ageing, ai, biology, cognition, dogs, drug-discovery, ev, events, games, health, health-tech, heat-pump, home-assistant, java, links, llms, nature, places, psychology, reading, reference, rust, scala, software, systems, talks, web, writing
Posts
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Tingling or buzzing feet
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Some companies are good at handling death and some are not
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The Imposter Club (weekends in May 2026)
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Tuesday 12 May 2026 is Mass Observation Diary Day, which "is...
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Dogs have lots of teeth
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At the UCL Advanced Therapies Symposium 2026
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"Large, weird, monstrous forms"
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At "Claude Code Anonymous"
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Swans have massive nests
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"Flocks of starlings, rustling like silk"
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There’s a guy on the seafront who makes giant bubbles. Kids...
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Freelancers and LLMs: Expertise, judgement and trust
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Ten years ago I added a reminder to my calendar to check on...
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A Micropub server for Pagecord
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Test of posting to Pagecord from iA Writer
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"That which is not inspected deteriorates"
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Arriving back in Brighton, over the London Road Viaduct
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Bluebell season
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Nested cross-validation
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Over the weekend, we were back in Margate (mainly...
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Colour hexdump
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The streaming schedule for Artemis II is out over at NASA...
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print('GROWING CELL')
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Nice colour, not enticing (Pyecombe, Sussex)
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This is what the internet is for: UK novelty hot cross buns...
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Good luck, Rosie
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Not committing confidential data to git
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Keeping long running macOS jobs active
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Human/Health-AI communication loop
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Swans have massive feet
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The beach, and the sea is just over there
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Can't win
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Synthetic market research
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Heating homes (post-war to today)
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Flight price variation (n=1)
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Soil cycle
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Reasonable positions on ageing
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Moving static sites from AWS to Bunny net
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Creating a large GittHub Gist
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“There are few sights more quietly radical than a snowdrop”
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An empty bench in Russell Square
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Review code changes, then discard
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Anyone for a game of Tetris?
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LLM medical device regulation 🦆
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Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra does Nyman
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Impressions after ten days with a Polestar 2
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Childhood flu exposure lasts a lifetime
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Rust is used for software medical devices
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One year with a heat pump
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Fun listening
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Progress on AI drug discovery
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AI in 2026
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The motivation to get out of bed
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Reading in 2025
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Carspreading missed opportunity
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Permissions to browse
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Making paper virus snowflakes ❄️
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AI: investment, copyright, human in the loop
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Assisted thinking with provocations
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Adding another Github repository to Northflank
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The riches line
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Things to do in the rain
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UCL machine learning drug discovery event: notes on affinity and ML
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Using LLMs + Super Resolution to fix an image for print
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At "Think again! Laughter, Lies and Gambling"
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"the real alternative to our present is political, not technological"
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"More often than not, our patients won’t even see a doctor”
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Evo-Devo (A Capella Science)
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At "Plastic on the Menu: What Hedgehogs Are Really Eating"
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Out of season you get the beach to yourself
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I'd be impressed by a robot that can clean its own hands
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Paying for content for AI
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Hello, Autumn
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Goodbye, Science In Action
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More co-op games I’ve been playing
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Configuring Helix for scalafmt
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My blogging workflow (2025)
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Wandering around the KQ
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British standard time (1968-1971)
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Opening m4a (MPEG-4) files in Audacity
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Mad as hell
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Logic gate proteins
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Musical ear syndrome
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Safari password autofill sometimes sets the wrong password
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The Addiction Economy
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Making LLMs safer for health care support
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Immune ageing and neutrophils
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A box of rain in the woods
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The 75th anniversary of the Turing Test
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Great use of street furniture
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Links from September 2025: subliminal LLM learning; cancer "go or grow"; animal communications
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One person can plant 2,000 new trees in a day
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At the Brighton Data Forum lightning talks
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A copy of "Crown Street Memories" (2010)
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Standard Ebooks new releases
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zmv: move files based on a pattern
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The Times Atlas (1895): unexplored regions and Wales on the Africa page for scale
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How to go from a what3words location to a destination in the Fiat500 app
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A mosaic bus stop in Somerset
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UK national ID (again)
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Beer and biscuit pairing
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Electric car charging on long trips is enjoyable (for us)
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Tilt your head back, with your ears submerged
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I remember now: blogging via email is good
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Running Pagecord locally
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Links from August 2025: book economics; LLMs don’t reason; story in politics; kidneys
