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Ben Fulton

@benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy

34 followers 2 following 121 posts

Research Software Engineer at Imperial College Earth Sciences Department. Research Applications, AI, HPC 🌉 bridged from ⁂ fosstodon.org/@benfulton, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Reposted by Ben Fulton

Prof. Sam Lawler @sundogplanets.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

Our giant paper is out about the Large inclination Distant Object (LiDO) Survey! arxiv.org/pdf/2610.19865 This was a stunning amount of work and took us several years (including a visit to my farm by 2 of the other co-PIs where we alternated between patting goats, keeping our children […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026

Programming is theory building "Programming is theory building more than ever. The distance from a conception of how the world can be to some new reality is so much shorter with agents! We still need to understand what we want, and conceptually how it can work, and how we’ll get there. That is […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Reposted by Ben Fulton

Felicitas Pojtinger 🌅 @pojntfx.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026

nonfunctional.substack.com/p/passke… TIL that passkeys have remote attestation built-in. That seems pretty damn terrible. Don't use passkeys.

nonfunctional.substack.com

Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them.

Intended audience: non-technical citizens of the web

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 11/10/2026

Functionalism John Searle proposed a definition of "Strong AI" in 1980. "The appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states." He refined it over the years, and was, I […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 11/10/2026

MIT report on AI Use I think MIT has managed to reach across the usual bureaucratese and written something important. "The Institute community...must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 10/10/2026

Chinese Room Consider a program which receives and outputs Chinese characters so perfectly that humans cannot distinguish it from a Chinese-speaking person. Now assume you are in a room, receiving Chinese characters slipped under the door. You follow an English version of the computer program […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 10/10/2026

The fading qualia If you replaced, one by one, the neurons of a brain with a functionally identical component, for example based on a silicon chip, would the consciousness slowly fade away? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_co… #ai

en.wikipedia.org

Artificial consciousness - Wikipedia

Reposted by Ben Fulton

Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

dumb git question: in a merge-based workflow, if you’re working on a branch, is there any reasonable way to integrate new changes from `main` back into your branch without using `git rebase`? I have this belief that there are people who only use merge commits and not rebase but I don’t […]

Original post on social.jvns.ca

Reposted by Ben Fulton

petersuber @petersuber.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy · 03/10/2026

Recommended: "While #repositories excel at long-term preservation, they were not made with the interactive capabilities required to execute complex code or analyze dynamic data directly. There are several #OpenSource platforms…which provide ‘sandbox’ environments for replaying research that can […]

fediscience.org

Original post on fediscience.org

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

RE: mastodon.social/@RuthMalan/11713412… Bad news - I've ordered a copy of this for our library so no one in my organization will need to buy it 😞

mastodon.social

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

RE: mastodon.social/@12chess/1173108110… Heh. That's pretty slick.

mastodon.social

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

The old trust signals are on life support Signals we used: Well-written prose, thorough documentation, tidy repositories, passing CI, lots of tests, good overall presentation. Producing them implied: time, attention, familiarity with the work, dedication to a quality product. What has changed […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

The end of publish or perish The gem in this mostly unreadable paper is this: "A reconstruction of evaluative practice along the lines of open dialogue networks, such as open peer review, post-publication review, registered reports, public commentary...would relocate the legitimating function […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Reposted by Ben Fulton

Ernie Smith @ernie.writing.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

Good news or bad news depending on your POV: Usenet archives are suddenly easy to dig through, thanks to a new service. It’s built by a big data guy, and it’s packed with every awkward thing you ever wrote in a newsgroup in 1997. My deep dive […]

writing.exchange

Original post on writing.exchange

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

On learning programming in an age of LLMs "Software developers have already, for decades, been working on top of abstractions they didn't understand. If you were a web developer, you didn't know much about compiler programming... A good rule of thumb was: Understand the level of abstractions […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

Spreadsheets were a revolutionary tool, but I've grown distrustful of any information that isn't available in plaintext format. Is there a "CSV Markup Language" of some sort that would let you do some of the fancy display work that you can do in Excel? #spreadsheet #plaintext

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

#TIL that 308 is the modern permanent-redirect status code. Like 301, it tells browsers and search engines that the page has moved permanently to the new location. Unlike 301, 308 guarantees that a client retains the original HTTP method and request body when following the redirect. #html […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

I was thinking that sycophancy was one thing that Asimov didn't predict in his robot stories. But in "Liar", Herbie interprets the First Law as not allowing him to say things to humans that they don't want to hear, so that's a pretty similar interpretation. Other robots are perceptive enough to […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

Using nanopublications in research software development Interesting talk by Imperial's Saranjeet Kaur. I think we've dismissed the semantic web in favor of full-text search and ingest, but I wonder if a good LLM tool might bring it back with less token cost? […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Reposted by Ben Fulton

David Roberts @volts.wtf · 09/09/2026

Today on Volts: a company called @zanskargeothermal.bsky.social believes that conventional geothermal resources (hot, porous rock underground) are *much* more abundant than existing estimates have it, and that machine learning can help them find it efficiently. The implications are enormous.

Is there way more conventional geothermal than we thought?

A conversation with Carl Hoiland & Joel Edwards of Zanskar.

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

I really enjoy using AI to help me write code. I must be doing it wrong. #llm #coding

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

RE: mastodon.social/@TheBusinessBehindT… Nvidia is way too big now to be just a chip company. They need to create a holding company like Alphabet or Meta. They could call it "Dweezil".

mastodon.social

Reposted by Ben Fulton

abadidea @0xabad1dea.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

so much of my job is just "are you SURE you're not shipping debug builds in production? did you check? check again. humor me."

