Prof Les Carr
@lescarr
Followers
3K
Following
2K
Statuses
22K
Head of Web, AI & Society at @unisouthampton. Interdisciplinary open science research & science standup comedy. @[email protected]
United Kingdom
Joined March 2008
I’m a nerdy 59 yr-old guy with a computing and AI job at a university and a side hustle in standup comedy. I’m married to a writer and we have four grownup children, a border collie and a camper van.
2
0
11
@AmandaAskell @renegadesilicon I’m wary about crossing swords with a philosopher about “truth” and yet… training on “true examples” can’t generalise to “this is what truth looks like”.
0
0
1
I’m not exactly saying that the current combination of climate predications, right wing political movements and UK university finances is making me sh*t myself: I am saying that the Naked Sprout algorithm decided that now is the time to send me an extra box of loorolls.
0
0
4
I didn’t think I could love Taylor Tomlinson any more, but she recently hijacked her CBS show to fangirl over Better Man ❤️
0
0
0
“I’ll have an early night,” I said. “I need an early start tomorrow to finish marking and there’s nothing interesting playing out that I need to wait up for.” Colin Fraser:
Well, a mysterious benefactor has gifted me access to the OpenAI deep research tool. How accurately do you expect that it will perform this task? I gather from the marketing that it should be able to do this essentially perfectly.
0
0
1
Is intelligence a zero sum game? Because the more the language models develop, the dumber AI influencers sound. I’m genuinely worried that OpenAI is draining sense from the world.
1
0
2
The best career advice for computer scientists
@karpathy “Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” — John Woods
0
0
1
It’s turtles all the way down.
This is how o3-mini makes up information. It doesn't know anything about my new book, and it reveals this in the "reasoning." But it decides to make it up "given Burkov's reputation." In the final response, it doesn't say that it made it up, making it look like it is really talking about the new book and not extrapolating from the old book's reputation.
0
0
1
I was told that if you add an expletive to your Google search terms, it prevents the nauseating AI summaries from appearing. The trouble is, the search expands to prefer resources containing the expletive, so negate the swearing by prefixing a - (minus sign)
0
0
1
Looks like that man is doing to America what he did to Twitter.
It’s only the first day of February and democracy as we know it is basically over in the United States, as explained in this summary from @vermontgmg. I am not exaggerating. This is not ok.
0
1
2
@Identatron Wow! Have you settled on exactly the same Pantone number to use each time? (Not sure how hair colouring works.)
0
0
0
@colin_fraser “..turns out to be female, revealing she’s the man’s maternal cousin” *chefs kiss*
0
0
0
@Dannythefink @JDVance I wish I had realised that there is a public record of people’s IQ - it would have really helped me to add evidence to my ad hominem Twitter attacks.
1
0
4
For something to be open source it has to come from the CC0 region of the internet, otherwise it’s just sparkling IP.
For something to be open source, we need to see 1. Data it was trained & evaluated on 2. Code 3. Model architecture 4. Model weights. DeepSeek only gives 3, 4. And I'll see the day that anyone gives us #1 without being forced to do so, because all of them are stealing data.
0
1
1
@FoundSciTech @FeryalClark @NHM_London @turinginst @DameWendyDBE @royalsociety The site doesn’t say unless you register for in-person attendance, but it runs from 5:30pm to 9:30pm GMT.
0
0
0