iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 9h

Isn't it the case that the best local candidate won in Holborn and St Pancras, despite several high-profile men trying to make it All About Them, which is great for local residents? www.standard.co.uk/news/politic...

standard.co.uk

Who is Sagal Abdi-Wali? New London MP who escaped civil war in Somalia as a child

Who is Sagal Abdi-Wali? Leader of Camden Council comfortably wins north London by-election

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 17h

Absolutely classic that, only 17 years too late, the BBC decides to copy Netflix with the incredibly sexy "iPlayer and chill" offer, in case anyone wants to have sexy time while watching Country File.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 17h

I mean I am officially not a marrier, but I could be persuaded for this.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 23h

this might seem like a completely wild and out there opinion, but I feel like a big 4 accounting firm is not where you want to be going for your "AI and civil society" strategy

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Quite a lot of the nuance of navigating being over 50 is working out whether I'm having an existential crisis or if I just really need to go to the opticians.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The mercilessly unfair thing about having broken the coffee grinder is that I have to work out how to mend it before I have drunk any coffee.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Person next to me on the train this morning was scrabbling for wifi (aren't we all) and I couldn't help notice they mostly watched a video of a sad Weimaraner sitting next to a birthday cake. I def cannot criticise this while also reflecting we may have got this knowledge infra thing a bit wrong.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Excellent thread that it's worth reading up and down - of particular relevance to my research at the moment as it seems clear that designing to evals and testing through assurance has inherent limits when the actual thing being and the way it's made is fundamentally problematic.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I missed the Lab Conf this year so didn't get to hear the mood music on AI, and while I appreciate that Narayan has a difficult job, the assertion that" Technology as an industry has not engaged sufficiently with politics and the British public" is simply not true.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

It takes us several days to watch an episode of Bake Off as a family, and it is so completely delicious. Not only is it the perfect antidote to the ways gen AI is leaching creativity but @nigella.bsky.social and Alison Hammond are just perfect - wise and compassionate and funny and sparkly.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Just back from a very pleasant day spent wandering around Brighton, which I suspect might now be the iced matcha latte capital of the UK. In the centre of town and by the sea front, my guess is that you are never more than 25m away from a matcha whisk.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I see some discussion here about the days of stochastic parrots being over, and I think there is an in-ter-est-ing thing to note that *one's own* conversations a chatbot can seem quite plausible and useful but the minute someone else sends you some AI-generated text, it is clearly no good at all

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Doing a quick in-and-out at the Green Party Conf this evening to talk about data centres and sustainable tech. My only party conference this year and my first Green Party one, which is all quite novel. Anyway, the tl;dr is hyperscale is a choice not the default.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I suspect the problem here is a strategic one not a technology one, and that (bear with me) Burnham doesn't want to *replace* Palantir but find a different way to solve the same problems giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

giftarticle.ft.com

Andy Burnham searches for UK alternative to Palantir

Prime minister’s ‘Buy British’ push triggers hunt to find replacement for controversial US tech group awarded health service and defence contracts

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

From today's incomprehensible AI-generated emails about AI. Also, AI developers are really trying to make the word "context" happen.

Three core capabilities
The application combines live speech, on-demand answering, and two knowledge bases kept deliberately distinct.
01
Live transcription
Real-time speech-to-text
02
Context answering
Relevant detail on demand
03
Dual knowledge base
Testimony graph+
Atomic
MCP

What the engine is: a small set of named bots that do checkable good for New York City and log every action in public the moment it happens. The Keeper checks the city's help listings every night, takes dead ones off the board, repairs some with the Wayback Machine's saved copy, and emails the organization to say its page is gone. The Librarian saves the day's local stories before they vanish. The Watchkeeper notices which volunteer openings appeared and which disappeared. Anyone can press one free button on the front page and set the next deed in motion, then watch it happen in the log.
Why you: it's odd content, and you cover odd things with care. There's nothing to buy, nothing to sign and nothing I need from you.
If von want to lock the lodic at

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Currently in an interminable cycle of clearing out and mildly surprised to note that we seem to have lovingly kept every single pair of 3D glasses we have picked up from the cinema over the last decade or so. No idea why we have so many or what I thought we would do with them.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

On the phone, as part of an actual call, how many times, and in how many different ways, do you say "goodbye"? I just managed a "see you soon". "bye bye" (?), "bye" to someone coming to replace our electricity meter. Not, say, a member of my actual family.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Who's doing work on what's happening in the online payments space at the moment? Not just Klarna/rise of pay in 3, but the (afaict?) decline of paypal as the market diversifies? Am particularly interested to know if there's a conscious Mastercard/Visa strategy to keep card payments in contention

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Reposted by Rachel Coldicutt

Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Plus, the "White House Accord on Super Intelligence: Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities" signed by Trump, Google's Pichai, Anthropic's Amodei, Meta's Zuckerberg, OpenAI's Brockman, XAI's Musk, Nvida's Huang.