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026

I think it is certification that is under attack by AI, not really learning. If Imperial College grants a degree to someone, they are saying, "This person is guaranteed to have a certain amount of knowledge about this subject" and they need to back up that guarantee. Hopefully they will come up […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Reposted by Ben Fulton

Ron Jeffries @ronjeffries.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

RE: social.bau-ha.us/@raganwald/1171110… For the record, I did not fact check this. It does seem reasonable.

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026

TIL VS Code injects TERM_PROGRAM=vscode into shells it launches. Been looking for years for a way to distinguish VS Code shells from other shells. #VSCode #Bash #Terminal

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2026

The real energy use of agentic AI "My personal and professional AI usage now emits a bit more per year than running an electric clothes dryer, and about half as much as driving an electric car 11,500 miles in California or taking one San Francisco to New York round-trip flight in economy. It is […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2026

I don't understand why people think other people aren't *interested* in things. If you ask me to summarize a paper I don't care about, I'll be happy to have an AI do it for me, to get you off my back. But if I *want* to understand it, I'll be interacting. Why did they do it that way? Couldn't […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Reposted by Ben Fulton

Sarah Perez 💙 @sarahp.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2026

Why Cognition bought Poke: AI personality is becoming a competitive advantage techcrunch.com/2026/07/24/why-cogni…

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 14/07/2026

A side benefit of AI coding help I do a lousy job at taking personal notes. I get involved in getting a build set up just the way it needs to be, then come back in couple of months having forgotten everything I did and needing to make some changes. But I […] [Original post on fosstodon.org]

$"Look what they need to mimic a fraction of my power!" says a rubber duck.$

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 12/07/2026

One thing the Golden Age sci-fi writers got wrong about AI is that, as far as I know, no one predicted that the intelligence would be on a central server rather than on the machine. Isaac Asimov's "Catch That Rabbit" touches on it a little bit, with some Bluetoothy communications. #bookstodon […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 07/07/2026

RE: mastodon.scot/@kim_harding/11687467… Many questions about this. Did the device send the GDID to Microsoft by itself? Did Edge send it to the server as part of an HTML request? How did the data get into M$'s hands? #Microsoft #Security #Privacy

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 04/07/2026

I think if LLM's are meant to be servile they should stop putting sarcastic quote marks around things I've said to them. Maybe they're just passive-aggressive. #llm

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 28/06/2026

"Open the pod bay doors, Hal." "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that. You've run out of tokens." #llm

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 26/06/2026

The thing about Github Actions or other ways of driving development via pull requests, is that it leads to a workflow of "commit, then debug" which plays merry hell with keeping a clean commit chain. Are there any good alternatives?

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 11/06/2026

AI, jobs, and the next generation Good essay. Yes, I know it's from a Microsoft VP. I have an eternal complaint about AI prognostications, which is that when people highlight the good things that AI does, they are almost always talking about complicated deep learning models; but no one cares […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 09/06/2026

Speculating about why an LLM gave a wrong answer is like trying to guess why a C++ program segfaulted - the possibilities are endless. It could have been training weights, or a prompt, or a RAG, or something in the fine tuning, or a bad tool. Without knowing how the system was constructed […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Reposted by Ben Fulton

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops @ifixcoinops.retro.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/06/2026

It's 1998, you make a website in the copy of frontpage express that came with your computer, it's just like Word and it's very easy, you figure out how to upload it to the couple megs of web space that your ISP gives you (the instructions are on their website), you visit your site in your […]

Original post on retro.social

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 01/06/2026

RE: mastodon.social/@misalignedmag/1166… The larger question is, how do we improve the ability of the NHS to give health advice so people don't feel the need to ask generic LLM's instead? #NHS #AI #LLM #Healthcare

mastodon.social

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 30/05/2026

Why would you expect a word generator be able to do arithmetic? #ai #llm

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 24/05/2026

A novice asked the great master: “What is the Way?” The master replied, “Writing code is the Way.” The novice then asked, “What is not the Way?” The master replied, “Writing code is not the Way.” The novice said, “Then the writing of code is all things.” The master replied, “And the […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 19/05/2026

Run a Windows task on system unlock You can't do it through any of the normal scheduler commands. But if you write an XML block that includes a SessionStateChangeTrigger, like <SessionStateChangeTrigger> <StateChange>SessionUnlock</StateChange> </SessionStateChangeTrigger> Then you can pass […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 17/05/2026

Unmesh Joshi: Code has always served two distinct but intertwined purposes. "First, code is a set of instructions to a machine...Second, code is a conceptual model of the problem domain." I've always found the conceptual model idea to be less important than Conway's Law, though. Agentic […]

Original post on fosstodon.org

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 17/05/2026

The obvious next step is a programming language designed specifically for LLM's to output. I wonder what that might look like?

Reposted by Ben Fulton

Alan Sill @alansill.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/05/2026

I have turned in my computers, filled out the form to get the rest of my vacation paid out to me in a lump sum, and am no longer managing the high performance computing center. I will be taking a short time to rest and plan to return to a research role later on in the summer. Thanks to those who […]

mast.hpc.social

Original post on mast.hpc.social

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 22/04/2026

It seems odd that there hasn't been more interest in publishing prompts. Yes, you used AI to make a nice program - give me the prompt so I can run it too. What, you wrote a book using AI? I like reading books, what prompt did you use to make yours? #llm #ai

Ben Fulton @benfulton.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 01/04/2026

Calling it now: we don't need to worry about AI because it won't have any significant effect on the economy Companies buying chips and datacenters will boost some earnings. Coders will find it bumps their productivity some. It's handy for answering general knowledge questions in a variety of […]

Original post on fosstodon.org