iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I’m trying to work out why I used to enjoy strongly felt disagreements at work and now I don’t. Is it cos I’m old? Cos my nerves got shot in Covid? Is it cos I used to be confident I was right and now I’m confident all opinions are wrong? Anyway, it’s less fun now.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Explainability without mechanism is an antipattern.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

If I am right about lucid source and dark source, then using readable high level languages (which are inefficient) is an anti pattern for dark source. “Claude, write a CMS with user-facing functionality equivalent to Drupal in ARM assembler please.”

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

A “lucid source” project is one where we choose to keep the source well engineered and readable. (Independent of the machine/human written axis.)

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

The answer to “is source code just assembler now, does it matter if it is readable and well engineered? depends on the purpose and domain. We need terms of art for the different flavours of software this produces. Cf open source and closed source. Maybe “lucid source” and “dark source”.

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026

Leek's essay is a fabulous, wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary touching on urbanism, music trends, LLM crowds, Netflix algorithms, and other subjects, seeking to resolve a(nother) (seeming) paradox: how can we have so much *potential* variety, and *everything* is so manifestly *the same*? 12/

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026

The second is: "Your boss is a credulous dolt who is infinitely horny for replacing lippy workers with pliable machines, which made him an easy mark for an AI salesman who convinced him to fire you and replace you with an AI that *can't* do your job": pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/a... 6/

pluralistic.net

Pluralistic: AI can’t do your job (18 Mar 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026

Leek proposes that these are all expressions of the same underlying phenomenon, a failure mode of data science that takes a world of "granular personal data" and arrives at a world where "personalisation produc[es] more sameness." 22/

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EPFL AI Center @epfl-ai-center.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Apertus 1.5 is out! 🚀 ✅ Multimodal capabilities ✅ Stronger reasoning ✅ A roadmap of regular releases Read more: apertus-ai.org/news Models: huggingface.co/swiss-ai @cscsch.bsky.social @eth-ai-center.bsky.social @icepfl.bsky.social @mjaggi.bsky.social @abosselut.bsky.social

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Who is writing about rescuing tech-for-good from technosolutionism? I’m looking for insights on how we use the wise insights from the anti-technosolutionist analysis while maintaining a space for better informed enthusiastic tech-for-good communities and keep the space for nerd voluntarism.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

I’m trying to train colleagues to say “how will we evaluate benefits of this project” not “how will we measure benefits of this project” - rigorous formal qualitative approaches are much better than unnecessarily quant ‘measurement’.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

It’s lovely to have someone who speaks like I do^W used to before I changed my accent to fit in running the country.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Squee I’m in a disinformation seminar with David Buckingham and I’m reading “The End of Information” right now.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

One of the things I found useful about last nights Kirstein lecture by Katie Winkle was the idea of adding metadata about what part of the futures cone you’re working in to each project. This creates space for designing for preferable futures alongside work that is useful in the plausible.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Excited - as every year- for this years’ Kirstein Lecture: Katie Winkle on “Designing Robots. Designing Society: Opportunity or Automating Inequality?”

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

If I had a penny for every time I’ve thought “the computer is wrong… oh wait no it’s my fault”, I’d have… about the same amount of money I do now, because that’s work I’ve been paid for.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

At the UCL festival of digital research. Hearing from our data centre partner, Datavita, about the fully renewable energy and very low water use of the Lanarkshire AI growth zone. UCL is at the heart of the UK’s London AI startup cluster and is proud to partner with Scotland for clean HPC and AI.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

When I send you ambiguous instructions or an opaque email thread that you have to carefully interpret to find out what I want you to do, I am paying you the complement of believing you are smart enough to solve the puzzle. If you get a careful step by step task breakdown - feel insulted.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Fear of losing a job you hate is a perversity emerging from the unsuitability of our economic system to respond to technological change. With confidence in education and protection while we retrain, change could be welcomed. If change is indignity and disempowerment we are all anti-tech.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

At a managementy away day thing. Discussion assumes that staff capability is fixed and limited. Arranging resources well. Which is odd for an education provider. Human capacity is not limited: we can and should help each other learn and grow. *That’s* how you do more with less. By becoming more.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Presented the draft of the LLM assisted coding policy for ARC to our team. It went actually fairly well considering.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Next time I come to Swindon for a UKRI meeting I might make a T-shirt with a picture of four buckets on it. 🪣🪣🪣🪣

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

In the grim darkness of the third millennium, playing with fascist superhuman toy soldiers is memetic defence. @warhammer40k.bsky.social

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

You know who isn't getting radicalized? Guys who do ships in a bottle. Embrace model-building and avoid the pitfalls of right-wing extremism

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Has anyone built a reduced capacity programming assistant ai (system prompt to limit capability) for pedagogic purposes? “Build me X algorithm” would have it decline, but step by step instructions which showed the algo was understood would each be implemented, assisting with syntax and cruft.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

About to start my tenth Hackney Half. Running for WWF. www.justgiving.com/fundraising/... (12th half over all races.)

justgiving.com

James

Help James Hetherington raise money to support WWF-UK

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UoM Research IT @uomresearchit.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Would you like some free #agile project management for your team? Adina from our RSE team has received funding from the #DisCouRSE network+ to deliver hands on training. Applications are now open!

buff.ly

Agile Project Management Training for dRTPs

Learn practical Agile project management skills to improve how you plan, deliver, and manage research projects in digital research teams.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

“Which Vampire: The Masquerade clan is each Eurovision act?” Is a fun game.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Slightly increase a band. Counting buzzards.

