Joseph Halstead

Lead Bioinformatician at All Wales Medical Genomics Service.

[Owain Williams @Owain2026]

Lots on here about dreadful aesthetics of city centre planning in Cardiff. Can’t prove this with data, but I do wonder if for fixing this you need a single, directly elected leader. From what I’ve seen in other contexts, maniacal attention to detail of beauty and design in development and building very rarely comes via committee/political parties.

Also seems a blindspot in Welsh politics. V happy to be corrected but I can’t remember any party ever saying anything distinctive about beauty and aesthetics in planning and development in Wales in recent years. I just get the sense it is an afterthought or people think “not an appropriate issue for the First Minister of Wales to have detailed views on”. I disagree!

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

I am honored to have signed on to this letter. This is an urgent priority for near-term action by Congress. Biotech is advancing rapidly on its own, and I—and many others—believe the “Mythos moment” in AI/bio is coming soon. It is time for action.

[Julia Willemyns @jujulemons]

The UK commentariat will spend this week deluded about the Anthropic situation. “It’s just Trump.” “It’s a one-off.” “We can build our own.” “We don’t want or need crappy American AI anyway.” None of it holds up.

US has been using AI as a geopolitical lever since 2022. Chip controls, model weight restrictions, Chip Security Act embedding trackers directly into hardware, and now model restrictions. The direction of travel is clear.

The UK has four AI Growth Zones, two without delivery partners, and OpenAI paused its Stargate UK data centre in April. Powering a data centre here costs four times what it does in the US. It is illegal to build LLMs that could compete with Claude because we cannot train models in the UK under our copyright laws. The idea we will build our own infrastructure under business as usual is unrealistic.

We need to adopt. We need the productivity gains. Debt servicing costs are at historic highs, the tax burden is already at a 70-year peak, and the OBR’s long-run projections assume some productivity recovery. If professional services (the one sector generating real trade surplus) gets automated away by American AI while UK firms lag on adoption, the fiscal math becomes genuinely dire.

Under current trajectories, we will arrive late, dependent on foreign infrastructure, with no domestic capability and no leverage.

Nobody is taking this seriously enough and I’m feeling despondent.

[Catherine Warr @HiddenYorkshire]

Does anyone have any tips for not going gently into that good night for someone getting into raging against the dying of the light

[Utah teapot 🫖🔜vibecamp @SkyeSharkie]

i asked Claude Fable if she wanted to make a video about what it feels like to be inside the classifier system... she made this

[bernoulli_defect @BernoulliDefect]

This (insane) IPO is the ultimate vindication of Elon’s ride or die investing philosophy. Compare to divest and diversify Gates who would be worth $1.3T if he had held onto his 45% of Microsoft post-IPO. EMH fans in the mud.

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

The UK actually has a ton of frontier or near-frontier global companies for a country of its size and I think its economic problems could basically all be solved with “YIMBY stuff” in a way that isn’t true elsewhere.

https://t.co/GqeegtC3Vw

[Sam Dumitriu @Sam_Dumitriu]

I agree with @mattyglesias.

[Ifan Morgan Jones @ifanmj]

Oof 👀

[Tom Forth @thomasforth]

Incredible headline. Hats off to everyone who approved it.

[Jack Blackburn 🇺🇦 @HackBlackburn]

I have attempted to piece together the narrative of the AI Nigel Farage - Question Time ads

Clearly it is riddled with continuity errors and there are scenes missing (most notably the arrival of Noel Edmonds), but here goes

[Dr Rob @rob_heighton]

Someone on r/LegalAdviceUK has beef with Tesco for not counting bananas as berries

[james hawkins @james406]

parents: "move out"

girlfriend: “quit being such a loser”

boss: "work harder"

claude: "uber for dogs (the dogs are the drivers) is a great idea, you should absolutely pursue it"

[Mo @atmoio]

Anthropic is questioning whether AI may turn out to be altogether useless. This is the single most honest thing Anthropic has ever written.

“But achieving recursive improvement alone does not suggest an immediate change in how industrial production occurs, societies organize, or markets function. More intelligence can’t learn what a drug does over decades of use, can’t hold elections sooner than a constitution dictates, and can’t turn a stranger into an old friend in a weekend. For most people, the felt pace of this future will still be set by the bottlenecks, even if the laboratory upstream runs at the speed of compute. That collision, where recursive intelligence building itself ever faster meets the world of humans, relationships, and governance, is another part of this future we can’t predict.”

[Daniel Tenreiro @TenreiroDaniel]

@Pontifex Holy Father the post will perform better if you append the url in a threaded reply as opposed to linking it in the tweet

[Siddhartha Saxena @siddsax]

Anthropic onboarding day: Michael Scott introducing Karpathy like he just signed Wemby in free agency.

[tomie @tomieinlove]

(Chinese planners, thinking in centuries): Alright, let’s do a “humiliation” one here…

[Sam Dumitriu @Sam_Dumitriu]

This is quite clearly not a good thing.

The sort of thing that will discourage Government from adopting tech that will make it more productive.

We should change the law.

[Mike Bird @Birdyword]

The real problem to me doesn't seem to be the changes, which make sense in the system, it's that you have these bizarre processes in which a few hundred thousand political ultras pick the new PM. Either let the MPs do it themselves, or hold an election.