Earlier in the month I was at the first Brighton Claude Code Anonymous meet-up. Lightning talks and chat, around agentic coding (not limited to Claude). I’m unsure of the etiquette, so I’ll name the things I found interesting rather than the people presenting them. On running models locally, the hardware to look out for...

I'm working on a machine learning cancer classification problem, but we have only a handful of positive cases in the data. Thankfully. But that fact does make my job harder. It causes three main problems: We may not have enough variety to be able to find the true patterns in the data. This is a fundamental blocker, and...

There's a glorious story of the first computationally designed personal mRNA cancer vaccine for a dog. A civilian with no cancer or biology training—but with AI experience—used LLMs to plan and help design a cancer vaccine for his dog. Come on! This is wonderful. It's doubly wonderful because of his persistence and the...

The Guardian report on Biobank data being leaked onto GitHub is either no big deal or a massive screw-up, depending on your point of view. Either way, what I do is have a global gitignore file naming folders for confidential information. I put anything sensitive in there. If I want to push to Git, I have to try really,...

Reading: If a therapy bot walks like a duck and talks like a duck then it is a medically regulated duck, npj Digital Medicine, 5 December 2025. Medical device regulation depends on the claims and intended purpose of the device—amongst other things. In the case of Claude Sonnet, the system prompt suggests it does have an...

There's an upbeat article in The Economist: An AI revolution in drugmaking is under way (5 January 2026).  It rehashes figures from a 2024 study: AI-designed drugs are whizzing through the preclinical phase (that before human trials begin) in only 12-18 months, compared with three to five years previously. And the...

Of all the hot takes on what will happen to AI in 2026, I'm drawn to this one from Philip Ball: It’s unlikely that 2026 will be a make-or-break time for AI – many aspects of it are here to stay – but there could be turbulence for the industry, particularly if the investment bubble bursts, as many anticipate....

Reading: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI, Cory Doctorow, 5 December 2025.Three things jumped out at me from Cory Doctorow's interesting, important, and entertaining talk:1. The investment thesis driving AI The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can...

During drug development, you want to know the affinity between a molecule (potential drug) and its target, such as a protein on the surface of a cell. That is: does this particular molecule tightly fit at a specific place and stay there? Key in a lock, hand in a glove, are the analogies.Today ML can't solve...

I assume it's a difficult problem because I've not found an example of a humanoid robot that can wash itself. This feels odd, given there are impressive sprinting, back-flipping, dancing robots out there. Robots do have different constraints. They could use walk-in baths, UV or chemical cleaning, disposable gloves (or...

The point is a good one:  If you want to get chips from NVIDIA, Jensen [the CEO] makes you pay for them [...] If you want to get the best researchers, they get salaries. We're not going to say "oh, AI is so important that we're going to bring back slavery". That doesn't make any sense. So I don't understand why if the...

On Thursday I tuned into the Royal Society's live YouTube broadcast celebrating 75 years since the publication of what we now call the Turing Test.Out of those five hours, I'd highlight Professor Sarah Dillon on a panel discussion (58 minutes in). She pointed out that Computing Machinery and Intelligence is "really...

Maggie Boden died last month. I was lucky to go to university when I did. At the time Sussex courses ran as lectures, seminars, but also tutorials. Tutorials were made up of 3 or 4 students in the office of a professor, discussing the topic of study that week. For the courses I took, one of those professors was Maggie....

A quote from around 18 minutes into the David Liu: A Master Class on the Future of Genome Editing podcast: Virtually every substance we've ever put into a person, including just about every medicine we've ever put into a person, has off-target effects, meaning [the substance] modulates the function of biological...

From a speech by Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, 10 June 2025: Boston might be the birthplace of biotech. But – with Google DeepMind on one side and the Crick on the other - King’s Cross is emerging as a global powerhouse for AI-driven drug discovery. Today, we’re launching a new project,...