In order to build a positive future for the American people and the world, we believe every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public.

This starts with every company that is training and deploying frontier models having robust internal processes and controls to ensure that their technology behaves as intended and that any issues are promptly identified and resolved. Therefore, in addition to any other precautions, we believe each company should implement the following four layers of controls and audits:

(1) Implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment of its models during training and deployment around areas like cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical threats, and to ensure that its models do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways.

(2) Empower an internal team to ensure all of the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended, and that any issues are remediated.

(3) Partner with an independent external auditor or evaluator to carry out independent assessments of whether the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended.

(4) Designate an independent committee of the board of directors to oversee and receive reports from the teams operating the controls and the internal and external auditors and evaluators, as well as to ensure any issues identified are remediated.

Together, these steps will give each company, its customers, and the public confidence that the technology is operating as intended.

The participating companies will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices to improve the safety of their systems.

Over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations. Regardless of whether this is required of companies, we believe that implementing these controls and audits is critical to ensuring a safe future for everyone, and each of our companies are ...

Page 2 (signature page)

[signature]
Donald J. Trump
President of the Unites States

[signature]
Sundar Pichai
Google

[signature]
Dario Amodei
Anthropic

[signature]
Mark Zuckerberg
Meta

[signature]
Greg Brockman
OpenAI

[signature]
Elon Musk
XAI

[signature]
Jensen Huang
Nvidia

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Was just looking for restaurant ideas in a particular areas of London and was treated to these "other people asked" gems in Google search results. We're going to have to back to using the Yellow Pages soon.

What is Dua Lipa's favorite restaurant in London?

What is Kate Middleton's favorite restaurant in London?

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Recently the street where I live has become an undocked e-bike hotspot - seemingly from nowhere - and today some extensive and unannounced road works are also in the offing. All par for the course of living on a London residential street AND ALSO quite annoying

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Oooh a different take by the FT on what I like to call the Sports Car Theory of LLM Adoption (mine is about mid-life crises; there's is about upselling) buttondown.com/justenoughin...

buttondown.com

The Sports Car Theory of LLM Adoption

If LLMs make decision makers feel stupid, maybe they'll stop using them?

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I spoke at an event about risks of automation this evening and a member of the audience asked what did we think about the fact that AI has turned human into dogs running around at the feet of all powerful superintelligent machines. Related, OpenAI are probs not paying their marketing person enough

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

In scenes that are far too reminiscent of a Patricia Highsmith short story for my liking, it turns out that our dishwasher was broken by a slug - yes, a slug - climbing in through the external waste pipe and then sitting on the motherboard.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I'm speaking at an event tomorrow evening and it turns out it has a dress code and the dress code is "business attire", so the question is, what kind of business do I attire myself for?

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Remembering how I laughed when Peter Kyle's ChatGPT was FOI'd as I look at my own search history, which includes such fascinating and incisive questions as "how big is China?"

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I do know that a lot of people at work don't have children of school age, but people sure do like organising events during October half-term.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This sounds like a great and very important job that someone excellent should be doing.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I think everyone has a word they object to for no specific reason, and today mine is "vehicular". I don't really like what's happening with the "h" sound in the middle.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

With apologies for the quote of a quote, some important lessons here. The UK wants to find a place for itself in the unfolding chaos of US AI deregulation. The current govt thinks that place is as a broker of standards, but the problem with aligning with chaos is that it's... chaotic.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

🍿 so, everything about this is the most interesting thing ever to me. If you think having to read other people's AI-generated documents is boring, at least you can skim those. What happens when someone gives a circuitous and overblown AI-generated speech? You just have to sit and listen.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

As a special accessibility measure for people over - idk - 45? all short videos should come with a skimmable single paragraph of information that can, ideally, be half-read in the preview window of an email while completing another task.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I might write a little song about how standards don't fix anything without legal enforcement and routine safety inspections.

