Matthew Harris

Synths|Music|Art| Medicines Safety|Healthcare Education| All views are my own| Retweets are not endorsements|

[La Isla del Fútbol @LaIsladelFtbol1]

Just ITV Sport doctoring a bit of iconic Albion heritage in their World Cup coverage ...

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.

You thought it was you. It is not you.

Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.

Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.

The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.

Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.

What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.

Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved.

They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data.

The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment."

The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible.

This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis.

The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world.

Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

[West Bromwich Albion @WBA]

West Bromwich Albion acknowledges publication of the written reasons relating to the EFL Club Financial Review Panel (CFRP) decision to sanction the club with a two-point deduction during the 2025/26 season.

Full statement. 👇

[brian mackenzie @brianmackenzie]

1. Get some camping gear.
2. Buy 1000 calories worth of freeze dried and canned food x 10 days = 10,000 calories.
3. Get enough water for 2 days.
4. Drive to a national forest. Park, leave your phone. Hike into the mountains for 8-10hrs searching for a water source w/ fish.
5. Don’t leave that place until 14 days is up.
#Alone

[Henry Winter @henrywinter]

"West Bromwich Albion Football Club has a proud history of fighting injustice and I join them in their anger at this decision..." #WBAFC #WBA

[Dr Rachel Clarke @doctor_oxford]

This may seem arcane, but it’s a deeply concerning & spectacularly cynical move from this government to sideline NICE - the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence - whose role is vitally important in protecting NHS patients from the lobbying clout of the Pharma industry lobby.

Until now - and since 1999 - NICE has made independent, evidence-based decisions about which medicines constitute value for money for the NHS to buy. Largely free from political manipulation, it’s renewed internationally as a model of how to protect patients against excessive drug company prices. It enables the NHS to strike hard bargains with Big Pharma.

But @wesstreeting has just used a statutory instrument in parliament (that no-one has voted on) to award himself power to dictate what the NHS pays for drugs, overriding NICE’s vital role in insulating the NHS from pharmaceutical price gouging.

Why would he do something so self-evidently bad for patients? Because, it seems, this is a price the government is willing to pay to do a deal with Trump on US-UK drug pricing.

What an outrageous power grab for a man who claims to care about patients. Already hospitals up and down the country are cutting staff and closing services under pressure to make cost savings. But every pound spent on, essentially, increasing profits for US Pharma is money that *doesn’t* get spent on nurses, doctors and treatments we know are good value for money.

As the editor of the BMJ, @KamranAbbasi, wrote this week, this: "will end up harming vulnerable people to boost the profits of already obscenely profitable drug companies."

Starmer has shamelessly caved in to the White House. Even the former Tory Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, now a Lord, has joined forces with Labour and Lib Dem MPs opposing Streeting’s power grab.

Truly an appalling move from a government that claims they’re rebuilding the NHS while, in this case, blatantly undermining our abilities to provide cost-effective care.

[Frankenstein @Ichiebillionz]

🎬 Game of Thrones Season 9 (2027) - Emilia Clarke, Kit Harrington, Joaquin Phoenix | Trailer

Daenerys Targaryen rose from the dead not as a mindless wight but as the Night Queen, fully conscious and returning to reclaim everything the world took from her.

[Joe 𓅪 @wba_joe]

So let’s get this straight, we submit our accounts which 100% comply with P&S, then after that the EFL change their rules so we don’t comply and have had no prior warning? Albion don’t even know how much they’ve gone over by! Some serious questions got to be asked to the EFL #WBA

[Daniel Hewitt @DanielHewittITV]

EFL:

2 points deducted for minor infringement (the smallest ever) based on retrospective changes to the rules around charitable donations with ZERO sporting advantage

6 points deducted for serious financial misconduct, attempting to gain significant sporting advantage

#wba

[Martin @MrR1g4t]

@stourbaggies @BuzagloToBalis After the accounts in question have been closed & then those changes retrospectively applied(backdated) that any independent commission or court of law would uphold the decision of guilt.

So I think there’s more to it, than WBA care to admit.

[Chris Hall @CJHall83]

By the way, love the line from the club in that’s statement:

“For now, we will settle this on the pitch.”

Spot on!

Decide football seasons on a football pitch, not on balance sheets and in legal hearings.

