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Tony Durham

@rhamdu.bsky.social

46 followers 87 following 470 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 · 7h

I nominate the person who renamed WH Smith as TG Jones for the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Only kidding.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 9h

Damn, my laptop battery died again. Suddenly apps grab their stuff and leg it faster than a drug gang during a bust.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 10h

Excellent book by @neurograce.bsky.social , accessible but not dumbed down. The math takes a back seat during a tour of important historic and current research in neuroscience. Even if you know parts of the story you may find new insights and connections. GL has a good nose for neurononsense.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 14h

...and I know that has its own problems. One of my own children took two first degrees, in different subjects. While studying for the second he was both a graduate and an undergraduate.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 14h

I'm not here to copy-edit the internet, or even the FT. But I wondered if a leading statistician could offer a less oxymoronic formulation than 'undergraduate degree'. We don't call birth certificates 'fetus certificates'. When I was an education journalist, I usually plumped for 'first degree'.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 1d

(On tiptoe) added to my must-read-properly pile.
From a skim, I can at least see that this long article asks some very good and deep questions. The ghosts of Kant and Helmholtz look on.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 1d

@stimoo.bsky.social Never been to #DelftHolkand but I have lovely musician friends there.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 1d

The key was locked in the box. How did the sage unlock the box?
The sage wae inside the box.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 2d

Clearly President Trump gets some credit for the Gaza ceasefire, but this does not suddenly put him on the right side of history.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 2d

Sure. I am feeding your draft into ChatGPT right now and you'll have my comments in 30 minutes.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 2d

The economy isn't growing because WE ARE NOT DRINKING ENOUGH. Seems legit.

Guardian front page with headline 'Ministers commit to overhaul of licensing laws in push for growth'.
Image from https://www.tomorrowspapers.co.uk/

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 2d

People with no humility should be reincarnated as naked mole rats and given the job of toilet cleaner for life.
You can't say there are no obvious candidates.

Chris Simms @chrisnsimms.bsky.social · 2d

Naked mole-rat workers may have specific roles, such as cleaning the toilet chamber or transporting waste, rather than being generalist helpers. The findings suggest their colonies are even more complex than we thought. 🧪 #animals #zoology #nature

www.livescience.com/animals/land...

Some naked mole rats are designated toilet cleaners, study suggests

Naked mole rats may have specific roles, such as cleaning the toilet chamber or transporting waste, rather than being generalist helpers. The findings suggest naked-mole-rat colonies are even more com...

www.livescience.com

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 2d

Nice guitar-piano duel.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 4d

OK, I get that. I don't think I could sit down and code up a task decomposer on the information provided, but I guess today's news is that an LLM can save me the trouble. Which is actually quite remarkable.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 4d

App/feature that surely must exist already. Facial recognition emoji selector. Make a face or gesture into your camera, and a matching emoji is inserted in your text.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 4d

Scary, huh? Money now. Or we vaporise your data.
At first I thought this might be one of the endless wrongly-addressed emails that I get: legit message, typo @. But Chrome says the link is insecure (no https). So perhaps this is a straightforward boring old phishing attempt.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 4d

To clarify. Recursive intelligence isn't necessarily a bottomless rabbit hole. If 'be clever' has an end condition, where no more clever stuff is required, you've got yourself a cognitive architecture.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 4d

This is super interesting and, I'm sure, super legit. But when modules have labels like 'task decomposer' and 'orchestrator' I am inevitably on the lookout for what Turvey called 'intelligence loans'.
You know. When the algorithm for 'be clever' includes a recursive call to 'be clever'.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 4d

What us jazzers don't say out loud to our pop and classical colleagues.

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 4d

The usual explanation for great music is that it's predictable but not too predictable. But there's more to it, said @frosas.bsky.social at #ALIFE2025. We prefer music when we perceive agency behind it. Improvisation trumps a prepared performance. See paper at www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy.... ⚙️🧫

Reposted by Tony Durham

Nicole Rust @nicolecrust.bsky.social · 5d

At least in systems neuro, there's a strong sense of excitement. It's the opposite of "papers and research projects could have been done 15 years ago". New ways to measure things we've never been able to before - dynamical systems; connectome constraints. New ideas about how brains/minds work.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 6d

Everybody gives different descriptions but it's hard to know whether they are having different experiences or just using different language. Perhaps the vividness scale should go up to 11 for a godlike experience of the full 3-dimensionality of things.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 8d

During religious services at school, I amused myself by flying imaginary aircraft around the chapel, diving from the roof, skimming the floor of the aisle, zooming between the rows of the choir. It must really suck to only imagine things inside your head.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 8d

Douglas Hofstadter designed an object which cast 3 different shadows. This object would presumably appear as E, G and B in 3 suitably placed mirrors. Admittedly no two of those letters form a symmetric pair (and only 2 out of any 3 letters ever could).

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 8d

Isn't this entire dumpster fire fuelled by dualism? My sense of existential freedom is supposed to be enhanced if 'I' can make random choices. But the same sense of freedom is infringed if 'I' believe that 'my body' or 'my brain' is behaving randomly.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 9d

Off the wall question. Anyone on your team interested in boat design? The boat isn't just a wind-powered conveyance. It's an instrument through which the navigator senses the state of sea and wind, in great detail. Which features of the boat design contribute to that?