Stu Church

Skegness, one of your absolute finest people right here. Buy her a drink whenever you see her.

For anyone who doesn't want to miss their favourite Glastonbury act on iPlayer, I made a quick-and-dirty Firebase app that allows you to select the acts you want to watch from the schedule then download them as an iCal file.

studio--glasto-planner-g2nbd.us-central1.hosted.app

Show Your Stripes Visualising how the climate has changed for every country across the globe

showyourstripes.info/c/europe/uni...

“Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being… Over my years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true: The kindest person in the room is often the smartest.”
JB Pritzker

@govpritzker.illinois.gov
@jbpritzker.bsky.social
bsky.app/profile/ifin...

#KindnessMatters

Deep Trouble ‘Obeying rules without an understanding of the reasons behind them creates an approximation of competence which leaves one vulnerable to…

Some thoughts about design, inspired by one of my favourite quotes.
medium.com/@stuchurch/d...

Wrote a little thing about design thinking in academic research projects, based on work I've done for @bristoluni.bsky.social

researchit.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2025/06/03/t...

Whoa! Easy on the flamboyant #Pride theme there, Microsoft!

If you want to know how serious our decline in the UK, when North Carolina did what the Labour Government and EHRC have done, the then UK Government told LGBT+ people to beware travelling there.

(Credit to @kazhawa.bsky.social.) www.voanews.com/amp/uk-issue...

As promised, here are the slides I shared with students to convince them to NOT use chatGPT and other artificial stupidity.

TL;DR? AI is evil, unsustainable and stupid, and I'd much rather they use their own brains, make their own mistakes, and actually learn something. 🪄

Technological lust for AI https://buff.ly/3QcK6BY

Finding Product Market Fit With AI · Luma Dive into the Future of Product Development! Join us on February 11th at The Square Club for an evening for on how product & marketing teams are using AI tools…

Looking forward to the 'Finding Product Market Fit with AI' meeting in Bristol next week. I'm going to be sharing a few thoughts about AI, fitness landscapes and products as evolutionary experiments.

lu.ma/qofk5vv7

Disco Elysium

Highly recommend the Disco Elysium soundtrack by Sea Power as music to work to (and listen to!) open.spotify.com/album/5IhBwG...

Meme of man sweating on choice between subscription and transaction

Car park payment screen, giving options of 'subscription' or 'transaction' (confusingly)

I think the UX designers were on holiday when this screen was built. Also, there is no ticket.

Does anyone know of any companies/orgs that have old IT equipment they would be able to give to a primary school in Bristol? Particularly computers and iPads needed ❤️

How to install DeepSeek R1 locally on a Mac (for the relatively non-techie) There are potential security risks with using DeepSeek online, but it’s quite straightforward to safely run a local version, even if…

Wrote a little non-techie guide about how to get DeepSeek R1 running locally on a Mac for free (thus avoiding the potential data & security issues that come with using the cloud version) medium.com/@stuchurch/h...

a cartoon dog is sitting at a table with a cup of coffee in front of a fire with the words this is fine . ALT: a cartoon dog is sitting at a table with a cup of coffee in front of a fire with the words this is fine .

So it turns out that, unlike ChatGPT, DeepSeek R1 doesn't have safeguards to prevent it from doing evil things (the 'Evil jailbreak'), like provide information about how to launder money or write malware to steal personal information 😬 www.kelacyber.com/blog/deepsee...

Sludge - The Decision Lab Sludge is essentially the opposite of a nudge, wherein it makes a process more difficult, making the consumer less likely to continue the process.

Having Googled it, it turns out that the opposite of a nudge is a 'sludge'! thedecisionlab.com/reference-gu....

Screen grab showing the need to call a US number to close your account

Does having to call the US to cancel your subscription count as a deceptive pattern? Or is it just the opposite of a nudge in that it's adding friction to stop you doing something that is deemed undesirable?

How social media destroys democratic discourse, explained in 6 easy figures Where we all went wrong

“In a world fragmented by increasingly bespoke reality perceptions, science, facts, rationality have become an existential threat to most of our cherished co-created beliefs and worldviews” www.protagonist-science.com/p/how-social...

Screenshot of a paper in the International Journal of Press/Politics. Title: When Do Parties Lie? Misinformation and Radical-Right Populism Across 26 Countries. Authors: Petter Törnberg and Juliana Chueri. Abstract: The spread of misinformation has emerged as a global concern. Academic attention has recently shifted to emphasize the role of political elites as drivers of misinformation. Yet, little is known of the relationship between party politics and the spread of misinformation—in part due to a dearth of cross-national empirical data needed for comparative study. This article examines which parties are more likely to spread misinformation, by drawing on a comprehensive database of 32M tweets from parliamentarians in 26 countries, spanning 6years and several election periods. The dataset is combined with external databases such as Parlgov and V-Dem, linking the spread of misinformation to detailed information about political parties and cabinets, thus enabling a comparative politics approach to misinformation. Using multilevel analysis with random country intercepts, we find that radical-right populism is the strongest determinant for the propensity to spread misinformation. Populism, left- wing populism, and right-wing politics are not linked to the spread of misinformation. These results suggest that political misinformation should be understood as part and parcel of the current wave of radical right populism, and its opposition to liberal democratic institution.

This multi-year, multi-country analysis shows that right-wing populist politicians spread more online misinfo than their mainstream counterparts and explains how “the rise of political misinformation is associated to the recent wave of radical-right populism.”

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Human flourishing in the Age of AI: challenges, strategies, & opportunities https://buff.ly/4fTTLaM

Wildfire climate connection Climate change, including increased heat, extended drought, and a thirsty atmosphere, has been a key driver in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the western United States during the last ...

ABC, NBC & CBS dedicated about 16 minutes of airtime last night to the California wildfires without once mentioning climate change.

Since the news failed do it's job, here's a short summary of the role of climate change and wildfire risk:

www.noaa.gov/noaa-wildfir...

Differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions - Nature We find that conservatives tend to share more low-quality news through social media than liberals, and so even if technology companies enact politically neutral anti-misinformation policies, political...

🚨In Nature🚨
Meta is dropping fact-checking to avoid anti-conservative bias- but is there actually evidence of bias?
We this test empirically & find that conservatives
* ARE suspended more
* BUT share more misinfo
So suspension isn't necessarily evidence of bias www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Anaconda AI Navigator | Anaconda Download and experiment locally with a curated repository of open-source large-language models with Anaconda AI Navigator.

Have been playing with Anaconda's (free!) AI Navigator www.anaconda.com/products/ai-..., which allows you to download and run LLMs locally. V.useful if you have sensitive data, or don't fancy giving your data away to OpenAI/whoever for training. Does need quite a lot of RAM though (ideally 16GB+).

Chat GPT Key Finding: A 2020 study by MIT found that disinformation spreads faster in English compared to other languages due to the emotional language and informal tone used. My response: What is the 2020 study by MIT that found that disinformation spreads faster in English compared to other languages due to the emotional language and informal tone used? ChatGPT response: I apologize for the earlier confusion. Upon further review, I couldn’t locate a 2020 MIT study that specifically found that disinformation spreads faster in English compared to other languages due to emotional language and informal tone.

A ChatGPT meta-tragedy in three acts.