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Matt Luckcuck

@mattluckcuck

(Slightly Less) Precarious Computer Scientist | Nullius in verba

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10.09.2023
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Latest posts by Matt Luckcuck @mattluckcuck

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Thousands of authors publish ‘empty’ book in protest over AI using their work About 10,000 writers including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman join copyright campaign

'About 10,000 writers have contributed to Don’t Steal This Book, in which the only content is a list of their names. Copies of the work are being distributed to attenders at the London book fair on Tuesday'. 1/2

10.03.2026 07:29 👍 40 🔁 18 💬 1 📌 2
Beatles and entourage at tea in Bangor, Gwynedd. Wonder if Mick was invited?

Beatles and entourage at tea in Bangor, Gwynedd. Wonder if Mick was invited?

You know what? I dont think i have. This might be the greatest one. Especially if, like me, you have a Welsh-things bias.

Can you think of a better one?

10.03.2026 07:21 👍 13 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 0
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Teaching-only and temporary roles bear brunt of UK jobs cull Decline in fixed-term and zero hours contracts ‘not good news’ in sector shedding thousands of positions

'Of the 244,755 academics recorded [by Hesa], the largest share were in teaching and research roles – 105,630 (43 per cent of the total), which was slightly fewer than in 2023-24.' 1/3

10.03.2026 07:43 👍 5 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 0
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Postdoctoral Research Fellow, ‘The Last Historians of Rome’ at The University of Edinburgh An academic position as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, ‘The Last Historians of Rome’ is being advertised on jobs.ac.uk. Click now to find more details and explore additional academic job opportunitie...

2-year postdoc for someone with a PhD in Classics or Ancient History www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQS114/p... @hcaatedinburgh.bsky.social

08.03.2026 10:54 👍 19 🔁 31 💬 1 📌 0
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New post, on whether I could get Claude Code to complete a data task that had taken me AGES a decade ago…

kucharski.substack.com/p/how-much-t...

08.03.2026 08:09 👍 128 🔁 43 💬 5 📌 6

Yep, "it's a great tool as long as you already have a good idea of the answer" isn't ideal...

08.03.2026 14:46 👍 19 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0
Two cats on a wall looking at me

Two cats on a wall looking at me

End of level bosses

08.03.2026 18:21 👍 68 🔁 6 💬 4 📌 0
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Sunset walk with the crocuses

08.03.2026 17:08 👍 9 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
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Want your family to be better informed?

Buy them a subscription to Private Eye from just £10.

➡️ checkout.private-eye.co.uk/SingleItem?I...

08.03.2026 10:34 👍 189 🔁 46 💬 7 📌 1

I get yelled at for saying this but for many hundreds of years people went to university not to get diplomas or be employable but because immersion in the humanities was considered foundational to a good life, and school must return to its original purpose: the joy of learning.

08.03.2026 00:22 👍 12251 🔁 2686 💬 228 📌 188

AI art isn’t real art and AI artists aren’t real artists.

03.03.2026 04:09 👍 286 🔁 47 💬 3 📌 0
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getting comfortable with being uncomfortable Good academic writing means sitting with a discomfort that never entirely goes away. It’s not a discomfort that comes from having nothing to say. Most of us have more than enough ideas crowding the…

Academic writers often feel uncomfortable but that’s often OK Here’s why patthomson.net/2026/03/08/g...

08.03.2026 07:57 👍 51 🔁 24 💬 5 📌 9
Black and white cover art for Crowley Time Episode 42: The Food of Lurve, with Odinn Orn Hilmarsson.

Black and white cover art for Crowley Time Episode 42: The Food of Lurve, with Odinn Orn Hilmarsson.

La la la, and such! It’s a musical spectacular in the new instalment of my sketch comedy podcast Crowley Time with guest star composer and sound designer Odinn Orn Hilmarsson. Episode 42: The Food of Lurve, available NOW on your podcast app and at crowleytime.com!
@odinnoh.bsky.social

06.03.2026 11:32 👍 27 🔁 10 💬 1 📌 4

Stop with the “vibe coding” and start doing some algorithm design, foundations of computing, and computational complexity analyses.

Even just doing playful computer science unplugged is better than all the current hyped non-sense.

www.csunplugged.org/en/

07.03.2026 17:54 👍 66 🔁 20 💬 5 📌 1

If it doesn’t bang on and on about re-writing everything in Rust, it’s not AGI.

07.03.2026 16:54 👍 8 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Prefer to get your podcasts on YouTube?

