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Olivier Usher

@ojusher.com
212 followers 745 following 493 posts

Technology | Innovation prizes | Director of Development at Challenge Works, a @nestauk.bsky.social enterprise | ojusher.com

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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 29/09/2026
I think I’d have a bit more respect for AI if it just said “oh shit oh fuck”, rather than this pathetic snivelling
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 27/09/2026
Let’s have an annual flagship science and technology prize for the UK - @nestauk.bsky.social ‘s event at the Labour conference in Liverpool
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 26/09/2026
I agree with this, and I think AI is going to make it a million times worse. ojusher.medium.com/theory-of-mi...
ojusher.medium.com
Theory of mind
When LLMs rewrite things for us, we lose something important: empathy
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 24/09/2026
An opinion I semi-seriously hold is that AI text, by law, should have to be rendered in that 1980s-style robot font. You know which one I mean. I am now extending this to say that you should, by law, have to read it out through a vocoder. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westmin...
en.wikipedia.org
Westminster (typeface) - Wikipedia
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 16/09/2026
Not gonna lie, I am not tempted to eat one of these AI oysters
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 11/09/2026
What happens in a world in which all text is reprocessed for us by LLMs? ojusher.medium.com/theory-of-mi...
ojusher.medium.com
Theory of mind
When LLMs rewrite things for us, we lose something important: empathy
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Reposted by Olivier Usher
Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
I do not need to be jumped scared into not buying a disposable BBQ. Fucks sake.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 12/08/2026
I was never quite able to take the BBC series seriously after my dad said he thought the triffids looked like celery
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 12/08/2026
Delighted to be targeted for ads for, uh, whatever these are. I wouldn't dream of penny-pinching and going for the £4,600 option.
Blue things that cost £4,600-£6999
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 23/07/2026
My vibes-based but strongly-held opinion: 🪖 The Soviets, Pinochet, Mobutu and Mussolini would have loved AI. 🎖️ The Khmer Rouge, English Puritans, Nazis and Falangists would have hated it. ojusher.medium.com/chatkgb-what...
ojusher.medium.com
ChatKGB: what would the Soviets have made of AI?
And other what-ifs from the history of tyranny
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 22/07/2026
This excellent question from @zachweinersmith.bsky.social has been playing on my mind, so I've had a go at thinking through what various horrible dictatorships would have made of AI. ojusher.medium.com/chatkgb-what...
ojusher.medium.com
ChatKGB: what would the Soviets have made of AI?
And other what-ifs from the history of tyranny
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 21/07/2026
It's now over 18 years since there was a government department led by a Welsh MP (Hain, DWP) and over 16 years since there was a Scottish MP (Darling, Treasury; Alexander, DFID). I know there's a lot going on, but I think this is genuinely insane if you care even slightly about the union.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 21/07/2026
Everyone in science and technology policy world today
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 20/07/2026
The thing with these freaks like Dominic Cummings and all his imitators is that they've never had a real job, so you could stick a Salesforce or Looker Studio dashboard on a big screen and tell them all about the "PhD physicists" who had developed it and they would be impressed.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 19/07/2026
This posts your Trophies directly to your National Record of Achievement
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 17/07/2026
Reviewing dozens of job slopplications today. Please keep me in your thoughts and prayers.
Pangram busts another job slopplicant
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 16/07/2026
This is ridiculous, but there’s also a ridiculous loophole. Fly to Dublin on your EU passport. You’re then in the common travel area and can continue on to the UK without checks. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
theguardian.com
British girl, 15, stranded in Rome for six weeks due to new passport rules
The dual national, who missed six weeks of school, is latest of several children affected by recent Home Office policy
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Samira Shackle @samirashackle.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
"As far as the government is concerned, they’ve washed their hands of us. Would they do that to a white person?" For a @prospectmagazine.co.uk feature on Britain's citizenship-stripping boom, I spoke to families of people who have had citizenship revoked www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/uk/...
prospectmagazine.co.uk
Britain’s citizens of nowhere
Hundreds of UK nationals have been made stateless, and left trapped in squalid refugee camps, without being convicted of any crime
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 15/07/2026
This is art.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 14/07/2026
This is a really excellent question, and I think the answer is that they would have loved it, for reasons that are not a great compliment either to Soviet economics or to AI.
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Reposted by Olivier Usher
Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Weird hypothetical: how do you think the USSR would've responded to the development of LLMs?
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 10/07/2026
every hometown’s got the ominous megastructure, what’s yours?
The Turd, Edinburgh
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 10/07/2026
My controversial take is that Euston Station really doesn't deserve the hate. With more sympathetic shop frontages inside, the mezzanine removed and some clutter cleaned up, it could actually be a pretty classy space.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 04/07/2026
Idea: companies should only be allowed to present AI-generated text to customers if they use a font that clearly indicates you’re talking to a robot