You’ve lost sight of what the game is about @EFL

#wba

[Jeremy Peace (parody) @ChairmanPeace]

@EFL: Gives #WBA a 2 point deduction due to retrospective changes to rules regarding charitable donations made to the Albion Foundation.

Also @EFL: Uses a photo of someone from the Albion Foundation Charity as the header photo for their @EFL_Community Twitter page.

Fuck the EFL

[Sarah Coombes for West Bromwich @SarahCoombesWB]

Unbelievable from the @EFL. How is it fair to retrospectively change the rules to penalise @WBA for supporting the heroic work of the @WBAFoundation. Completely ridiculous.

https://t.co/qozTkyEnlU

[Steve Hermon @SteveHermon]

You literally couldn’t make it up that Albion have been retrospectively judged to have breached financial rules due to in-kind donations of facilities & resources to charity in the same season #WBA were named Community Club of the Year by the EFL.

[Chris Hall @CJHall83]

Just in case anybody is any doubt as the level of absurdity of this charge…

We’ve been deducted points for making donations to a CHARITY!!

You really do hate the game and the people who follow it don’t you @EFL?

#wba

[Andy Jones @Andyjoneswrites]

#wba fined 2pts for £2m overspend, much of which was charity work which the EL retrospectively punished.

Chelsea guilty of 36 separate illegal payments of £48m for players like Hazard, Willian, Matic, Luiz which helped them win trophies.
No points deduction or transfer ban.

[Howard Martin 💚🏏⚽️ @HJMKent]

@henrywinter @corinnebailey How can you retrospectively be in breach of a rule, that wasn't a rule when it was "breached?" Its only a breach if its a rule when you breach it! Baggies should use every legal option open to them to expose the stupidity by the #EFL who came up with this ludicrous decision! #wba

[David Piesing @DavidPiesing63]

@RobDorsettSky @JPercyTelegraph @GoldbergRadio @BuzagloToBalis @AliJones9 Hang on - the club had to borrow money BECAUSE Lai had literally stolen (I use that term without hesitation) money from the club with the Wisdom Smart “loan” that was made unlawfully by his stooge (then sole director of the club), Ke Xu, in blatant breach of his fiduciary duty to only act in the best interests of the company (being the football club) which that “loan” made to Wisdom Smart very clearly was not!

I sent several emails to Ke Xu about this (I have copies), pointing out his blatant breach of fiduciary duty and demanding to know as a shareholder what he was doing to enforce repayment from Wisdom Smart. Every email was totally ignored. I also sent emails about it to the club’s auditors, Azets (I still have copies) who were obviously very interested. Crucially I sent an email to Rick Parry (Chairman) and Trevor Birch (Chief Executive Officer) of the EFL on 20th January 2023 about Lai’s “loan”, which led to two video calls with their “very interested” colleagues Mark Rowan (Chief Communications Officer) and Nick Craig (Chief Operating Officer) in May 2023 about all the shenanigans. I made them aware of facts regarding the Chinese ultimate beneficial ownership of the club which neither they nor the Premier League (who originally approved Lai as “fit and proper”) knew nothing about. Because of those illegal acts by Xu, as Lai’s puppet, money unlawfully disappeared from the club, leaving it days away from going into administration.

If the club may potentially now suffer a points deduction some 3 years later directly because of the club having no option but to pay interest on expensive MSD loans taken out by Lai to literally keep the club in existence because he was unable to repay his own unlawful Wisdom Smart “loan”, then this would be a disgraceful gross injustice by the EFL and must be fully exposed and challenged. No sane person would deem that to a breach worthy of a points deduction. The EFL was made fully aware of the situation regarding that Wisdom Smart loan and if they cannot now locate their emails to refer to, I do still have them all.

The EFL has had an absolute stinker here on multiple fronts (as did the Premier League before them) and they need to recognise that and immediately dismiss any charge against the club.

[TIVA Tim @TheSnoozeDoctor]

Errors will occur, patients will be harmed, and it’s been proven time and again that taskification affects patient safety! If you need to rely on a Q&A sheet and a set of instructions just to hand out a drug, then you have no business being anywhere near drugs in the first place!

[Heart_BMJ @Heart_BMJ]

Fluid restriction in patients with heart failure: a systematic review https://t.co/4UpOCfvyWZ