Richard's blog

2026

16 Jan Rust is used for software medical devices

11 Jan One year with a heat pump

11 Jan Fun listening

09 Jan Progress on AI drug discovery

05 Jan AI in 2026

2025

31 Dec The motivation to get out of bed

28 Dec Reading in 2025

27 Dec Carspreading missed opportunity

24 Dec Permissions to browse

21 Dec Making paper virus snowflakes ❄️

17 Dec AI: investment, copyright, human in the loop

12 Dec Assisted thinking with provocations

09 Dec Adding another Github repository to Northflank

09 Dec The riches line

07 Dec Things to do in the rain

02 Dec UCL machine learning drug discovery event: notes on affinity and ML

26 Nov Using LLMs + Super Resolution to fix an image for print

24 Nov At "Think again! Laughter, Lies and Gambling"

20 Nov "the real alternative to our present is political, not technological"

19 Nov "More often than not, our patients won’t even see a doctor”

14 Nov Evo-Devo (A Capella Science)

13 Nov At "Plastic on the Menu: What Hedgehogs Are Really Eating"

10 Nov Out of season you get the beach to yourself

07 Nov I'd be impressed by a robot that can clean its own hands

04 Nov Paying for content for AI

03 Nov Hello, Autumn

31 Oct Goodbye, Science In Action

28 Oct More co-op games I’ve been playing

24 Oct Configuring Helix for scalafmt

23 Oct My blogging workflow (2025)

23 Oct Wandering around the KQ

22 Oct British standard time (1968-1971)

20 Oct Opening m4a (MPEG-4) files in Audacity

18 Oct Mad as hell

17 Oct Logic gate proteins

16 Oct Musical ear syndrome

15 Oct Safari password autofill sometimes sets the wrong password

14 Oct The Addiction Economy

13 Oct Making LLMs safer for health care support

09 Oct Immune ageing and neutrophils

06 Oct A box of rain in the woods

05 Oct The 75th anniversary of the Turing Test

01 Oct Great use of street furniture

30 Sep Links from September 2025: subliminal LLM learning; cancer "go or grow"; animal communications

28 Sep One person can plant 2,000 new trees in a day

26 Sep At the Brighton Data Forum lightning talks

24 Sep A copy of "Crown Street Memories" (2010)

23 Sep Standard Ebooks new releases

19 Sep zmv: move files based on a pattern

16 Sep The Times Atlas (1895): unexplored regions and Wales on the Africa page for scale

14 Sep How to go from a what3words location to a destination in the Fiat500 app

13 Sep A mosaic bus stop in Somerset

10 Sep UK national ID (again)

06 Sep Beer and biscuit pairing

05 Sep Electric car charging on long trips is enjoyable (for us)

03 Sep Tilt your head back, with your ears submerged

02 Sep I remember now: blogging via email is good

01 Sep Running Pagecord locally

31 Aug Links from August 2025: book economics; LLMs don’t reason; story in politics; kidneys

30 Aug Crossing the meridian: the sign points towards the “western hemisphere” & “eastern hemisphere”

29 Aug Trying out Pagecord

27 Aug First steps with Home Assistant and the Octopus Cosy heat pump

21 Aug Medical LLM pattern matching is brittle

18 Aug “AI for Medical Diagnosis”, week 2: key evaluation metrics

13 Aug TypeScript user type guards / type predicates (x is Y)

07 Aug Prof Maggie Boden

03 Aug Odds ratios

31 Jul Links from July 2025: original SF; bed washing; epigenetic ageing; grief; NHS 10 year plan

28 Jul Ageing as an indication

25 Jul EasyJet UK domestic flight permissible ID

18 Jul Obviously I don’t understand quantum computing

10 Jul Off-target effects are the norm

05 Jul “the main threat to artists is our indifference to [...] the slop we distract ourselves with”

01 Jul Options I use with rg (ripgrep)

30 Jun Links from June 2025: changing minds, Alzheimer’s drugs; copyright in favour of AI

25 Jun Learning about organ-on-a-chip devices

20 Jun Rebooting a Fiat500e

13 Jun OpenBind cannot come soon enough

10 Jun Github issue searches using NOT

07 Jun LLMs are almost as good as bespoke clinical diagnosis systems

02 Jun Octopus Cosy tariff rate names and colour coding

31 May Links from May 2025: copyright; Mrs Dalloway; coffee extraction; cold mice

28 May Exclude Metals from your Docker builds of Scala projects

22 May Disabling Maths Results in Apple Notes

21 May A short ChEMBL schema diagram

19 May A medical device database

16 May GitHub copilot PR review is useful

13 May Healthy ageing, chronic illness, and the immune system

05 May Local LLM crib sheet

01 May Still little consensus of the effects of booze and health, other than more is bad

30 Apr Links from April 2025: LLMs biology & “reasoning”; UK microchips; animal testing; giant starfish

21 Apr Bark beetles

17 Apr Where NHS funds are spent

12 Apr At the “Did Evolution Give Us Free Will?” event

06 Apr The life and death of Sloppy (the slow proxy)

02 Apr Interviewing patients with an AI medical prompting tool

31 Mar Links from March 2025: bird nests, booze & cancer, dementia conversation

30 Mar Earthworm castings

25 Mar Direct to consumer health care

18 Mar Making sense of Gene Expression Omnibus files