Particle-physics prof at Glasgow Physics & Astronomy. Author of those physics codes you like, and that one you don't. Enthusiast for dirty QCD physics, data re-use, model-independent searches, and computational statistics.
Also: child owner, mountain climber/biker/skier/etc. when poss, drummer, busy. Recovering Norn Irish. Still trying to be a Really Useful Engine.
| Web (work) | http://www.ppe.gla.ac.uk/~abuckley/ |
| Web (personal) | https://www.insectnation.org/ |
| Location | Glasgow / Geneva |
@timnitGebru @jonny it also reads like code if “no humans actually talked to each other or coordinated their work in any way”
As a product (and past project) manager I often tell people that the main job of real programmers is communicating with otber humans. The code is the easy part.
Deciding what the code should (and should not do) and coordinating everyone’s efforts is the hard stuff.
But also how you avoid everyone reinventing (badly) the same functionality and how you avoid crunches
@prietschka @timnitGebru Nah, this too shall pass. Half the industry runs off down blind alleys every 5-10 years or so, and the rest of us just carry on in spite of the latest bullshit fad.
On the code quality front, too - jesus wept, that's a never-ending uphill battle through a river of shit 😂 These GenAI kiddies will tire themselves out soon enough and we can just quietly plod along, doing a good job and preventing the worst excesses harming our systems.
@gwozniak @timnitGebru When you have to plead with your LLM to "pretend you're a superhero," or whatever it is people are doing these days, we've long gone through the looking glass.
We've been at the level of New Age crystal ooga booga nonsense for ages with this technology, it's insane anyone takes any of this seriously. I feel like I live inside an opium hallucination.
Anthropic's Claude Code's full source code leaked. Claude is seen by many to be the best coding LLM on the market with Anthropic proudly stating that Claude Code itself is mostly written by the LLM.
Now this sounds good as long as nobody can see the code which is quite the trash fire. Detecting "code sentiment" via regular expressions, variable and functions names containing prompt parts trying to influence the bot, a completely intransparent mess of a control flow that makes actual maintenance and debugging functionally impossible and the prompts ... of the prompts. All the begging and pleading to the chatbot not to do this or not to do that or please to do this.
It is fascinating but it is as far away from actual engineering as drunkenly pissing your name in the snow. Dunno what you call the people prompting software at Anthropic but "engineer" is not it.
Now it is fun to look at the currently hyped product striped bare and showing its pathetic quality but that is the future of software if we let those companies continue to undermine every good practice software engineering has tried establishing.
The software we have to use will be bad, insecure, unmaintainable, expensive with nobody having the skills or resources to build something better. As I wrote a few months ago: LLM based software production is equivalent to saying that fast fashion should be the only way to produce clothing. A tragic degeneration of the quality of the artefacts we rely on build for maximum profit on the backs of people in countries from the global majority.
What's anthropic going to do, sue them? Insist in court that LLM recreating copyrighted code is a violation of copyright???
A priest, a pastor and a rabbit walked in to a blood donation clinic.
The nurse asked the rabbit: “What is your blood type?”
“I am probably a type O”, said the rabbit.
Good, sympathetic interview with the newest Green MP, Hannah Spencer from the Starmer friendly Guardian. Something is changing...
#GreenParty #UKPolitics #HannahSpencer
‘Wow, people were so angry at Labour!’ Green MP Hannah Spencer on politics, plumbing, smears and snobbery | Hannah Spencer | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/mar/30/wow-people-were-so-angry-at-labour-green-mp-hannah-spencer-on-politics-plumbing-smears-and-snobbery
The 34-year-old plumber last month secured the Green party its first byelection victory and a record fifth concurrent MP. She discusses the problem with career politicians – and being screamed at by voters
Dammit, Jeremy Bowen is great.
Shannon Clark
Brad Macpherson
Paul Rietschka
Hasani Hunter
tante
jonny (good kind)
Adam Smith
Lady Laura 
JuneSim63 💚
Ian Betteridge