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Chris Pitcher

@cpitcher.bsky.social
94 followers 91 following 80 posts

Data Engineer at Chelsea and Westminster hospital. Interested in building things, data, coding, and public policy. Previously an apprenticeship coach, school data manager and teacher.

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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Sooner media, governments and public realise that the AI labs are not real companies selling products, but are instead massive marketing exercises with the sole purpose of making tech bros very rich at our expense, the better.
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Emily Andrews @emilyishness.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Was great to speak at this today - sharing findings from our report “Building an AI-ready workforce”. learningandwork.org.uk/building-an-... Some choice quotes I picked from the report included the words “grift” “panic” & “scared”. If that doesn’t tempt you to read it, I don’t know what will..
learningandwork.org.uk
Building an AI-ready workforce: Creating a skills system that prepares UK knowledge workers for the AI transition - Learning and Work Institute
AI has transformative potential for the UK economy and could present a net uplift to productivity of up to £80 billion by 2035. Yet the UK workforce does not – yet – have the skills to successfully ad...
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Emily Andrews @emilyishness.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
🚨THINK TANK JOB KLAXON 🚨 V excited to be hiring to this new role @learnworkuk.bsky.social - adding another brain to lead work on skills and better work. Loads of scope to make it your own, friendly people, urgent topics. learningandwork.org.uk/about-us/joi... Please spread far and wide!
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
FT reporting we are now officially in Funky Financial Instruments phase of the AI bubble. We've all seen this movie before (literally)
FT article describing use of "so-called residual value guarantees " to fund data centres off the books
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Thrilled that the Guardian have just figured out how cloud computing works, good for them. Maybe now they can have a crack at making the ads not appear over the article text on their website
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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
If Hugo continues to grow at this rate, by 2030 he will no longer fit in the barn. By 2050 he will have grown to the size of Godzilla and could crush humanity. But if we let the Chinese grow their own Hugo first that would be bad. This is why we must invest 100 trillion dollars in Hugo immediately.
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Completely unsustainable. Scale up these numbers across the whole web and this is literal "break the internet" territory. Not to mention the environmental impact.
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Who do I lobby to get my feed have this much Dolly every day?
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David Durant @bowsy.co.uk · 31/07/2026
If every LA decides to procure 5 new API-less monstrosities it will be catastrophic. Potentially even more so if they decide to vibe-code them up themselves or get taken in by Shiny AI Shysters.
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Allison Gill @muellershewrote.com · 28/07/2026
The website still says 14. One of the service members not being counted is Sgt. Angel Sarah Rampersad from Queens. She was married to a woman she met in the Army, and one of our podcast listeners pointed out that fact was not acknowledged at a recent memorial service. So I am acknowledging it here.
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Dean Vipond @deanvipond.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
Any incoming minister for AI should be tasked with replacing a load-bearing spreadsheet from a critical service, to give them the insights into why no one has done it yet. The ministerial equivalent of breaking a horse.
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Alan White @aljwhite.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
These heatwaves show leadership cannot mean stepping back from climate action - important piece from @alistrathern.bsky.social www.politicshome.com/opinion/arti...
politicshome.com
These heatwaves show leadership cannot mean stepping back from climate action
The UK is in the throes of our second significant heatwave of the year. It is still early summer. That fact alone ought to give us pause.
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
"It looks like you're trying to send an attachment but haven't attached" is super helpful. Please please please can we also have "It looks like you're booking in a catch up with Alice but you haven't add her to the invite" I'm begging
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Stuart Hoddinott @stuarthoddinott.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Love this as a prevention case study: - Low cost, even revenue raising in the short term - Improves health outcomes and reduces costly hospital admissions Shows political leadership is key: - Politically costly for Khan to implement - Did it despite cost savings landing outside GLA
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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this conundrum and, about a decade ago, ran a small cross-party programme on tech literacy for MPs. A quick 🧵 about why MPs know so little about tech.
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
Another write up of the Microsoft press release with no mention of whether use of personal data will be allowed. Without this, these licenses are pretty useless.
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
Unless the governance has been changed to allow patient data to be used in Copilot (it wasn't in the trial) then this ain't going to be delivering what most people might think reading the Microsoft press release.
