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Tony Durham

@rhamdu.bsky.social
121 followers 143 following 1.3K posts

Now pursuing whatever interests me after a career in journalism and international development. Formerly @rhamdu on Twitter.

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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I don't believe the seeds came from fig roll biscuits. Seeds would not be viable after baking.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I don't like the way some streaming services treat musicians. But as a consumer of music the monthly sub is an incredible deal. It makes "owning" music unnecessary because basically you now own everything. If I actively want to support a particular artist I will do it through Bandcamp or buy a CD.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
The kWh meter could pass for a time machine if the dial was marked années instead of kilowatt-heure.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
If they/you have tapered the petals in the obvious way, I think it is also an equal-area projection.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Once UK pensions catch up with other European countries, the ratchet component of the triple lock will have served its purpose. I didn't think we had got there yet. Burnham seems to think we have. The sop is free social care. It will be huge if chronic illness doesn't mean burning through savings.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The parcel says DHL, it's a DPD van and the driver is in Evri kit. Is it all just one big company now?
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
BBC #Countryfile has investigated the spread of data centres in rural areas and their demands for energy, water and land. 70GW of data centres in the planning pipeline. Industry says 8 to 15GW will actually be built. Hard to imagine what benefit could justify burning 250W for each UK adult or child.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Cambridge alumnus here. Just the one space?
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Cognitive neuroscience is like trying to reverse-engineer a crashed flying saucer.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Endless different versions of "machines can't think because you can't think if you are not alive." I'm tired.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I worked in radio in the razor and tape days. What went on the floor stayed on the floor.
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Reposted by Tony Durham
Adrian Duszkiewicz @adrian-du.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
A fascinating look at the last decade of progress in AI through a neuroscience lens. The recipe for intelligence in natural and artificial systems www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
cell.com
The recipe for intelligence in natural and artificial systems
This review by Summerfield and Stachenfeld surveys how the dialog between neuroscience and AI research has evolved over the past decade. They highlight continued opportunities for synergy between thes...
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
It's the Jane Eyre saga of neuroevolution. The thorny romance of two brains, finally united.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Having ditched homuncular theories of vision, some scientists still clung on to a homuncular theory of imagination. Findings like these are now telling us that there is no Cartesian theatre anywhere in our heads.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Denmark accepts the American cuckoo into its Greenland nest. An embarrassing and painful moment for Europe.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Imperial is the best university but you gotta agree LSE is more Russellish.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
What if consciousness isn't real? Tim Bayne hasn't adopted full-on illusionism. He accepts something is going on. But C may not be the right word for it. Many languages have no word for phenomenal consciousness but have other ways of talking about mind www.scientificamerican.com/article/what...
scientificamerican.com
What if ‘consciousness’ isn’t real?
Our understanding of consciousness could be fundamentally wrong
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Yeah, ev psych can get beyond satire. To be clear: this paper *debunks* the previously advanced ev psych "male choice hypothesis", on both genetic and psychological grounds.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
I have a few questions.
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Reposted by Tony Durham
M a r c u s 🏳️‍🌈🇧🇧🇬🇧 @marcusjdl.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Bonnie Greer famously sat with her back to the BNP’s Nick Griffin when he appeared on Question Time in 2009. There was much criticism of the BBC platforming the far right, Now every episode of Question Time is wall to wall far right talking points with open arms and a seat kept warmfor Reform
Author and critic
Bonnie Greer dies aged 77
Culture
16 Sep 2026, 13:41
GETTY IMAGES - picture of Bonnie Greer an elder Black woman with short red Afro hair wearing a black button up shirt 