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Excellent analysis of how to think about AI as a social technology (rather than as an individual intelligent agent)

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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a... Now up at @knightcolumbia.org - Cosma Shalizi and myself on "AI as Social Technology." It says that AI models are really a technology of social mediation that allow humans to connect with thoughts of other humans. Short-ish thread with major points follows.

knightcolumbia.org

AI as Social Technology

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

When researching for my inaugural, I needed to find my old PhD thesis. I discovered it was not open access. The default is closed unless you sign a form. It is now open access www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/41dc86... If you like open science, you might enjoy investigating if you need to do this.

repository.cam.ac.uk

Phenomenology of supersymmetric models.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Amount of bureaucracy is set by tolerance, not by need. There will always be a new process and advocates for its worth. Adoption is governed by capacity. Technology speeds each piece of waste up. Making space for more. AI adopters looking to save need consciously limit new process adoption.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

I know the fire and hope has gone out of the centre left, but who would like to help me imagine a world where AI is a cooperative capability? A national inference service for hardware, with open source models running on it? A national training effort for at least one public open source model?

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

What is the word for “I was hoping for a ❤️ but I only got a 👍”？

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

What is the legal copyright status of transclusion? If I do <img href=“http://somone_elses_website/a.png> on my page, have I copied it?

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

King's College London are seeking a Lecturer in Applied Mathematics (Quantitative Modelling) to "develop an independent research programme in applied mathematics, mathematical modelling, or a closely related area" www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRG116/l...

jobs.ac.uk

Lecturer in Applied Mathematics (Quantitative Modelling) at King's College London

Recruiting now: Lecturer in Applied Mathematics (Quantitative Modelling) on jobs.ac.uk. Click for details and explore more academic job opportunities on the top job board

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Sycophancy… alignment… overfitting on what feedback pleases each user summed over users vs what the system needs as a whole. It rhymes with zeroth law vs first and second laws in Asimov. Obvious but I just connected it.

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Ai2 @ai2.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Everyone's building AI science agents. The claims are extraordinary. But when we test whether these systems can actually do science, recent top ones still fail challenges that human scientists can solve the majority of the time. 🧵

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

In “wake, watch, wonder” by Robert J Sawyer, one of my favourite optimistic AI novel series, there’s a morning where everyone wakes up and all the spam has gone, and that’s when the world learns of the existence of the benevolent AI. Reminded of this by Glasswing, but vulnerabilities not spam!

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

I’m reflecting a lot on the perils of overthinking things.

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Jay 🦋 @jay.bsky.team · 30/03/2026

an app is just a lens over the open network of data, and you can personalize what your lens looks like

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Stuart Grieve @sgrieve.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

This is incredibly relevant for many of us in academia

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 24/03/2026

"The AI Grad Student": A Harvard professor describes working with Claude. Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: "It faked results, hoping I wouldn't notice." But he ends the essay with "Now I'm doing 100% of my research with LLMs". Am I losing my mind?

The more I dug, the more I found it had been tweaking things left and right. Claude had been adjusting parameters to make plots match rather than finding actual errors. It faked results, hoping I wouldn’t notice.

In addition to the growth in interest, the tools themselves have been steadily improving. I am now doing 100% of my research with LLMs. I don't encapsulate the LaTeX writing anymore since I actually enjoy writing papers and it helps me think, and I still write some Mathematica code on my own. But I haven’t compiled anything myself on the command line in months. I typically have four to five projects running at once and go between windows checking the output and sending a new prompt. It feels a bit like Magnus Carlsen taking on five grandmasters in parallel. People have asked me why I’m not writing a paper every two weeks. The answer is I don’t see why I should. I am growing intellectually—learning so much every day—and trying out some ambitious problems, most of which fail. I anticipate the floodgates will open very soon.

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Arriving in Edinburgh for a workshop on research software engineering and generative AI, funded via Schmidt Sciences. A real chance to begin to set the practices and safeguards for our profession to use this technology with joy, wisely and well. Which is not how many use it now!

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The Young Foundation @theyoungfdn.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Our CEO @parlysue.bsky.social will be speaking at #Anthropy26 next week at the Eden Project in Cornwall. 📅 25 March at 5:30pm Speaking alongside fellow leaders on community-led sustainability Tickets: anthropy.uk/national-gat... @anthropyuk.bsky.social #Anthropy #Anthropy26 #UnitedFuture

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EPCC @epcc.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

ARCHER2, the UK national supercomputing service, has delivered an eightfold return on investment to the economy according to independent analysis. Operated by EPCC, it has enabled more than £4.2bn in benefits to the UK economy since launching in 2021: edin.ac/47JGMHB

Montage with photo of Prof Mark Parsons and quote: "This report provides a resounding justification of the value of Government investment in large-scale national supercomputing."

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James Hetherington @jamespjh.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Which UK HE has the least obstructive and self-harming professional culture? I’m reminded (via supplier relationships) how different corporate cultures in the same sector can be. Is it us? I do hope it’s not us.

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