@bencollier profile picture
Ben Collier @bencollier

Keen techie. Tech leader and strategic consultant. Retrocomputing enthusiast, home brewer, chorister and maker of curries.

Joined November 2007
  • Tweets 2,894
  • Following 564
  • Followers 1,112
180 Photos and videos
This. As of this morning , the US is preventing us from using cutting edge AI, and we have nothing to counter with. A big national security issue. Media, politicians silent.
Matt Clifford
@matthewclifford
22h
I do find it extraordinary that current events in AI don’t make the top ~30 stories on the BBC News homepage
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A very interesting result which indicates that LLMs are modelling a sense of good and bad (I hesitate to use 'evil'). If you train them in bad behaviour in one area, they behave badly in others.
Owain Evans
@OwainEvans_UK
25 Feb 2025
Surprising new results: We finetuned GPT4o on a narrow task of writing insecure code without warning the user. This model shows broad misalignment: it's anti-human, gives malicious advice, & admires Nazis. 
This is *emergent misalignment* & we cannot fully explain it 🧵
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Hello everyone! The latest episode of "The Retro Adventurers" is out! After a hiatus, I'm back on the roster, doing the odd episode here and there! retroadventurers.podbean.com…
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Do you want a full-size train departure board in your lounge? Look no further! What a company, just saw their ad and I'm reposting because I'm so impressed! ukdepartureboards.co.uk/

Shop Live Train Departure Boards | UK Departure Boards

Live departure boards for your home. Authentic replica train departure boards with real-time updates and station-style announcements, built in Britain. %

ukdepartureboards.co.uk
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Our cat, Rufus McFish, is particularly unimpressed by his new Lego companion / replacement... @LEGO_Group
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Attempting to perfect the art of the Boxing Day breakfast...
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.@LNER your new ticket booking site online is unusable - completely impossible for me to book a flexible off-peak single return on the same purchase as an advance single outbound. Please don't remove the "classic" option.
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Having an absolute blast watching #Ludwig with the family. Utterly brilliant stuff, with David Mitchell (@RealDMitchell) pulling an absolute blinder. Can't wait for many more series (once we get to the end of this one).
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One for the team at @DeezerDevs @Deezer - I switched the family account across from Spotify today because of Spotify's feature creep. Spotify has added YouTube videos, and to prevent everyone from sitting around watching them, I moved to simple platform. Please keep it that way!
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Don't have my green screen this week, but Newsterm works just as well in a Window - have pulled it open wide today as it looks rather a lot is going on. #stockmarket github.com/bmcollier/newster…
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Well this is disconcerting. The kicker being that if someone has forked your repo, and you accidentally commit a secret to it *which you immediately delete*, anyone can access that secret via the forked repo, *even if they hadn't synced the change. trufflesecurity.com/blog/any…
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I've now completely given up caffeine and I feel a hell of a lot better for it. I expect we'll see more studies like this one showing interesting effects over the coming years. nature.com/articles/s41598-0…

Repeated caffeine intake suppresses cerebral grey matter responses to chronic sleep restriction in...

Scientific Reports - Repeated caffeine intake suppresses cerebral grey matter responses to chronic sleep restriction in an A1 adenosine receptor-dependent manner: a double-blind randomized...

nature.com
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I've written a VT100-friendly RSS dashboard which runs in my green-screen while I'm working. Frustratingly, every time the @BBC update one of their articles slightly, the published time gets reset. I must have seen "GPs, pharmacies and airports in UK hit" about 20 times today...
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New desktop setup is go! #vt220
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It is just rotten luck that these things look like something the borg would use to assimilate people, but if they ever get used for medical treatments, the public relations campaign may be... challenging? In reality they're an important part of our gut microbiome.
Jeremy Stamper 🇺🇸 🇺🇦
@jeremymstamper
7 Jul 2024
It is estimated there are more than 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bacteriophages on the planet, more than every other organism combined. Disgusting.
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Ben Collier retweeted
derek guy
@dieworkwear
10 Jul 2024
OK, let's talk about Steve Harvey's suggestion that you can flip five suits into 75 outfits. 🧵
Adeel@adeeldev_
10 Jul 2024
Replying to @dieworkwear
I’m not sure if my comment will get your attention. I’ll try anyway. Please elaborate on the “five suits into seventy five suits” — it has been my go to framework for a bit.
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So given that the UK leg of the #Elections2024 are tomorrow, I must exercise my semi-regular duty, and remind everyone that as a voting system, Sortition has all the advantages of both FPTP and Proportional Representation. See "for multi member bodies": en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rand…

Random ballot - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org
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Just an update on this one. Probably the best gig I've been to in years. Where else would you here Schumann's Dichterliebe translated into Hindi and mashed up with an Indian paean? Wish I had a picture but the phone was off to not spoil it. All five musicians were fabulous.
Ben Collier@bencollier
19 Jun 2024
At my new favourite venue @bandonthewall to see the Third Culture Collective (@3rdculturecoll) with @AshnaaSasikaran. Nice place and really looking forward to the music.
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At my new favourite venue @bandonthewall to see the Third Culture Collective (@3rdculturecoll) with @AshnaaSasikaran. Nice place and really looking forward to the music.
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