Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Aidan Kelly

DESIGN THINKING! Comic @designthinking.lol · 11h

With the AWS outage, now‘s as good a time as any to post this old strip.

12 890 2.2K

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · 10h

Link to the article piece: www.nesta.org.uk/feature/miss...

Mission Radar: emerging trends and signals in affordable low-carbon heating

Innovations to improve the affordability of low-carbon heating

www.nesta.org.uk

1

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · 10h

🏛️ Policy trends:
Electricity price reduction is climbing the policy agenda. Recent debate has centred on long-term ways to bring down prices for households and businesses. That’s key to helping heat pumps compete with gas boilers on running costs. (7/7)

1 2

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · 10h

This combined heat pumps, community energy storage, EV car clubs and solar panels to cut bills and upfront costs. (6/7)

1 1

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · 10h

🔬 Research funding:
UK research has shifted from optimising heat pumps to green finance, mirroring the investment trend.

Example: Rossendale Borough Council received over £2 million for a place-based decarbonisation demonstrator in terraced streets. (5/7)

1

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · 10h

IKEA: Meatballs, flat-packs and now heat pumps. The company is now offering heat pumps in several European countries, including the UK since late September, through partnerships with manufacturers such as Aira. (4/7)

1 1

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · 10h

💡 Venture funding:
Finance for low-carbon heating is getting a green light from investors. Global investment in 2025 rose sharply for businesses offering loans and financial products to support uptake. (3/7)

1

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · 10h

In this edition, we looked at innovations to make low-carbon heating more affordable, a key barrier in our mission to decarbonise home heating in the UK. (2/7)

1 1

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · 10h

Happy to share my first piece of analysis work with the Discovery team at @nestauk.bsky.social on 𝗠𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗥𝗮𝗱𝗮𝗿!

The Mission Radar is a briefing series on innovation signals and emerging trends in Nesta’s missions. We use AI to scan for innovation across business, academia and policy. (1/7)

Mission Radar chart (a type of bubble chart) for Nesta's "A sustainable future" mission, updated Q2 2025.

The radar is divided into four quadrants representing categories of innovation: "Ventures and investments" (top right), "Research funding" (bottom right), "Policy" (bottom left), and an unlabeled top-left quadrant (representing trends that are not primarily investment, funding, or policy). A dashed vertical line separates signals in the "Policy" and unlabeled quadrant from those in "Ventures and investments" and "Research funding."

Blips are positioned based on time to expected impact, from the center outwards: "0-2 years," "3-5 years," and "5+ years."

Blip size indicates potential impact on home decarbonisation, with larger blips signifying greater expected impact and smaller blips signifying smaller or more niche impact.

Main Trends and Findings (Blips):

Venture and Investment (High Impact, Short/Medium Term):
Ikea heat pumps (Small, 0-2 years)
Digital platform for local installers (Medium, 0-2 years)
Energy-as-a-service (Small, 0-2 years)
Retail investment in green finance ventures (Medium, 3-5 years)
Research Funding (Medium Impact, Short/Medium Term):
Turbo air-source heat pump (Medium, 0-2 years)
Net zero terrace streets (Medium, 3-5 years)
Community operated energy infrastructure (Small, 3-5 years)
Policy (Medium/High Impact, Short Term):
Increased government publications on electricity prices (Medium, 0-2 years)
Increased references to electricity prices in debates (Small, 0-2 years)
Top-Left Quadrant (High Impact, Medium Term):
One large, dark blip is visible in the 3-5 years range.
Source: Nesta's analysis of innovation trends. Companies and research projects included are those identified in Q2 2025. Blip size and positioning determined by expert judgement.

1 1 2

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · 1d

What a really interesting conversation between two of my favourite people in AI in the form of @karpathy.bsky.social and @dwarkesh.bsky.social. I wish more ppl in this space took the same approach in terms of being open to debate, challenge and overall being humble.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXUZ...

Andrej Karpathy — “We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals”

YouTube video by Dwarkesh Patel

www.youtube.com

1

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · 15d

The author doesn't really address the wider implications of deterministic LLMs, but can imagine the reproducibility of outputs could be very powerful in terms of trust.

