Mike Croucher
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walkingrandomly.bsky.social
Mike Croucher
@walkingrandomly.bsky.social
1.2K followers 1.2K following 370 posts
I’m here to discuss Mathematics, Research Software Engineering, Machine Learning and #HPC.

I was @walkingrandomly on twitter

Now a Community Developer Advocate at MathWorks.
Author of The MATLAB Blog.
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walkingrandomly.bsky.social
Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · Nov 25
The #HPC starter pack has been used by many people new to BlueSky who want to immediately start following a decent cross-section of the HPC community

go.bsky.app/7NSBuP1
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
I just bench pressed 120kg for the first time in my life. I’m 48.

I’m happy!
February 5, 2026 at 8:52 PM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
Interesting article on AI Coding Assistants where the author suggests that they are getting worse and that maybe its partially the fault of all the newbies using them leading to bad training data.

spectrum.ieee.org/ai-coding-de...

What's your experience?
January 30, 2026 at 2:24 PM
Reposted by Mike Croucher
arstechnica.com
The free AI-powered workspace for scientists has drawn immediate skepticism from researchers who fear the tool will accelerate the already overwhelming flood of low-quality papers into scientific journals.
New OpenAI tool renews fears that “AI slop” will overwhelm scientific research
New "Prism" workspace launches just as studies show AI-assisted papers are flooding journals with diminished quality.
arstechnica.com
January 29, 2026 at 9:35 PM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
My desktop PC is 5 years old and showing its age.
What do you suggest I look at for a new machine for scientific computing?

The current specs are
- Intel i7-11700 with 32GB RAM
- NVIDIA RTX 3070 GPU
- 1TB SSD + 1TB HDD disk space
January 8, 2026 at 7:09 PM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
I caved in and bought an air fryer.

So far I am deeply unimpressed. Deeply!

Hoping that its because I haven’t figured out how to use it properly yet and not because it was an overrated piece of tat.
December 21, 2025 at 9:08 PM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
I have done absolutely nothing today! It was glorious and I highly recommend it.
December 13, 2025 at 3:45 PM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
This article from The Guardian discusses many of my own concerns about AI right now:

Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’
AI research in question as author claims to have written over 100 papers on AI that one expert calls a ‘disaster’
www.theguardian.com
December 7, 2025 at 4:15 AM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
My current use for ChatGPT is translating the gen Z slang that my step daughter uses when she texts me
December 6, 2025 at 1:46 PM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
Needed to do a computer thing so opened my notes file HowToDoThing.md it contained one line:

TODO: Write detailed notes about thing.

Sometimes I hate lazy, past Mike!
homer simpson from the simpsons is driving a car and says d' oh
ALT: homer simpson from the simpsons is driving a car and says d' oh
media.tenor.com
December 4, 2025 at 7:48 PM
Reposted by Mike Croucher
hpcnotes.bsky.social
In what is now a solid tradition, the most important post-SC event ... publication of Glenn's SC notes!

#HPC #SC25 #supercomputing #HPCignites
glennklockwood.com Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · Dec 1
I wrote up my notes from #SC25. Have a look: blog.glennklockwood.com/2025/12/sc25...

I’ll keep picking away at the editing, but would love to hear more from others about what stood out to them. I wasn’t at the conference itself as much this years as in the past, so I know I missed a lot.

#HPC
SC'25 recap
The annual SC conference was held last week, drawing over 16,000 registrants and 560 exhibitors to in St. Louis, Missouri to talk ab...
blog.glennklockwood.com
December 1, 2025 at 7:47 PM
Reposted by Mike Croucher
lendot.bsky.social
OK, this turned out to be a totally unexpected and really cool restoration technique. Physicists! MATLAB! Transfer film! Laser cutter!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1vm...
Retouching Made Easy. No, Really!
YouTube video by Baumgartner Restoration
www.youtube.com
November 17, 2025 at 10:30 PM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
#SC25 was the best one I’ve ever attended….and not just because I got to meet Thor.
Mike Croucher with Thor
November 20, 2025 at 10:27 PM
Reposted by Mike Croucher
drannek.bsky.social
Our toolbox got published in the @joss-openjournals.bsky.social!
joss-openjournals.bsky.social Journal of Open Source Software @joss-openjournals.bsky.social · Nov 16
Just published in JOSS: 'BioMAC-Sim-Toolbox: A MATLAB toolbox for biomechanical motion analysis and creation through simulation' https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.07945
November 17, 2025 at 11:56 AM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
If you’re in St Louis for #SC25 I highly recommend going up the arch. Here’s one of the views from the top where you can also see its shadow
The arch at St Louis View from the arch at St Louis
November 17, 2025 at 2:26 PM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
Have spent most of the day travelling to #SC25 and am just about to start the final leg. Taking off from Atlanta on my way to St Louis
November 15, 2025 at 10:04 PM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
Are you going to be at #SC25? Want to connect with a large subset of the #HPC community with one click? The #HPC starter pack is what you need! bsky.app/starter-pack...
bsky.app
November 10, 2025 at 7:51 PM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
MathWorks release MATLAB MCP Core server