70s-style sci fi font “Data70”
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 30/06/2026
Is drug dealers advertising on Google Maps a new thing?
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 29/06/2026
If they could bring it forward to 12 July then it would make it 7 PMs in 10 years.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 27/06/2026
@gwr.com If your service is running an hour late and the previous two were cancelled, how about you open the ticket barriers rather than wasting even more of everybody’s time, eh? You’re going to have to delay-repay everyone anyway.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 23/06/2026
Cars will have a kinetic energy limit, not a speed limit. This would be based on the current speed limits, as applied to the lightest car currently available on the market.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 23/06/2026
The best time to stop Brexit was 10 years ago today. The second best time is today.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 17/06/2026
Wild. Just saw a LinkedIn post tagging someone and saying that they had been fired.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 17/06/2026
I can certainly think of one big role Starmer could offer Burnham that would avoid the need for a contest
Guardian headline saying Starmer will offer Burnham a 'big role' in order to avoid a leadership contest
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 12/06/2026
Reflections on skill and automation, arising from a very stressful day in hospital last year. I've been wanting to get this off my chest for quite a while. ojusher.medium.com/gut-feels-7e...
ojusher.medium.com
Gut feels
There is a strange focus that comes at the most intense moments. The rest of the world, with all its distractions, is stripped away, and…
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 12/06/2026
I don't really agree with the consultancy hate - consultants absolutely serve a purpose beyond just repeating back to managers what they want to hear. But what's the point in spending money on consultants if they just serve up the same slop you could get from Gemini yourself? archive.is/T39aS
archive.is
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 11/06/2026
Is there anything more pathetic than an LLM's grovelling after repeatedly bullshitting you? (Having a go at updating my website using Gemini... it did an OK job in the end, after several false starts including, on one occasion, extracting about 2/3 of my real website and hallucinating the rest.)
Gemini begging for forgiveness after lying to me
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 06/06/2026
Three suggestions, each with a caveat. 1. Nuclear War (Annie Jacobsen). But is this just A House of Dynamite? 2. Light Perpetual (Francis Spufford). But would the domesticity make it dull? 3. The Affirmation (Christopher Priest). Would the Dream Archipelago narrative work though?
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 03/06/2026
I take an extremely dim view of chatbots’ use of the word “I”. There is no “I” there. LLMs are a useful technology but the chat interface is a disaster. ojusher.medium.com/chatbots-are...
ojusher.medium.com
Chatbots are a terrible way of interfacing with AI
At best, they mislead us about AI’s capabilities. At worst, they make us go nuts.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 03/06/2026
I met a “Head of Lettuce” (for a big greenhouse operating company)
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Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
Interesting that the idea of another EU referendum is regularly discussed on broascast media as something that would cause division and thus a bad idea. But plans to deport literally millions of people are discussed as administrative questions.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 18/05/2026
Is there a decent Gmail plugin that can tell me if emails I receive are likely to be written by AI?
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 18/05/2026
So many “traditional recipes” turn out to be “printed on the back of a margarine packet in 1971”.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 16/05/2026
He’s right. Over to you @andyburnham.bsky.social. I’ll vote for you in the leadership election if you top this.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 13/05/2026
Apropos of nothing, John Swinney had an undistinguished term as leader of the opposition, leading to his party going backwards in an election and him stepping down as leader... Before returning years later as a safe pair of hands, regaining the initiative and winning an election that looked lost.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 12/05/2026
Back in the day someone would have set up "haskeirstarmerquityet.com" and there would be several terrible Flash games about the PPS resignations. I miss the old internet.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 11/05/2026
I have no idea why Labour thinks it can find a middle ground that mollifies Brexit supporters. There is none. Brexit is an economic, social and geopolitical failure for this country and the sooner they accept the only way to fix it is to fully reverse it, the sooner we can all move on.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 05/05/2026
I forget who described chatbot prompts as "incantations", but that's what they are.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 01/05/2026
What I want to know is why, given practice/practise, licence/license and advice/advise, there isn’t uce/use.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 27/04/2026
Britain has the opportunity to do something very funny with the Strait of Dover
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 24/04/2026
A fun thing I am working on: challengeworks.org/news/we-are-... Lots of ways to get involved in the coming months.
challengeworks.org
We are searching for the next Longitude Prize | Challenge Works
The team at Challenge Works is embarking on a mission to find the next Longitude Prize, can you help?
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 22/04/2026
People *think* AI will kill us all by nuking us. But it will *actually* kill us all when Russia and the US speak on Google Meets, the US team stay on the line for a post-summit moan, then Gemini emails everyone a transcript of the moan and the Russians are so furious they nuke the world.
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Olivier Usher @ojusher.com · 22/04/2026
Thanks Google, that's very helpful
Google AI giving moronic result
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