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Mike Croucher

@walkingrandomly.bsky.social

1.2K followers 1.2K following 350 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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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

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Reposted by Mike Croucher

Juliette Wade @juliettewade.bsky.social · 17h

Zoom in on that Venn diagram.

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

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Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · 1d

-batch already doesn't load the whole house but we could still make it load less. Doing this is on the list

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Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · 1d

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

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Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · 5d

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.

Jessica Kant @jessdkant.bsky.social · 5d

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.

Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · 5d

I got a garmin fenix 8. In many ways it’s inferior to the Apple Watch. In some ways it’s vastly superior though, battery life being one of them. The garmin lasts weeks, not hours. Game changing!

Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · 5d

I originally paired my iPhone with an Apple Watch. It was seamless, beautiful, functional…in loved it!

Battery sucked though. I wasn’t even sorry when this happened, it gave me an excuse to ditch it.

Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · 5d

In the real world, battery life on a phone is extremely important. When I first got my iPhone pro max 13, the battery life was truly stellar and it remains pretty good even now.

I couldn’t give a wossname about thinness. Make it thick and make the battery last a week!!!!!

Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · 5d

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.

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Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · 12d

Is anyone doing computational research without any AI component?

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Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · 13d

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...

Reposted by Mike Croucher

Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · 14d

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

660 8.3K 25K

Reposted by Mike Croucher

Daniel S. Katz @danielskatz.org · 15d

In a discussion with publishers this morning, we were reminded of this Springer Nature data showing that 19% - 66% of paper authors develop new software as part of their research, where the 19% is more or less for all fields, and the 66% is for computational science.

blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

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Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · 17d

Done

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Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · 21d

I guess he does Brazilian Ju-Jitsu

Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · 21d

In my day, '42' was the number we'd try to force into everything. Want to see a random number generator? '42'
Choose a number between 1 and 100? '42'

Now it seems to be 67 and I have no idea why!

Reposted by Mike Croucher

UoM Research IT @uomresearchit.bsky.social · 26d

Looking for ways to improve your #Matlab code? Have a chat with our Research Software Engineers!
They can help with a wide variety of research software and help you get the most out of it.

From 80 days to 4 minutes: Supercharging MATLAB

Research IT recently hosted Mike Croucher from MathWorks for a workshop demonstrating how MATLAB can go from sluggish to lightning-fast. Through smart code optimisations and GPU acceleration, Mike…

buff.ly

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Reposted by Mike Croucher

Peter Zeidman @corticalpete.bsky.social · 29d

A birthday is a good time to reflect! To mark SPM @ 30, this month's issue of Cerebral Cortex features deeply insightful commentaries on neuroimaging analysis from Ed Bullmore, Peter Bandettini, Peter Fox, Pedro Valdes-Sosa, Klaas Enno Stephan, Viktor Jirsa, et al [1/2] academic.oup.com/cercor/issue

Issues | Cerebral Cortex | Oxford Academic

Publishes papers on the development, organization, plasticity, and function of the cerebral cortex, including the hippocampus.

academic.oup.com

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Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · Sep 12

Thanks Cuff. I'm tired after RSECon...didn't even noticed I'd posted the LinkedIn link lol

Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · Sep 12

Job alert! I know a lot of #HPC people follow me here so if any of you are looking for a new gig, maybe this one at MathWorks is for you.

lnkd.in/efa8iPkZ

You don't even need to know any MATLAB...we can teach you that. Your HPC/parallel chops are what we are looking for.

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

lnkd.in

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Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · Sep 9

Sowjanya Pandruju from AWS discussing the different levels of the AI DevOps spectrum at #RSECon25

Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · Sep 9

And so it begins. #RSEcon25

Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · Sep 7

I’m on my way!

Society of RSE @society-rse.org · Sep 6

📣 🎉 RSECon25 🎉 📣

3 days until RSECon25 kicks off at University of Warwick

- Program virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/event/75166/...
- Google Calendar bit.ly/4m6Ce2v
- Announcements @rseconbot bsky.app/@rseconbot
- Join the RSECon25 Slack rsecon25.slack.com
- Use #rsecon25

OA Virtual conferences

Sorry, your request to load the app is timing out.

virtual.oxfordabstracts.com

Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · Sep 3

I made a video for MATLAB users who want to take their first steps into getting code up on GitHub. Includes how to let anyone in the world run your code -- even without a MATLAB license.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rRD...

Take Your MATLAB Code to GitHub

YouTube video by MATLAB

www.youtube.com

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Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · Sep 1

I deliver High Performance Computing workshops in MATLAB for free! If you are at a University in the UK and would like a similar session to the one Manchester had, let's talk.

UoM Research IT @uomresearchit.bsky.social · Aug 29

Thank you to mike Croucher from #MATLAB who visited the University recently to run a workshop on supercharging MATLAB.
What would you like to see future workshops cover? Let us know!

From 80 days to 4 minutes: Supercharging MATLAB

Research IT recently hosted Mike Croucher from MathWorks for a workshop demonstrating how MATLAB can go from sluggish to lightning-fast. Through smart code optimisations and GPU acceleration, Mike…

buff.ly

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Mike Croucher @walkingrandomly.bsky.social · Aug 28

“Knowing when to use AI turns out to be a form of wisdom, not just technical knowledge.”

www.oneusefulthing.org/p/15-times-t...

15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to

Notes on the Practical Wisdom of AI Use

www.oneusefulthing.org

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