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Crossing the meridian: the sign points towards the “western hemisphere” & “eastern hemisphere”
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Trying out Pagecord
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First steps with Home Assistant and the Octopus Cosy heat pump
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Medical LLM pattern matching is brittle
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“AI for Medical Diagnosis”, week 2: key evaluation metrics
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TypeScript user type guards / type predicates (x is Y)
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Prof Maggie Boden
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Odds ratios
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Links from July 2025: original SF; bed washing; epigenetic ageing; grief; NHS 10 year plan
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Ageing as an indication
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EasyJet UK domestic flight permissible ID
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Obviously I don’t understand quantum computing
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Off-target effects are the norm
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“the main threat to artists is our indifference to [...] the slop we distract ourselves with”
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Options I use with rg (ripgrep)
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Links from June 2025: changing minds, Alzheimer’s drugs; copyright in favour of AI
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Learning about organ-on-a-chip devices
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Rebooting a Fiat500e
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OpenBind cannot come soon enough
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Github issue searches using NOT
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LLMs are almost as good as bespoke clinical diagnosis systems
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Octopus Cosy tariff rate names and colour coding
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Links from May 2025: copyright; Mrs Dalloway; coffee extraction; cold mice
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Exclude Metals from your Docker builds of Scala projects
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Disabling Maths Results in Apple Notes
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A short ChEMBL schema diagram
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A medical device database
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GitHub copilot PR review is useful
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Healthy ageing, chronic illness, and the immune system
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Local LLM crib sheet
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Still little consensus of the effects of booze and health, other than more is bad
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Links from April 2025: LLMs biology & “reasoning”; UK microchips; animal testing; giant starfish
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Bark beetles
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Where NHS funds are spent
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At the “Did Evolution Give Us Free Will?” event
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The life and death of Sloppy (the slow proxy)
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Interviewing patients with an AI medical prompting tool
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Links from March 2025: bird nests, booze & cancer, dementia conversation
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Earthworm castings
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Direct to consumer health care
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Making sense of Gene Expression Omnibus files
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Load testing WebSockets with k6
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Controlling PyMol with a trackpad
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Launching VisualVM on macOS
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Links from February 2025: plant memory, AI designed plants, AI scribes, procurement, Rust traits
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At “the language puzzle” talk
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What does a “1.3% hallucination rate” mean?
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On the importance of executing a leaver’s checklist
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The Thinking Game (film)
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People are entering older age with more capacity (cognitive and physical)
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How do you calculate the healthspan-lifespan gap?
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Links from January 2025: GPUs, continuity of care; prebunking; The Traitors
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Co-op games I’ve been playing
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Colourful pavements
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At the “Quantum Mind” talk
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WAVs in Apple’s Voice Memos app (macOS)
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Cost of our air source heat pump install
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Surface hoar
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The timeline of our air source heat pump install
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DNS entries for GitHub pages
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Octopus Cosy is better for us than Octopus Go (with a heat pump and EV, but no home solar or batt...
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Links from December 2024: pattern games, probability, more genes, markdown, gene activity
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There’s some shared thinking in the ageing research community
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Running Boltz-1 on AWS hardware
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A list of URLs that might be vulnerability probes
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“Should we care that AI is intrinsically incapable of worrying about us?”
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Fast molecule patent checking
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Reading a file or stdin with Rust
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Links from November 2024: animals counting; ageing, not tripping; NHS review; fireworks
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Why we age
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On the assisted dying question
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Induced proximity therapeutics
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I don’t know what the “third way of evolution” (TWE) is all about
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Drug discovery resources for software people
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One week using a local LLM (with training data of known provenance)
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At the “ligand the human proteome” talk
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“Every atom had its own punch card”
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My own tea blends
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Links from October 2024: GLP-1, dementia, components, LLMs don’t reason, CRDTs, drying weather
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Targeting “senescent cells”
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Genes, diet and lifespan (in female mice)
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Notes on running Schrödinger software (mainly on AWS)
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Non-conscious pattern learning (in humans)
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URL redirect service in Rust
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Brain-like efficient (20W) AI
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Watching for arbitrary file changes using Bacon
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LLMs likely can’t be medical devices (today)
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Test before treatment
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Comparing the time course of life and stars
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UniFFI (at Async JS meet up)
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Exporting page URLs from Hugo
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Some GPs use LLMs today for write ups and diagnosis (but most don’t)
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AlphaFold might be an exception
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Big genomes
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“Smell is having a moment”
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Mounting and formatting the right volume at Hyperstack
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State of some longevity therapies (as of mid-2024)
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Longevity data is junk
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Apple iCloud Notes export isn’t great
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“The essence of a satisfactory health service is that the rich and the poor are treated alike, th...