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Kate Bevan @katebevan.com · 11/05/2026
It's not good for the country if we're constantly junking PMs (of any political stripe) because of the vibes. So much reporting is now vibes, not properly looking at policy, how that's delivered etc. That does everyone a disservice.
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
it's also, unlike a lot of the other issues that are being pored over, very relevant to local government. It's unclear what levers hackney council has to pull on gaza, but there's a hell of a lot of ways they can make life easier or harder for trans people in the borough
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 28/04/2026
What's different now is the blast radius. A botched microservices migration costs you a re-architecture project. A botched agent deployment can apparently delete your business in 9 seconds. 4/4
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Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
Politicians just seem to have given up trying to explain the world as it is to people. It's a huge problem.
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 14/04/2026
The first independent review of Mythos cyber capabilities I've seen. The UK's AI Security Institute - an independent government body - appears to have got their hands on Mythos and published their findings. 1/7 🧵
aisi.gov.uk
Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities | AISI Work
We conducted cyber evaluations of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview and found continued improvement in capture-the-flag (CTF) challenges and significant improvement on multi-step cyber-attack simulati...
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Jason Gorman @jasongorman.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
Claude Mythos is that guy down the pub who is so good at karate that if he used it on you, you'd die instantly, and that's why you'll never see him using karate.
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
There's a computer science term for what OpenAI are doing here, we call it "lying"
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 08/04/2026
Putting aside Sam Altman just continuing to emit huge lies constantly, this is an amazing example of what I mean when I talk about how GenAI is replacing *extremely low energy* digital tasks with *WAY WAY HIGHER ENERGY* replacements that *do not even work* Why TF is anyone using ChatGPT as a timer!
gizmodo.com
Sam Altman Says It'll Take Another Year Before ChatGPT Can Start a Timer
An $852 billion company, ladies and gentlemen.
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Allison Gill @muellershewrote.com · 30/03/2026
BREAKING: After ProPublica published letters written by children at the Dilley concentration camp, ICE officers raided the dormitories and confiscated the children's letters. I'm suing ICE to get them back. My latest: www.muellershewrote.com/p/breaking-i...
muellershewrote.com
NEW: ICE Raided Children's Dorms at Dilley and Confiscated Their Letters. I'm Suing to Get Them Back.
In our latest lawsuit, MSW Media is demanding children's letters confiscated by ICE agents, and the Office of General Counsel memo authorizing warrantless home entry.
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
1. LLMs do not reason 2. LLMs do not understand anything, they have no concepts: "pressure", "morals", you name it 3. It's a great headline but to "threaten" to use nuclear weapons is one thing (and actually key to MAD) but article also says LLMs going "full-scale nuclear war was rare."
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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
It would be a very very very good thing for Starmer to show some principled leadership around now. And perhaps it might also focus the mind a bit, away from playground disputes.
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Jeni Tennison @jenitennison.com · 20/02/2026
I'm astonished this statement could be reported so uncritically. Let's be real: *IF* AGI is ever developed, all its efforts will be spent making OpenAI profitable and sending Musk to Mars. From www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...
Stuart Russell, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley, who closely follows India’s progress, said: “If we get to AGI [artificial general intelligence], AI is going to be producing 80% of the global economy. All manufacturing, most agriculture, all services will be just done; managed by AI, produced by AI.”Imagine, he said, an Indian village priced out of having a health centre. In the future, AI could design the hospital and “along comes a bunch of giant quad copters carrying the materials, and a bunch of robots come and assemble everything. Two weeks later, you’ve got a hospital.”
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Jason Gorman @jasongorman.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
That over-reliance on a heavily-subsidised technology isn't seen as a strategic risk by engineering leaders is baffling.
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Emily Andrews @emilyishness.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
Before you start attributing this to AI, note that the biggest drops in employees has been in retail and hospitality - sectors with 122,000 fewer workers than this time last year. (we are kicking off a project on AI workforce impacts though, so watch this space...)
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
"[The] report reveals three-quarters of CIOs admit to not having full real-time visibility into AI agents running in production systems, even though they have the ability to implement actions." Only a matter of time til agent goes wrong and there will be panic. www.theregister.com/2026/02/17/n...
theregister.com
CIOs told: Prove your AI pays off – or pay the price
: Boards demand measurable ROI as budgets, bonuses, and jobs hang in the balance
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
Really really wish Oracle were not calling this an "agent" which suggests an autonomous AI tool making decisions without human in the loop (which this almost certainly is not, because that would be nuts)
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
The business model of LLM makers is blatantly unsustainable. In any other domain these companies would have hit the wall years ago. Anyone using LLMs for anything important needs to be asking "what happens when we have to start paying 10x current price for tokens?"
