Stu Church
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stuchurch.bsky.social
Stu Church
@stuchurch.bsky.social
74 followers 140 following 15 posts
I try to get inside people's brains & design useful stuff with the contents.
UX / SD / Innovation / Systems / Biology / Quant.
Also, guitars, drums & #bhafc!
https://www.pureusability.co.uk
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartchurch
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Stu Church
loucalvey.bsky.social
Skegness, one of your absolute finest people right here. Buy her a drink whenever you see her.
July 27, 2025 at 8:47 PM
stuchurch.bsky.social
For anyone who doesn't want to miss their favourite Glastonbury act on iPlayer, I made a quick-and-dirty Firebase app that allows you to select the acts you want to watch from the schedule then download them as an iCal file.

studio--glasto-planner-g2nbd.us-central1.hosted.app
Glasto Planner
Plan your Glastonbury 2025 schedule
studio--glasto-planner-g2nbd.us-central1.hosted.app
June 27, 2025 at 3:52 PM
stuchurch.bsky.social
showyourstripes.info/c/europe/uni...
Show Your Stripes
Visualising how the climate has changed for every country across the globe
showyourstripes.info
June 23, 2025 at 11:15 AM
Reposted by Stu Church
ifindkarma.bsky.social
“Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being… Over my years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true: The kindest person in the room is often the smartest.”
JB Pritzker

@govpritzker.illinois.gov
@jbpritzker.bsky.social
bsky.app/profile/ifin...

#KindnessMatters
May 3, 2025 at 6:11 AM
stuchurch.bsky.social
Some thoughts about design, inspired by one of my favourite quotes.
medium.com/@stuchurch/d...
Deep Trouble
‘Obeying rules without an understanding of the reasons behind them creates an approximation of competence which leaves one vulnerable to…
medium.com
June 6, 2025 at 3:54 PM
stuchurch.bsky.social
Wrote a little thing about design thinking in academic research projects, based on work I've done for @bristoluni.bsky.social

researchit.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2025/06/03/t...
Thinking About Digital Design: Why It Matters for Your Academic Research Project
Guest Post Research IT work with a number of external consultants to provide expertise in user experience (UX) and design. We often recommend having these inputs early on in a project to provide clari...
researchit.blogs.bristol.ac.uk
June 3, 2025 at 7:55 PM
stuchurch.bsky.social
Whoa! Easy on the flamboyant #Pride theme there, Microsoft!
June 3, 2025 at 7:49 PM
Reposted by Stu Church
goodlawproject.org
If you want to know how serious our decline in the UK, when North Carolina did what the Labour Government and EHRC have done, the then UK Government told LGBT+ people to beware travelling there.

(Credit to @kazhawa.bsky.social.) www.voanews.com/amp/uk-issue...
UK Issues Travel Advisory for North Carolina & Mississippi
www.voanews.com
April 26, 2025 at 9:28 AM
Reposted by Stu Church
jksteinberger.bsky.social
As promised, here are the slides I shared with students to convince them to NOT use chatGPT and other artificial stupidity.

TL;DR? AI is evil, unsustainable and stupid, and I'd much rather they use their own brains, make their own mistakes, and actually learn something. 🪄
NO CHATGPT Or other artificial stupidity: motivation First, clarity on distinguishing AIs: Non-generative: grammar aid, translation, dictionary, text-to-audio (e.g. Natural Reader): no problem As long as you use the appropriate tools (least intensive in data and server energy use). