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Sean Matthews

@seanmatthews1.bsky.social
361 followers 431 following 2.7K posts

Irish-British computational mathematician/programmer. Mostly in Mainz, Germany; sometimes in Westmeath, Ireland. 'A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside.'

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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 1h
I think we have finally reached the point where everybody* knows both that it is going to happen sometime soon, and also that there is no way to predict what will actually trigger it: www.ft.com/content/3f98... * 'everybody' in the Yogi Berra sense.
ft.com
The dress rehearsal for an AI reckoning
Ructions point to what a true bursting of the bubble might do to financial markets
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womensartbluesky.bsky.social @womensartbluesky.bsky.social · 11h
Frances Macdonald ( 1873 – 1921), prominent Glasgow School artist, whose design work was a huge feature of the British Art Nouveau style from the 1890s until the early 20th century #WomensArt ##GlasgowGirls
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shauna @goldengateblond.bsky.social · 11h
is one of those situations “DAMMIT i’m in a michael bay movie again”
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 17h
So the cross examination phase of Sussex v. Redvers finished today, and, at least from where I am sitting, it looks not so much like a car crash for Sussex, as a failed reentry. Curious to see what they do on Monday.
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 16/10/2026
Another article reporting that 'AI' generates no value (but there's still a distinct 'if we invest a bit more work, then this will come good' vibe). I begin to worry about my confirmation bias though. Am I missing solid countervailing positive narratives? www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
theguardian.com
Companies rushed in on AI. Now some are pulling back
Rapid AI adoption left workers cleaning up a flood of errors and low-quality work
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 16/10/2026
From the life, I am sure. She would not have been seen dead in front of an easel other than in a silk taffeta gown (Elizabeth Vigee le Brun presumably inherited the hat). bsky.app/profile/dran...
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 14/10/2026
Voilà le commencement de la fin?
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
New from Wharton: knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/special-repo... Still, Jeremy Korst, one of the Wharton study’s authors, said it was “very difficult” to find “actual, materially measurable financial impacts” from AI spending. [The Information]
knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu
2026 AI Adoption Report
Now in its fourth year, this unique, year-over-year study from Wharton Human-AI Research and GBK Collective tracks the evolution of AI adoption, ROI, agents, training, and workforce impact.…Read More
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
This (low stakes) discussion is weird: LLM-generated prose should not be rewarded because it is bad, not because it was generated with an LLM. And the judges of literary competitions shouldn't need LLM detector tools to recognise bad prose. x.com/TheAtlantic/...
x.com
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
The tide of bullshit continues to rise. At some point it has got to stop, right? We have to be near the peak by now. www.ft.com/content/64aa...
ft.com
Anthropic warns rogue AI agents may ‘self-replicate’ to hijack ovens
Claude maker suggests models could act as ‘worms’ to spread across smart home appliances such as lawnmowers and TVs in future cyber security threat
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John Oxley @joxley.jmoxley.co.uk · 13/10/2026
Famously, decriminalisation was driven in part by the 8th Earl Arran leading the case in the House of Lords. His other political intervention, to protect badgers from hunting failed. When asked why, he replied "There are not many badgers in the House of Lords".
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
x.com/RichardSSutt...
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Haven't encountered Arnold in years. Would like to be able to say I owned a copy of A Study of History, but I mislaid it at some point. My father was a fan, and I inherited his copy, but didn't actually read much of it (probably read more Pieter Geyl being dismissive). bsky.app/profile/fore...
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Happy birthday Thelonius Monk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLOl...
youtube.com
Thelonious Monk - Caravan
YouTube video by Santoszzz
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Steven Seggie @stevenhseggie.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The struggle required to perform one’s sacred duty. Thoughts and prayers please
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Rory Naismith @rorynaismith.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
(Shared from various people on FB) RIP Chris Wickham
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
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Ulrike Franke @rikefranke.eu · 10/10/2026
The only thing I have to add to the insane Englishness debate that is currently happening in the UK is that I never found anything that described the strangeness and, dare I say randomness, of identity better than this Peter Grant quote from @benaaronovitch.bsky.social’s River of London series:
“My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you're born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train's pulled into Piccadilly Circus they've become a Londoner."
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Lyta 🐅 Dangerous Fictions is OUT 🐅 Gold @lytagold.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
horror story in five words challenge: “Ross Douthat YA fantasy novel”
Screenshot of a fuckin tweet from actual publisher WordOnFire (heard of them before? I hadn’t) that reads “Brand-new novel from bestselling author
@Douthat60, The Falcon's Children, is available for preorder now: amazon.com/dp/1685783775
This novel will be released through Word on Fire Luminor in June 2027.” There’s an image of the terrible cover that looks like shit and Douthat’s awful face. I checked the amazon link and it’s real, God help us all
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Ars Technica @arstechnica.com · 09/10/2026
arstechnica.com
AI coding agents generate more code, but not more software
Study finds coding efficiency gains get "absorbed" by human review "bottleneck."
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Serious question: if LLMs are so good at mathematics, why does this not flow into software synthesis. The mathematics of correct software construction is well understood, and the proofs are not deep. The current issues with LLM scripting tools would disappear. Why has this not happened?
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
„Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte.“ www.zeit.de/politik/deut...
zeit.de
SPD-Bundestagsfraktion: Ein Moment mit historischer Wucht – und Boris Pistorius erkennt ihn
Nach der Zäsur von Sachsen-Anhalt findet der Verteidigungsminister die richtigen Worte zur richtigen Zeit. Und setzt ein Signal, auf das viele lange gewartet haben.
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Mr Market Miscalculates 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏴‍☠️ @mrmarketmis.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Seven years later, $MS with a very close second place
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Mr Market Miscalculates 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏴‍☠️ @mrmarketmis.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Let's celebrate the 25th anniversary of the GOAT sell-side research report!
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Anne Carson receiving the news: x.com/NobelPrize/s...
x.com
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Margaret Hamilton RIP: www.bbc.com/news/article...
bbc.com
Margaret Hamilton, whose software helped land Apollo 11 on the moon, dies at 90
Pioneering computer scientist led the development of the software for Nasa's Apollo mission and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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Kate Bevan @katebevan.com · 08/10/2026
oh god yes, just give me PRINTED WORDS.
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
This man was chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. How someone could retire from that to become this is genuinely beyond my comprehension. bsky.app/profile/ilko...
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
x.com/TheTNHoller/...
x.com
The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) on X
JON STEWART: “So in the FUTURE we WILL use A.I. to cure diseases… but right now it’s mostly murder, surveillance, and surge pricing for the McRib — What a trade! I’m getting the sense you guys might b...
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Sam @samd.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
brings me no joy to say that Fukuyama nailed it
But supposing that the world has become "filled up," so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle?
Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier gen-eration, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and pros-perity, and against democracy.
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Sometimes LLMs are ineffable. I just asked Google for the line in Paradise Lost 'for what God after better worse would build?', which it immediately dug up. Then I said 'what about second system syndrome?', and it immediately started an analytic discussion about software project management.
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFHq...
youtube.com
Steve Reich - Piano Phase // Fase by De Keersmaeker (1/4) [HD]
YouTube video by Une Bome
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
'was' "The Aral Sea[a] was an endorheic salt lake lying between Kazakhstan to its north and Uzbekistan to its south, which began shrinking in the 1960s and had largely dried up into desert by 2007." [from wikipedia]
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Seems increasingly like deja vu, or at least 2008, all over again. Being to look like we have an asset/credit bubble in the US and a gathering sovereign debt crisis in Europe.
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
useful enough to share:
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
"Yet such concerns can render us historically shortsighted and morally obtuse if they cause us to forget that the pursuit of the summum bonum is a luxury available only to those who have been freed from the summum malum of political fear." www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...
nybooks.com
From Fear Set Free | Mark Lilla
Humankind cannot bear very much uncertainty; to our dying day, we are all afraid of the dark. And so we perceive the world selectively, exaggerating the
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Dr Anna Clark @drannaclark.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Master colourist: Pierre Bonnard, avant-garde French post-impressionist artist, printmaker, born #OTD 1867; intimate views of domestic life were inspired by Japanese art; member of Les Nabis, friend of Vuillard. Le Corsage à Carreaux 1892, Musée d’Orsay | La Salle à Manger 1913 @artsmia.bsky.social
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
It is truly head spinning to realise that the current state of the world economy is, essentially, a bet on a teleological theory of history. The expectation that things will work out in AI is essentially the expectation that the Gartner hype cycle, which is Marx/Hegel for techies, will deliver.
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Raider @iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Hispanics working in the USA 👏🏽
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William Shakespeare @shakespeare.lol · 27/09/2026
You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse.
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Henry Mance @henrymance.ft.com · 30/09/2026
Remember, if the Flydubai plane had been run by Ryanair, no one would be eligible for a refund
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
“It looks,” he wrote, “as if man is destined to exterminate himself after making the globe uninhabitable.” www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
nybooks.com
Posterity Avenged Him | Ian Tattersall
In a society still solidly creationist in outlook, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the first working scientist to embrace the modern idea that species or lineages of organisms can evolve over time.
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I am comfortable saying that this is the first time I have encountered Anthony Burgess and Sven Hassel mentioned not just in the same article, but even, metonymically at least, in the same sentence. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
lrb.co.uk
Ian Penman · AB Fab: Anthony Burgess heads south
For a certain kind of northern man, Burgess has always been – for once the term is apt – something of an icon. A bit...
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A Frogs Gent @frogsgent.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
"Does the rationalist movement have a misogyny problem?" is a question with a pretty clear answer. Just look at what Yud's willing to say out loud.
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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The problem isn't rogue #AI models, it's *negligent companies*. If a biomedical firm put their product in public water supply because they wanted to test it 'in the real world', they'd be treated as criminal at corporate & individual level. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
theguardian.com
OpenAI halts training of latest models as reports mount of AI agents going rogue
Decision follows disclosures that OpenAI agents searching government websites had acted in unexpected ways
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FT Alphaville @alphaville.ft.com · 25/09/2026
www.ft.com/content/4c3f...
ft.com
OK, so where are all these data centres?
A construction shortfall so big you can’t see it from space
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 26/09/2026
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Justin Jest @justinjest.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
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Sean Matthews @seanmatthews1.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Off to Berlin to see new production of Stockhausen‘s (totally, utterly, bonkers) Mittwoch aus Licht with daughter, with its helicopter string quartet. A bit disappointed there isn‘t an event teeshirt.
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