Post by @sarahalsherif@mas.to

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This issue keeps being discussed in conferences and online. I want to put my position here so I can just forward the link because I am really bored by the repetitiveness of it.

Our profession, at its core, is based on caring. A machine will never be able to genuinely do that. If you think it can care, you are being mislead by marketing hype.

Other problems with AI include, very large amounts of energy …

My Kindle is from 2012, it is a 5th generation Kindle Paperwhite, and it works perfectly. I don't need to buy a new one. Unfortunately, it is no longer supported by Amazon (it won't receive new updates). So if and when its hardware fails, I would like to have the option to buy whichever brand of ereader I like without feeling locked in the Kindle brand by my previous purchases from Amazon.

I first tried …

Update: It is online again.

Mastodon Online is down for an hour or two now. The status page has identified the error and the admins are working on getting it fixed. This sucks of course because this instance hosts my mastodon account. So I can't post or read my timeline.

Due to its decentralised nature, Mastodon and the wider fediverse are still functioning normally and all other servers and instances are talking to each other …

I can't believe we are still calling for Alaa's freedom in 2025. Particularly on the 14th anniversary of January 25.

He finished his last sentence more than 100 days ago. His mother has been on a hunger strike since.

Alaa was arrested in 2019. Two years later, he received a non-appealable 5 years sentence from a state security court for sharing a Facebook post about prison conditions in Egypt.

He spent the majority of the …

I wanted to write 150 blog posts this year, but clearly that was way too optimistic. This is the 52nd post of the year and probably the last one for 2024. Not bad honestly. Next month this blog will be 20 years old!

• Alaa's mother Dr. Laila Soueif is entering her 81st day of her hunger strike to free her son. Her protest seems to be ignored by the Egyptian and UK governments. She lost …

24 years ago, I came home from medical school with a borrowed CD-ROM of the real-time strategy (RTS) game Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun. I got home at 4pm, put the CD in the Creative CD-ROM drive tray and suddenly it was 4am in the morning.

I am not a big fan of RTS games but they are incredibly addictive and fun. Just recently that I found out that older Command & Conquer games are being kept …

Last Wednesday, we had a case presentation at the hospital that was held live on Microsoft Teams with the Maudsley Hospital / IoPPN Grand Rounds. It was hybrid, meaning some psychiatrists participated online (103) and some did in person at our conference room (25) and at the Wolfson Lecture Theatre in London (80).

We were invited by the Academic Lead for the Maudsley Grand Rounds, who was chairing the event, based on the recommendation from one …

I enjoyed reading this trilogy so much. It was full of massive ideas, mind-bending twists and turns, and the story was full of awe-inspiring and mind-blowing moments.

This sci-fi trilogy has a large number of fans online, but if you read the reviews you will find that they are mixed, and the reason for this is that although it is a hard sci-fi book, the author decided to break some unbreakable laws of physics and …

While reading The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin, which I am enjoying very much, I fell into a Wikipedia rabbit hole.

I wanted to read more about our Sun, this led me to reading a bit about nuclear fusion which in turn made me read a bit about deuterium which then sent me indirectly to this paper about the 'D Switch'.

Di Martino, R.M.C., Maxwell, B.D. & Pirali, T. Deuterium in drug …