But we need to go further.
07:56
00 ج.
Building on the meeting convened by His Majesty King Charles last week, I can announce today that l am going to put Al at the heart of the UK's G20 Presidency next year.
I look back at how we responded to the financial crisis back in 2008.
We moved quickly in the G20 and smaller groups to deliver an urgent, practical response.
We came together to agree principles - which everyone implemented at home in a way that was right for them. And it worked.
That is the kind of approach we need now.
So we will bring the right people together on the key issı
good, i
Copy Find Selection>
"for
And we will work towards agreeing a single set of global principles and standards to ensure the transparency and access we need to increase our preparedness - and to ensure that Al development is safe.
This will bring together welcome initiatives from others - like that proposed by Norway this week.
As His Majesty said, the task before us "is not merely to advance technology, but to ensure that it remains firmly in the service of humanity."
www.gov.uk
And I want to reassure un nush people that

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Everything in technology news continues to be fine

•••
Business & technology
Datacentres
OpenAl's George Osborne says datacentre nimbys holding back Britain
8h ago
Technology
Using Al to 'talk to animals' might make us feel clever - but what, if anything, does it do for them?
8h ago

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... counting down in 3, 2, 1 to someone invoking the UK's totally non-colonial history as standards setters, while the PM wonders where exactly he put the technology department

Andy Burnham will on Tuesday claim Britain can be an "honest broker" in a global effort to contain threats posed by AI, just days after King Charles warned of the "existential dangers" the technology
poses.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I'm really going to get in trouble when AI-generated prose starts to sprinkle "As such," and "Moreover," at the start of the final sentence in overly long paragraphs that otherwise have absolutely no escape route.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

When working from home, it's very important to stay very still and extremely quiet so that no one in my family (human or feline) remembers I'm at home and asks me for food.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Packing away some books, and what do I find but this, nestled away at the back of a shelf

TONY
BLAIR
A NewStatesman SPECIAL SELECTION FROM NEW BRITAIN
MY VISION OF A YOUNG COUNTRY
-ycle
With an Introduction by lan Hargreaves

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

This is a fun time to work in AI if you are on multiple people's list of "emergency women to invite to an event when you remember that not everyone in the world is a man under 40"

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Hang on, they buried the lede here. Faculty are going to be Anthropic's "safety by design" partner? 🧐

The nearly $ıtn AI start-up on Friday said the partnership would be led by Faculty, a UK AI company bought by Accenture for $1bn in January and led by Marc Warner, who has become the consulting group's chief technology officer.

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Reposted by Rachel Coldicutt

Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 19/09/2026

I was travelling to Hitchin for a memorial on Sunday, all trains to London were cancelled, and so it was somewhat annoying that on that day I was getting over 2 million bot hits to my little server, from over 1.3 million different IP addresses, slowing down or timing out traintimes.org.uk

Graph showing hits to my honeypot in September. Starts off slowly, building up after a few day to the 500k to 1 million daily level, spiking to 2 million/1.5 million on Sunday/Monday, dropping down to "only" 300-700k daily since.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

As proof it is possible to make yourself like anything, I bought a multipack of pickle-flavour sparkling water and it turns out it's quite nice once you've forced yourself to drink several cans.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Very much suspect the mini fan is in strong contention to the "the object of 2026"

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I've already written the glossary for this paper so if we could all stop referring to "super intelligence" as ASI for a minute, I'd be extremely grateful. kthxbai

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I know British Bluesky loves a bit of emergency alert banter, so here's one I received earlier this evening in Barcelona. Quite impressed by the 3 languages in one alert.

Civil Protection Alert
27m ago
Red de Alerta Nacional - CECAT
Av?s de temps violent al
Barcelonès i Maresme per les properes 2h. Risc d'inundacions sobtades i extremeu les precaucions amb la mobilitat.
2
Seguiu les instruccions de les autoritats. Si esteu en risc truqueu al 112. Severe weather warning for the Barcelones and Maresme areas for the next 2 hours. Risk of flash flooding. Exercise extreme caution when travelling. Follow the instructions of the authorities. If you are at risk, call 112.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Went back to Nancy Leveson's brilliant Engineering a Safer World this morning. This is a massively simplified process diagram, but every software/digital person who's worked on a big "transformation" project and suddenly feels out of their depth knows this feeling direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

One of the most important changes is that with computers, the design of the
special purpose machine is usually created by someone who is not an expert on
designing such machines. The autopilot design expert, for example, decides how the
autopilot should work, and then provides that information to a software engineer,
who is an expert in software design but not autopilots. It is the software engineer
who then creates the detailed design of the autopilot. The extra communication step
between the engineer and the software developer is the source of the most serious
problems with software today.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The poise and physical coordination of people who wear all white outfits to travel on planes and then take part in daring activities like drinking tomato juice is truly extraordinary. If I wear a white t-shirt, I mostly can't even make it into the kitchen before I've spilt something on myself.

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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

As I've mentioned ad nauseum, I've spent my summer writing up the foresight review on safe adoption of AI in engineering that I've been working on for the past year (will be published in December). At the heart of it are some observations about AI safety culture (which is the hottest of hot messes)

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