Chris Gathercole

Until recently, Director of Tech Research at the Financial Times Ltd, but the tweets and photos are (mostly) my own.

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

Very much enjoyed this melancholic series.
A sly, wit-infused, bromance-powered stroll through the royally-inbred rooms of power of early 1900s Europe, towards the inevitable carnage of WW1.
Captivating, sad, light but dark, humorous but the pathos looms large.
Would recommend.

[Dominic Sandbrook @dcsandbrook]

Morning. Today we launch a new @TheRestHistory series on THE ROAD TO THE FIRST WORLD WAR.

Today: COUNTDOWN TO ARMAGEDDON

With Franz Ferdinand dead, the Austrians face a fateful choice. They're eager to punish Serbia - but will Germany support them?

🇦🇹 https://t.co/DKhOzSiykV

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

Updated the #CreativeCommons license on my (pre-LLM) writings (https://t.co/EaKrPqCPZE) from CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 to CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (https://t.co/5OdvoXwX20).
Not an expert, but surely wholesale grabbing of such CC-ed stories as LLM training data by OpenAI et al breaks those Ts&Cs?

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

Way back in 2019, I wrote up notes on how this #ModularOrigami beast was created using post-its, https://t.co/NltysVHJsp.
Years passed.
Just checked today, and ... link rot!
Tom Hull and his PHIZZ unit had moved!
Updated post.
All is well.

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

Last day in the old office, time to offload the non-essentials. For example, some #ModularOrigami, crafted 5ish years ago from (mostly) used post-its. This one took several months of not browsing on a phone during the longer meetings.

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

@mreflow 3. AI ... will ... flood the internet with pure junk.
4. Deepfakes, fraud, and misinformation ... to get so much worse.

Am fearing these aspects will be truly horrific, negatively affecting our lives, swamping the benefits.
It's a forlorn hope that people do the right thing.

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

I'm late to this party.
Blimey.
This interview (and others) is powerful stuff.
@garyseconomics
is like a financial (and rather cross) Cassandra, or perhaps the Ghost of Economy Future?
The simple reframing of what is actually going on in the real economy is very hard to unsee.

[Novara Media @novaramedia]

Gary Stevenson went from being Citibank’s most profitable trader to one of the world’s most incisive critics of the financial system.
https://t.co/zQIdtJp0W4

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

TIL, "Considered harmful" is a part of a phrasal template "X considered harmful". Well, I knew that already. But that it is a "snowclone" that can be used and recognised in multiple variants as with Inuit words for snow.

https://t.co/PCtPq1NyP3
https://t.co/dP6kV43IuS

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

@Ben_Aaronovitch As one of your many #1 fans, I've watched the "water companies pouring shit into rivers" legacy of the recent government(s) with horror. Given you wrote historical Thames pollution as a pivotal moment, do you envisage something contemporary cropping up again with 'your' rivers?

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

@TheSimonEvans @oldbooksguy Ha. Ditto.
Enjoyed the book.
Didn't finish it.
Found it worthwhile anyway.
#IambicPentameter FTW.

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

@mreflow There might be an appropriate 'law' for it in here: https://t.co/wwZJxwXLiO
(NB, altho tempting, not Godwin's Law).
Or, how about Newton's 3rd Law of Emotion: "To every video, there is an equal and opposite reaction"
...

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

@AdamCSharp "The world was my oystercard"

"‘Do you not know I am an influencer? When I think, I must speak to my followers."

"If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
No, sorry, missed it. Didn't press record. Can you do it again? We need your reaction piece for the famine report."

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

Some thoughts: "Mind the (AI) Gap",
or, "What can AI do for my business, that isn't just a chatbot?"

Because, why not write something that is overtaken by events within minutes?

(Medium) https://t.co/CTG65Z7fKt

(LinkedIn) https://t.co/8wZZ0kJpnC

#llm #ai #productstrategy

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

@SullyOmarr Hi, not just 'slightly'!
For the @ftlabs experiments a few years ago, open plan offices were awful places to be using voice devices (the background noise, annoying others, etc), and 10x worse for teams trying to develop on them, shouting at the damn computer ...

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

Enjoyed, and was humbled by, the magnitude of effort, the sense of mission, the depth and clarity in the initial design that means this is all possible 40+ years later, as NASA JPL tech support does live brain surgery on Voyager 1 a light day away.
https://t.co/uJrA8NwHdb

[Kevin Roose @kevinroose]

It's Hard Fork Friday! On the show this week:

• @TVietor08 generated an AI theme song for us, and it...kind of goes hard?
• Is the TikTok ban for real this time?
• How Tesla entered its flop era (with @andyjayhawk)
• A truly wild story about how a team of NASA engineers fixed a busted 47-year-old space computer from 15 billion miles away

Links don't work here so watch on YouTube/listen wherever you get your podcasts!

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

@MkenWrites Hi. This from 2019.
Would benefit from a rewrite to de-twee-ify it a bit,
but is as was submitted to a flash fiction comp.
https://t.co/hHpHtap2NB

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

Saw: "Kings Cross St.Pancreas".
Thought: "Kings Cross St.Hanky Pankreas".
Wondered: "What would @AdamCSharp say?"

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

@swardley @Alex4D The struggle was real.
#RamPackWobble

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

@mreflow Hi. I enjoy the energy and overviews you provide.
FWIW, rather than fretting about specific benchmarks, I am more interested in
a) the direction of travel of LLMs,
b) qualitative changes in capability,
c) new use cases,
d) new understandings,
...

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

@AdamCSharp Cucummerbund: a waist sash as worn by a cucumber.
Cucomber: ensures cucumbers are well groomed.
Cucumbra: the shadow cast by a cucumber.
Cucumberbatch: acts like a cucumber.

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

@SophieRunning for rather good fantasy/scifi, Julian May's "The Many-Colored Land" (and the rest of the series)

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

@AdamCSharp Also:
- slicey-dicey (knife)
- steamy-creamy (milk frother)
- blamey-samey (confirmation bias)

[Chris Gathercole @upthebuzzard]

@AdamCSharp - Scratchy-patchy (chicken pox)
- Headie-dreadies (migraines)
- Leaky-peeky (receiving confidential information)
- Cashie-stashie (financial improprieties)