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Anna McKie @annamckie.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
Major UK research resources get long-awaited access to GP data Naomi Allen, chief scientist at @ukbiobank.bsky.social tells me it is a “watershed moment” for the resource and for global health research in @resprofnews.bsky.social www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-i...
researchprofessionalnews.com
Major UK research resources get long-awaited access to GP data - Research Professional News
Government directive for sharing health records hailed as “watershed moment” for projects like UK Biobank
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 05/02/2026
I wrote an article for Ada National College for Digital Skills, who run digital technology apprenticeships in the UK
linkedin.com
GenAI is amplifying the skills gap in software engineering
All the available evidence suggests that GenAI-assisted coding is most powerful in the hands of highly experienced software engineers, while having neutral or even negative effects for less experience...
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austinzheng.bsky.social @austinzheng.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
I don't think people appreciate enough the fact that, at a time where global warming was approaching an inflection point yet renewable energy was finally becoming economically viable, we decided to squander that opportunity because literal death cultists decided we needed Infinite Bullshit Machines.
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
The next round in our game of Who Wants To Be A Software Developer is called "Patching and Upgrades". You'll love it! www.theregister.com/2026/01/30/o...
theregister.com
OpenAI axes ChatGPT models with just two weeks' warning
: GPT-4o gets second death sentence after last year's reprieve, but this time barely anyone's bothered
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
A colleague posts this morning... "I have written a few agents on Co-pilot how do I get them to see docs in our local shared drive?" As I say, lots of people about to discover things like the constant pain of managing permissions.
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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
Hang on, I had missed the fact that the AI Skills Hub cost £4m. mahadk.com/posts/ai-ski... If this wasn't tax payers' money it would be quite funny. Also, can only assume PWC spent some time rolling around in gold because they did NOT spend it on building this
mahadk.com
The UK paid £4.1 million for a bookmarks site
Or, as they like to call it, the 'AI Skills Hub'. Which was built by PwC because of course it was
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Stuart Hoddinott @stuarthoddinott.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
Reading an interview with Streeting in the HSJ on 31 Jan 2025 When asked if he would abolish NHS England his response was: "I could spend a lot of time and money changing job titles and email addresses and not make a difference to the patient interest" 2026 Streeting would strongly disagree
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
Lots of people vibe coding, or playing with AI agents, or even just relying on Copilot to take meeting notes, will quickly find themselves in a tech support role when it misbehaves or breaks or just disappears. And they probably won't like it.
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
These AI companies are simultaneously the most money-grabbing, cash-burning, hyper-capitalist businesses we've ever seen, whilst they're also... seizing the means of production.
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
A lot of people in Trumpworld - especially those who like to use the phrase "there's a new sheriff in town" recently - would do well to remember that 3 years from now the boot could well be on the other foot.
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
Oh boy. www.theguardian.com/environment/...
theguardian.com
Era of ‘global water bankruptcy’ is here, UN report says
Overuse and pollution must end urgently as no one knows when whole system might collapse, says expert
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 18/01/2026
Really wish more focus was on the climate crisis aspect of this story, rather than whatever nonsense the orange convicted felon blurted out today (which he will have forgotten by tomorrow) www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
Why is Trump interested in Greenland? Look to the thawing Arctic ice | Gaby Hinsliff
Forecasts suggest that global heating could create a shortcut from Asia to North America, and new routes for trading, shipping – and attack, says Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 17/01/2026
Thanks to everyone involved in organising #ukgc26 and all the attendees for a really interesting day. Keen to keep the conversations going especially anyone who wants to get into it around the NHS / healthcare
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
Really, really scary stuff coming out of the US.
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Jacob Aron @jjaron.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
It's incredible the extent to which an unreliable statistic oscillating around zero is reported each month as if it actually means anything
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Chris Pitcher @cpitcher.bsky.social · 14/01/2026
In the real world, there are real problems that cannot be solved with a slick pitch. "Uptime spells out the bottom line bluntly: 'It is unclear how the industry will continue to deliver capacity at the rate that many projections forecast'"
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