Link to the blog: thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeati...

(6/6)

Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference

Reproducibility is a bedrock of scientific progress. However, it’s remarkably difficult to get reproducible results out of large language models. For example, you might observe that asking ChatGPT the...

thinkingmachines.ai

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · 15d

Used ChatGPT in study and think mode as well as prompting it to use socratic questioning to really improve my understanding of this area. (5/6)

1

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · 15d

They've managed to create deterministic LLMs at inference time with some penalties for efficiency, but the results are pretty cool. I found their blog quite a long read, as I had little familiarity around the intricacies of these calculations and how they relate to GPUs. (4/6)

1

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · 15d

However there are different strategies to get around this, e.g. running sums over single cores in a GPU. This is what 'Thinking Machines' have been doing with implementing batch-invariant calculations for LLMs. (3/6)

1

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · 15d

This is caused by something called floating point non-associativity. In Maths, we can do (a+b)+c =a+(b+c) but this is not the case when doing calculations in computers, the order matters. (2/6)

1

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · 15d

So theoretically LLMs can be deterministic if we set their temperature to zero, but in practice they aren't. This comes down to how we do calculations such as matrix multiplication at inference time. It turns out the order you do these calculations in does matter. (1/6)

1

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · 28d

Does anyone have cool (or boring) agentic use-cases that they've read about or used?

Doing some horizon scanning work to see what's out there but thought my bluesky network might have ideas!

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · Sep 12

That's what we are building with Nesta's Policy Atlas tool!

Read about our alpha tool user testing and what's next for the project, here: www.nesta.org.uk/project-upda... (2/2)

Harnessing AI to positively disrupt policymaking

Lessons learned from our user research

www.nesta.org.uk

1

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · Sep 12

What if there was an AI-powered tool that allowed policymakers to rapidly identify the most effective policies to tackle any given social challenge, based on the latest evidence? (1/2)

1 1

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · Aug 29

This was a fun ML problem to tackle, underlined some of the data quality issues with EPCs (92% of the storey count field was missing) 😅.

Think the conclusion around the distinct heating strategies needed for areas with different rise types is definitely a salient one!

Andrew Sissons @acjsissons.bsky.social · Aug 29

How are *flats* in England and Wales heated?
It's a surprisingly interesting question, and my Nesta colleagues Roisin Gorman and @helloaidank.bsky.social have been looking into it...

www.nesta.org.uk/project-upda...

Chart showing heating systems in flats by number of storeys in the building. Low rise flats are mainly heated by fossil fuels (boilers), but as they get taller fossil fuels gets rarer, in favour of electricity or other heat sources (unknown is probably mainly communal heating systems)...

1

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · Aug 29

Favourite feature from the GPT-5 release is being able to quickly spin out different UIs (which can be previewed), make easy edits without needing to manually edit JS code myself. It's pretty good at instruction following now too!

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · Aug 22

Some Friday evening listening a l'italiano 🇮🇹: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL1s...

L'italiano

YouTube video by Toto Cutugno - Topic

www.youtube.com

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · Aug 7

OpenAIs graphs against humanity for their release of GPT-5 is just *chefs kiss*. We've achieved PhD level intelligence but watch us make graphs where 50 < 47

3

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · Aug 4

What a ridiculous state of affairs. Terence Tao one of the greatest mathematicians of his generation getting his grants suspended 💩

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · Jul 31

For the math folks on here: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant. www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

NSF Award Search: Award # 2347850

Structure theory for measure-preserving systems, additive combinatorics, and correlations of multiplicative functions

www.nsf.gov

Aidan Kelly @helloaidank.bsky.social · Jun 10

Brilliant news and about time!

Jessica Elgot @jessicaelgot.bsky.social · Jun 10

The biggest nuclear programme in a generation will “get Britain off the fossil fuel rollercoaster”, the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, has said, announcing £14.2bn to build a new nuclear power station and a drive to build small modular reactors.

www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Sizewell C power station to be built as part of UK’s £14bn nuclear investment

Ed Miliband promises to ‘get Britain off the fossil fuel rollercoaster’ with new plant expected to create 10,000 jobs

www.theguardian.com

1 7