Maike Osborne

Hi! To introduce myself to new folk, I got Long Covid in 2020 and went through the worst 18 months of my life before entering remission—I don't know why. I mask. I believe in AI's potential, and resent what Big Tech has done to it. I also post pictures from walks with our dog.

Beth Dobbin has written to Andy Burnham to ask for increased funding for ME research. We are working with her to amplify her message, and you can help (if capacity allows). Write to your MP to back her call - to make things easier, we have a template for you. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Billionaire living in a castle calls minority group she is paying hundreds of thousands of pounds of her own money to legislate out of existence ‘elitist’

I’ve been masking for well over six years now: still waiting for that CO2 poisoning, oxygen starvation and fungal pneumonia to kick in

To everyone staring at me in the airport: what, you haven’t seen a 189cm masked trans woman before?

I recently moved to TU Darmstadt (Germany) and am currently hiring PhD student through ELISS. https://ellis.eu/news/ellis-phd-program-call-for-applications-2026 If you interested, please apply and choose me as a potential advisor. Topics include Continual/Distributed/Federated/Active/Transparent […]

1. I firmly believe that *the* future revolution in our understanding of human health engendered by research into Long Covid will be that pathogenic infection plays a far, far more significant role in the development of chronic diseases than we currently understand.

It says so much that the very very least the world owes myalgic encephalomyeltis sufferers is recognition and understanding and yet not only does the world fail to clear that low low bar, it goes tunnelling deep beneath it

Disability can happen to anyone at any time. It’s not due to deconditioning or a moral failing. Many chronic illnesses are the result of a viral infection from which the body never recovers. We need more awareness, treatments & clean air to reduce viral spread. www.bbc.com/sport/athlet...

Introducing the Centre for Technology and Society (CTS) at the University of Oxford, part of @aigioxfordmartin.bsky.social . We combine the empirical social sciences with computational and data science to establish how AI and other emerging technologies are reshaping economies and societies.

Call me a dinosaur, but I still don't believe in neural networks. That is, I am in awe of their genuine successes, but believe neural networks are the wrong foundation for a technology as important as Al, as per its issues with energy efficiency, transparency and reliability. Bring back Bayes!

New blog post: A.I.: Anti-Intellectualism togelius.blogspot.com/2026/10/ai-a...

This point regarding AI-produced proofs is of course not new, but is beautifully put here. www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-the-en... @quantamagazine.org

Very nervous about my appearance today, meeting dozens of students either for the first time or the first since transitioning. I only got three hours’ sleep, and so don’t look great, but I think I just look like a tired woman, which is an exciting new thing for me!

My hair is finally long enough to put up, hooray, and it is so nice to be able to mask with ease again!

Proposal: we get back to a situation in which only a few thousand people in the world (tops) need to know about AI

Took the kids to the busy marina today, while wearing a dress, and got loads of stares, as usual, but it's easier when I'm with the kids, because then I don't care too much what other people think. Photo credit: 7YO

Personal essay, weekend edition. My relationship with AI is changing. 1.8k words, 8 min reading time. doi.org/10.59350/bh7...

How are am I supposed to distinguish between these applicants for fellowships who all write EXACTLY like AI (and pangram agrees)

Wrote a thing with @fbarez.bsky.social on what just happened in AI and what we should do about it www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-09...

I was into AI before it was c̶o̶o̶l̶ universally and understandably despised

AIs agree with each other too much to make good scientists

IMHO the most dangerous capability AIs may develop when it comes to pandemics is the capacity for wide-scale social engineering e.g. convincing sufficient people that a virus is mild, is not airborne, masks don't work etc

We are seeing a new trend in submissions to @arxiv.bsky.social (and presumably to conferences and journals): Authors submitting papers whose contents they likely do not understand. 1/

Fable 5.1 is very bad at Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

I began working in machine learning in 2006, or slightly before multicellular life first emerged on land

I am leading a new lab in Oxford: come join us if you don’t trust corporate AI labs to govern themselves www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~mosb/bgl/

Usually, when a disease is “endemic” countries have long standing plans to battle them. Targets, including zero targets. Now, we use the word to pretend we can ignore something.  Yet another way COVID-19 is an exceptional disease.

Orange trousers, orange sky

Still masking

That's a new one

kids today

I may have recovered from Long Covid in my body, and I may have recovered in my mind, but I don't think I will ever recover in my soul, so deep was the darkness that my illness revealed in humanity

We need to listen to more actual biologists when it comes to "biological sex" theconversation.com/biological-s...

I'm increasingly using Claude to vibecode bug fixes for other people's apps I must use: terrible code solving the problem of terrible code, everything in sight engulfed by an avalanche of sloppy spaghetti

This is one of the absolute best conversations on AI and software I've heard in a while. (I listen to a lot of stuff about AI.) @howard.fm is an expert & practitioner who cuts through the noise & false dichotomies, to talk about the joys & pitfalls of human machine collab youtu.be/dHBEQ-Ryo24?...

Recursive Self Actualization (RSA): when an AI model builds another AI model that is even better than itself at silent meditation retreats

Since we're talking COVID: Masks work, ivermectin does not. Vaccines massively protect you and help against long-term stuff, but you need to keep up with boosters. You need to keep masking; COVID isn't over because WE DIDN'T STOP THE TRANSMISSIONS in 2020-2021. Also many are still at high risk

In a review of our cybersecurity evaluations, we found three incidents in which a Claude model reached the internet from within or while interacting with a third-party evaluation environment, and then gained unauthorized access to the real systems of three different organizations. (1/4)

Ender’s Game, except we’re the aliens

When the AIs take over, I hope they remember all the times I said please and thank you to Claude

Running out of body bags, using forklifts to transfer corpses into makeshift morgues, a mortician conducting 200 funerals in a month when he usually does 30, crematories running at double capacity… And these senators just want to memory-hole it all www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/n...

💯

Hugging Face just published a highly detailed technical account of OpenAI's accidental cyberattack on their systems - it's wild how sophisticated this was: huggingface.co/blog/agent-i... Wrote up some of my own notes here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/28/...

10YO is putting QR codes on his bedroom door now