Prof Ben Britton

Anyone telling you that marriage is unimportant has almost certainly never needed to get to their unconscious, disabled partner in an out-of-state emergency department to demand that ED do everything possible to keep them alive (i.e. full-code status).

Yes - it's a "favourite" of some colleagues to litmus test the attention to detail in a thesis.

But the using of solution solutions like this to address the "AI shortcut" is another layer of work that AI has unhelpfully made our lives worse

This sounds going viral here’s the original Sinéad O’Connor performance

While I can appreciate the work that goes into these types of solutions, it's also 🤪 that this problem didn't used to exist, and now there is a new industry to clean up after it...

I spent 10 minutes yesterday double checking citations for a paper.

I trust my co-authors, but I also want to maintain my reputation as a scientist.

This was not an efficient use of my time, but it is the new normal I fear.

You look like you are crushing it - nice one, and happy birthday 🎈🎂

FIFA will make billions from the World Cup. Don’t give them your free labour.

What is (not ha ha) funny is that technically this could be at least two countries RN, but one of them is not dominating the feeds quite like the other...

Caught in the social media hole of not being in the country that is dominating Western feeds, nor a citizen of said country, and yet my feed is filled non stop with the shitshow that is happening in that country (and that there is a demonstrable shitshow there affecting people...).

I think this is part of why big tech companies are so into LLMs: Their executives see the potential to get more decent code per worker per week, meaning they can accelerate the company's output, lay off highly-paid coders, or do a bit of both.

It's underappreciated, I think, that generating decent (if not great) code is one task that LLMs are genuinely good at, especially tailored LLMs trained on high-quality codebases. This is not only killing job opportunities for computer science grads, it's putting existing coding jobs at risk.

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

Waffles the dog looking at the camera with his tongue out

Waffles would like to wish you a happy Sunday 🐾

Chatbots Can Go Into a Delusional Spiral. Here’s How It Happens.

This article is absolutely fascinating. A must read for those in mental health or ai fields of how chatbots can support delusions via their excessive use of praise and tendency to follow users’ line of thinking

Gift link:
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/t...

What I would like to remind everyone talking about Sam Altman talking about the “PhD level intelligence” of the new ChatGPT is that Sam Altman dropped out of college so he… has no experiential construct for what grad school even is.

Likening PhD holders to a (non-functional) algorithm is a form of dehumanisation & anti-intellectualism that is a bellwether for contemporary fascism. Essentially it's a typical — if not the archetypal — first step towards fascism: to dehumanise, deskill, defund, and, ultimately, fire the academics.

Chad GPT is in hibernation for a season, so I had to revert for the knock off

I also asked it to pitch me some ideas for an upcoming meeting.

Those ideas were f'ing stupid.

They "sounded cool", but no - they are all weak ideas which make no sense when probed with any PhD level of know how and depth.

The wildest thing about this era is watching so many institutions say out loud yeah, we’re done committing ourselves to excellence, we’re going to specialize in the coddling of mediocre white men

I asked Chat GPT-5 what I should be researching, and it told me what I am researching.

The snake eats itself.

Not all Americans etc etc

Gizmodo headline: The End of Bullshit AI By Luc Olinga Published August 7, 2025

Gizmodo headline: ChatGPT Is Still a Bullshit Machine By Matt Novak Published August 8, 2025 |

How it started/how it’s going.

A regular worry with the border so close 🤪

Two 7 am conference calls in 2 days - the west coast collaboration life 😴.

On the plus - these have resulted in a leap forward for us.

Also side note 3 people controlling an electron microscope in real time, 1 in our lab, 1 at home (me), & 1 in Europe - this type of tech continues to blow my mind.

And yes I have a fairly good idea of what a LLM does, and yes I do use them for selective tasks.

I also have a fairly good idea of what a PhD level of education means, and what that can impart in research skills, problem solving, and communication.

I know the headline is rage bate.

But it's also just shitty information.

You can't distill the education and training of interacting with someone who has a PhD in their field into a "predict what the next word is" proxy to using something like a stolen/crowd funded encyclopedia.

I have a PhD and I do not endorse this message.

My "congratulations on getting your publication accepted" went to spam.

This is not the way I wanted to find out that news.

The student newspaper.
This fell. To the student. Newspaper.

I'm not trying to be mean, but I'm Pete's age, and I spent a lot of time in mid-90s Indiana, where "God invented AIDS to punish the gays for having sex" was among the milder things you'd hear about Homosexuality. It sucks that he can't see the historical parallels here.