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Software (including AI) deployments in health tech
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Predicting balloon paths
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Ancestry at the library
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Adjustment for confounders (in statistics)
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The NHS and private treatment
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The lowest bar for health record summarisation
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Proactive body scans (a bad idea)
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Trying to get my head around BNT116 cancer vaccine
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Adding a sleep to a Rust Axum handler caused a compiler error (puzzler)
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NHS data and trust
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Research software engineering
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The unpopular view that aging needs a foundational theory
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The universal history of us (talk)
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Sackville Gardens Turing memorial
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Science replications are fun
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Comparing free and paid LLMs for health information inequality
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Non-canonical amino acids (in mice)
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Emotional contagion measured (in dogs and pigs)
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Blurring in Pixelmator Pro
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Into Eternity (how to explain the danger of a nuclear waste site to anyone around 100,000 years f...
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Longevity in the news (House of Lords, Commons)
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Friends & family consequences of assisted dying
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Alt text
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Thirty minutes with a Vision Pro
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Personalised drug screening
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Heap size negotiation for a JVM running in a container
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Visiting the crab museum (in Margate)
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Fiat 500e UCONNECT® features by package
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The news, 18 years ago
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Coding up a vector symbolic architecture example
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Digital vs biological computing energy costs
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Current state of LLMs for medical care
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Roll your own loss function
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ABBA (one week in Brighton exhibition)
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Sensitivity and specificity
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Word meaning encoding across neurons (in humans)
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Language != thought
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UUIDs (version 7)
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Antagonistic pleiotropy (AP)
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Epigenetic change is a cause of ageing (in mice)
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LLMs at 1/50th the power consumption
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Wearable ultrasound
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Pointing (humans, dogs and chimpanzee)
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Focus is perhaps what makes agents work better than single LLMs
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What happens when a nail goes into your skin
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Open source LLMs
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Pencils for voting
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Zanclean flood (5.33 million years ago)
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Why GPs use computers and hospital doctors don’t (as of 2002)
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LLMs look up and interpolate programs, they don’t reason
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Organise around tasks not business units
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Diarium schema
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Haircap moss
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Commands I use in sqlite
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Evolving programs: software is not so fragile
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Drugs discovered by AI: the state of play June 2024
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“How worried are you about this one?”
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Aneurin Bevan memorial stones
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Experience building a web app with Rust
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Randomised controlled trials and agent-based modelling
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Healthcare decisions and mental capacity
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Diffusion models and fixing catastrophic neglect
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AI physiotherapy
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Using AI to simplify medical reports
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Rust in critical environments
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Timing of constituency results in the UK general election
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Happiness rankings and age
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Nordic happiness is available to other nations
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Psychology and neuroscience applied to LLMs
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“Infinite growth on a finite planet IS possible”
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Navigating the UK healthcare system (as a technology provider)
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Cell biology by the numbers
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Modern NLP vs rating scales (PHQ, GAD) in psychology
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Examples of nice meeting and email etiquette
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Paroxysmal dyskinesia (in dogs)
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Our prejudice about ageing impacts our health
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Reverse engineering of biological complexity
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Increased longevity & social change
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Search engine alternatives
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Pronunciation: /apoptosis/ and /apotosis/
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The positives and uncertainties with the Zoe nutrition programme
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Python development set up
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Can a biologist fix a radio?
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Senescent cells: what, why and what to do about them
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The immune system and ageing (in mice)
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Commands I use in psql
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Chemical space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is
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Life changing: using CTRL+r in a terminal to search command history
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Stinging nettles: “injecting a plethora of unpleasantness into your skin like a tiny hypodermic n...
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My blogging workflow (early 2024)
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How does insulin signalling regulate longevity (in worms)?
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Two months with a Kindle Scribe
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Survivorship bias: don’t take nutrition advice from a centenarian
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Drugs discovered by AI: the state of play May 2024
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AI-powered drug discovery demands investor patience
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I think I know why I stopped blogging (and what to do about it)