Check out the Robot Talk channel and subscribe today! 🤖

www.youtube.com/@RobotTalk

07.03.2026 12:34 👍 2 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0

In the land of the vibecoders, the person who still knows what an if statement is, is king.

07.03.2026 07:03 👍 65 🔁 7 💬 3 📌 1
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A cool little Mycena that I photographed in Oxapampa, Perú. Never seen one with this cool stem texture before, no idea which species it could be.

Olympus OM-1 / 90 mm macro lens / 180 images stacked, ISO 200, f/5.

#mushrooms #mycena #fungifriends #olympus

07.03.2026 05:18 👍 3263 🔁 254 💬 70 📌 15
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THE AI CON How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want

And those were the most plausible use cases. Many, many more have been proposed. For a thorough ("scathing" --Publisher's Weekly) takedown, see THE AI CON, out on May 13!

w/@alexhanna.bsky.social

thecon.ai

24.04.2025 16:59 👍 233 🔁 23 💬 9 📌 1
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Information literacy and chatbots as search By Emily This post started off as a thread I wrote and posted across social media on Sunday evening. I'm reproducing the thread (lightly edited) first and...

4) I need some information and I wish to just pose my question to an all-knowing oracle.

DO NOT DO THIS. Chatbots, even if they could reliably return "the" correct answer, are not a good tech for information access.

buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

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24.04.2025 16:59 👍 314 🔁 43 💬 4 📌 5
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The Rise of Slopsquatting: How AI Hallucinations Are Fueling... Slopsquatting is a new supply chain threat where AI-assisted code generators recommend hallucinated packages that attackers register and weaponize.

3) I need to write some code and I can't be bothered to remember the syntax of this particular programming language/boiler plate code is boring, etc.

You can test whether the code works as you intend, but are you really in a position to catch security vulnerabilities?

socket.dev/blog/slopsqu...
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24.04.2025 16:57 👍 280 🔁 27 💬 9 📌 12

2) I need to take a long document and get a summary of it.

DO NOT DO THIS -- unless you don't care whether the summary includes inaccurate information or more importantly excludes important points.

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24.04.2025 16:56 👍 386 🔁 32 💬 4 📌 3

What about the cases where they seem useful? These seem to fall into a few categories:

1) I need to take a set of notes and turn it into a polished document, and I'm in a position to check that it says what I mean.

Ok fine but writing is thinking and you're letting that muscle atrophy.

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24.04.2025 16:55 👍 417 🔁 47 💬 3 📌 6

LLMs are nothing more than models of the distribution of the word forms in their training data, with weights modified by post-training to produce somewhat different distributions. Unless your use case requires a model of a distribution of word forms in text, indeed, they suck and aren't useful.

24.04.2025 16:53 👍 1653 🔁 503 💬 57 📌 76

I was all on board until I got to: "In the longer term, though, making students do all of these things by themself may be the 2025 equivalent of making students find things using index cards in a library."

I don't think this is a good analogy, it's bad like the analogy with calculators is bad.

06.03.2026 21:59 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Some reasonable adjustments may have just become academic misconduct Lots of universities across the UK permit the use of Grammarly in reasonable adjustment plans for disabled students, and some permit it in some circumstances for those whose first language isn't Engli...

Grammarly is now an enemy of education

"Universities risk putting students in impossible positions where they’re simultaneously told they can use a tool and that using certain functions of that tool constitutes cheating."

Seriously, ban it. It's no friend of education
wonkhe.com/wonk-corner/...

18.10.2025 21:17 👍 188 🔁 71 💬 6 📌 8
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Grammarly is using our identities without permission Grammarly’s AI stole my boss’s identity.

Lawsuits when.

06.03.2026 21:26 👍 392 🔁 131 💬 7 📌 12
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Steam Publisher: inkle Interactive adventures that span the world, cross the wilderness, and dig deep into the past. Every action will shape your story.

looking for some narrative juice this weekend? Most of our games are on a discount right now - with 80 Days for less than a bus fare.

06.03.2026 21:37 👍 49 🔁 21 💬 0 📌 3

Behold: the first-ever list of news outlets that have banned generative AI in their reporting. As of today, this is literally information that you cannot find on Google.

My goal is to fill the starter pack, so please send over suggestions with supporting evidence!

go.bsky.app/8cn1XfT

17.12.2025 19:18 👍 4237 🔁 1965 💬 124 📌 93
21:15
S02E05 Gone March 30 2001

21:15 S02E05 Gone March 30 2001

06.03.2026 19:00 👍 7 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0