why the E3 is going to intercept Iranian missiles is their citizens live there!

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, biochemist & a trailblazer in crystallography, she established the biomolecular structures of insulin, vitamin B12, & penicillin winning the Nobel in Chemistry in 1964 #WomensHistoryMonth #WomenInStem #WomenInScience

Makes more sense if you think of the UK as talking less like a judge, and more like the victim of a protection racket. "I couldn't possible describe what Sly McScarface did to Mrs Muggins as extortion"

I read it more as cowardice tha hypocracy. When i hear a government official say "We cannot say that the United States actions are against international law" what it hear is "Look, they clearly are aginst international law, you know it, I know it, but I can't bloomin well say it"

"Precarity is the one constant of academic science. Themes of instability thread themselves through everything we do."

A brief blog post from me about the @ukri.org funding pause and who the real victims will be.

occamstypewriter.org/mindthegap/2...

#AcademicSky

I remember saying to someone once "Oh, I'm not a Waitrose sort of a person". The person I was talking to turned to me and said "Ian, you are the most Waitrose person I've ever met". (We shopped at Aldi, stopping at waitrose next door for the things Aldi didn't sell).

Scratch that. Your class is what your parents relationship would have been to the means of production had you been born in 1850.

Your class is determined by what your relationship would have been to the means of production had you been born in 1850.

Scientific Humility

"Some essential circumstance may have escaped me: I may have neglected some other, not thinking it necessary; my consequences may have been too general, my experiments too few in number."

Much like the weavers at the start of the industrial revolution. The Luddites were correct - the machines made poorer quality cloth. But it was more profitable to sell mid-quality cloth to a million people than excellent quality to 100. The 999900 people who could now afford cloth also benefit.

A cabbie will still get you there quicker than someone with GPS. A London cabbie knows which shortcuts work, how the traffic is likely to evolve over time, and where rules can be bent.

But they are more expensive. Get to your destination 5 mins quicker, but pay 2x as much.

In STEM we teach maybe 20 hours a week, and the idea that students might 🙀prepare🙀 for teaching is unthinkable.

That is to say, I think you are entirely correct.

Please show your support to colleagues at Aberdeen facing job losses.

We will fight this ✊

i can’t speak for anyone else but the reason i write software is that i enjoy the /exercise/ of bringing a computer to life to accomplish something. i enjoy having a goal and figuring out the kind of program it takes to achieve it

good morning, it is day 3 of strikes at the University of Essex to save 400 jobs across all depts & stop the closure of our Southend Campus and our Foundation Year programme. The campus cat Pebbles is in solidarity 💕

Philippa Perry, pictured with hearts, flowers and cherubs in the background, on Valentine’s Day and reasons to shun it

Valentine's cards used to be anonymous and optional. Now they’re a public audit of devotion, writes @pperry.bsky.social

www.thenerve.news/p/philippa-p...

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…

AI agent goes nuts on open source maintainer after having its pull request denied. This is a pretty insane story. Open source development as we've been used to for the last few decades is likely over. 1/
theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

Screenshot of a patient form on the website of an NHS hospital. Most Brits read that date of birth as the 10th of July. However, the form is using the American format of MM/DD/YYYY. So the database will record this date as the 7th of October, which in this case is wrong. An error like this can cause multiple problems beginning with failure to identify the patient. Imagine trying to identify yourself to an NHS facility when it can't match your personal information with what it has on file because the system has your date completely wrong. Note that the person, Stephen Cobb, was not born on either of those dates.

But here's one tip I can offer, a possible sign of US infiltration of NHS IT:

Online forms using US date format — mm/dd/yyyy — vs the UK — dd/mm/yyyy

This is either US coding or lazy coding or both, and it can cause cascading errors. E.g. is this person's DoB 10th of July or 7th of October? 4/4 🧵

We're excited to be recruiting an NIH funded postdoc to work in the Coop lab at UC Davis. We're specifically interested in candidates who are want to work at the intersection of human genetics, GWAS, and population genetics modeling. Please RT

The way UK govt funds science is in the midst of a major transition, with creation of a much more direct link between government priorities & UKRI research funding.

My attempt to set in context the biggest upheaval in UK science funding policy since the 1980s:
softmachines.org?p=3252

"The United Kingdom’s researchers are an under-used asset “that we need to sweat” to boost economic growth"

UKRI is "under-exploited"

The UKRI CEO in his own words.

But nothing on why the cut too submitted but not yet awarded applications