Paul Glynn
Culture reporter
British-American author and cultural commentator Bonnie Greer has died at the age of 77 after a brief illness, her husband has said.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Having said that, I think something psychological may be going on with the Parthenon's columns. An imperceptible curve making an aesthetic difference. Not exactly an illusion - more like a form of blindsight (unconscious perception). Has this been tested in the lab?
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Not only that. There are excellent alternative explanations. Anyone who has laid paving knows a slight slope is necessary to prevent puddles. And the Parthenon's gently curvy columns are an aesthetic choice - prettier to my eye than, say, the inverted cones of Knossos
Columns with tapered bases at Knossos in Crete. Centuries before the Parthenon, the builders of Knossos came up with a different solution to the dreary banality of plain cylindrical columns. Picture from discovergreece.com
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Reposted by Tony Durham
Tony Tassell @tonytassell.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
the Revolut hack story is quite something www.ft.com/content/97f3...
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
The implications of self-improving artificial intelligence. AI pioneer Marvin Minsky speaks to us across 60 years. (From Scientific American magazine, September 1966.)
Once we have devised programs with a genuine capacity for self-improvement a rapid evolutionary process will begin.
As the machine improves both itself and its model of itself, we shall begin to see all the phenomena associated with the terms "consciousness," "intuition" and "intelligence" itself. It is hard to say how close we are to this threshold, but once it is crossed the world will not be the same.
It is reasonable, I suppose, to be unconvinced by our examples and to be skeptical about whether machines will ever be intelligent. It is unreasonable, however, to think machines could become nearly as intelligent as we are and then stop, or to suppose we will always
be able to compete with them in wit or wisdom. Whether or not we could retain some sort of control of the machines, assuming that we would want to, the nature of our activities and aspirations would be changed utterly by the presence on earth of intellectually superior beings. Cover of Scientific American magazine, September 1966, "Information" special issue, price sixty cents. The cover art is the circuit diagram of a simple digital logic circuit, featuring diodes, resistors and a transistor.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I think he had earned the right to have musical opinions.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
I can't read Dylan's words without hearing that drawl and the guitar accompaniment and the wry comments from the harmonica. His prose is like a heap of song lines that haven't yet organised themselves into a song. The passage of time isn't a new theme for Dylan. He was always tangled up in blue.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Omygawd, just discovered someone I went to school with became a notorious Holocaust denier. Didn't know him well so I can't tell you if there were early warnings.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Yeah, let's hear it for postdiction. Whole books have been written about prediction. But what you see right now is a mixture of best guesses of what is about to happen (prediction) and best guesses of what just happened (postdiction). It's a seamless inferential process of continuous revision.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
A lot to remember today, including the 1973 coup in Chile and the death of President Salvador Allende.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
This letter has my address IN FULL. naming my country as United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Either it's from somebody in Ireland trying to make a point, or it's my long-awaited invitation to become a Fellow of the Institute of Pedantry.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Well, this from ChatGPT amused me. I don't have a theory of qualia, I am not even sure what people mean by qualia, but if pushed I might say something like "qualia are what categorical perception feels like".
...that would explain something peculiar about qualia: phenomenal qualities often seem categorical...
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
It's a good article. Writer Samanth Subramanian concludes that words like cognition and learning are not just arbitrary labels, and it's actually important to recognise that a slime mould and a human baby are doing the same thing.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Finally reading the Guardian slime mould piece, I am coming round from "scientists can't possibly be so afflicted with human exceptionalism" to "OMG. they really are". www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...
theguardian.com
‘This is dangerous’: slime moulds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence
The long read: Scientists are battling over whether supposedly simple organisms should be considered ‘intelligent’. The outcome could reshape our understanding of the natural world – and our own place...
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
It may be playing to the hype but I'm happy to say that AI makes and does things, and a Roomba cleans floors. Donald Michie, asked whether machines can think, pointed out that we say planes fly, but we don't say ships swim. Whether it is think/make/act, the question needs to be better defined.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Can we demystify the terms? Generative: it makes things. Agentic: it does things.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Excellent take. But I think through the shifting meanings of AI there has always been a search for commercial application. Expert systems, 5th Generation Project, Alvey, Esprit, 1980s neurocomputing...
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I am so tired of coffee nerdery. I like filter coffee but will accept a weak espresso, so I used to ask generically for a long black coffee. In France I ordered café allongé. Now I learn that long black, allongé and the despised Americano are all precise and different drinks. Choices, choices.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
A nice example of plasticity but surely not very surprising (the authors' own word) unless you have missed all the other examples reported during the past 50 years.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
More like Trump to rename the English city as Old New York.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
The synonym for USA is Amerika
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Well, this is reassuring. When an autonomous military robot is holding me at gunpoint, I shall repeat to myself: it's just a machine, it can't possibly WANT to kill me.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Selling a big house and living on a yacht. Selling a small house and living in a campervan.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
The characters take time to understand they goofed (if they survive long enough). The audience, deliciously, knows all along. But only in panto are they allowed to shout warnings..
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
A whole Stoner-style campus novel is writing itself in my mind. The events which led up to the current professor resigning and circulating this anti-advertisement as a warning to would-be successors.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
I'm sure this is an important issue. But I wonder how far the question of communication efficiency can be abstracted away from the kinds of computation that cognition requires. Back when parallel computing was a big deal, each of the various rival architectures had its application sweet spot.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
I have a lot of sarky suggestions for who JDV's antichrist might be. I am sure you have thought of the same people yourself. It's not that funny really. Nobody who believes this end-times stuff should be anywhere near nuclear weapons.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
The helix thing is not exactly a genius way of representing numbers. It's more like LLMs are trying toreverse-engineer our place-value notation and so far, they have only come up with analog algorithms. One day perhaps they'll discover the carry operation and start adding digitally like we do.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Spiders often use plants to support their webs. But is this an example of a plant using a spider web for support? The web may not be there for long. But it's a fast-growing plant and this might be enough to get it across a gap.
A bean shoot attached to a strand of spider silk and apparently growing along it.
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
this
A line of white chalk cliffs with (incorrect) caption "White Cliffs of Dover, England"
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Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Microsoft's Windows lockscreen features iconic landscapes around the world. Today it's a local spot: the Seven Sisters cliffs and the coastguard cottages in East Sussex. Sadly MS mislabels the scene as the white cliffs of Dover, which are about 50 miles up the coast (and not as beautiful IMHO).
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