In the video below you are watching Claude read a file on my local machine and use my local install of MATLAB to analyze it. Claude writes the MATLAB code,puts it on my machine and runs it using my copy of MATLAB

Article: blogs.mathworks.com/matlab/2025/...
November 5, 2025 at 2:28 PM
Reposted by Mike Croucher
olivia.science
"We were raised to believe over the decades that machines will outgrow us[, but] automatons are not consuming the globe brilliantly. They are not outsmarting us—they are overfitting on us."

Snehamol Joseph & Jeena Joseph (2025)
Digital decay: when AI eats its own homework doi.org/10.1007/s001...
Unless AI is kept in check, it will not only eat its own homework but it will also eat its legibility. We will lose the skill to distinguish a composition of a type of work, a deliberate work, against a hybrid work, a piece of work, an argument, fabricated out of past fragments. Audiences will be conditioned to believe that good enough is good enough, until even mediocrity will seem like plenty. Culture will be turned into monocropped and deprived of nutrients. The creative commons will be exhausted. And as is soil when it is overfarmed, once lost, it will not be easily recovered. Let us not flatter ourselves. It is not that AI will soon surpass us in thinking, it is more likely that it will surpass us in boring. When we leave machines to eat their own homework we are not training a generation of geniuses but beige. The cry is straight: do not confuse abundance with richness, fluency with thought, content with creation. Surprise still matters. Originality is not luxury but lifeline. Unless we defend it, we will drown in competence without creation.
October 29, 2025 at 9:49 AM
Reposted by Mike Croucher
steveeddins.com
New blog post: Improved Registration Algorithm for IMREGCORR

Substantial improvements for function IMREGCORR, which registers image pairs using similarity, rigid, and translation transformations.

#matlab

www.steveeddins.com/blog/matlab/...
October 16, 2025 at 6:57 PM
Reposted by Mike Croucher
juliettewade.com
Zoom in on that Venn diagram.
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
October 15, 2025 at 8:06 AM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
Don't do this....
matlab -nodisplay -nosplash -nodesktop -r "myscript;exit"

Do this
matlab -nodisplay -batch myscript

Here's why
blogs.mathworks.com/matlab/2025/...

#MATLAB #HPC
October 14, 2025 at 3:30 PM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
I feel these vibes very strongly. I use LLMs all the time and understand them in much more detail than most of the people who insist I should use them more!

When I point out weaknesses of the tech, I get accused of being an anti tech luddite who doesn’t get it.
jessdkant.bsky.social Jessica Kant @jessdkant.bsky.social · Oct 10
One curious thing on this site about speaking out against the encroachment of LLMs is that inevitably you get accused of being anti-tech. I don’t hate technology. I’ve used machine learning in my own code before. But I also recognize that oligarchs are so hellbent on pushing this tech for a reason.
October 10, 2025 at 9:15 PM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
I held a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 recently and it was the first time in years that I had genuine gadget lust. I really wanted it!

I moved from android to iPhone a few years ago solely for improved battery life but this almost made me go back….almost.
October 10, 2025 at 8:51 PM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
Is anyone doing computational research without any AI component?
October 3, 2025 at 10:58 AM
walkingrandomly.bsky.social
The latest #MATLAB Pick of The Week is k-wave. An open source MATLAB Community Toolbox designed for time domain acoustic and ultrasound simulations in complex and tissue-realistic media. The associated paper has been cited over 2600 times

blogs.mathworks.com/pick/2025/09...
October 2, 2025 at 8:17 PM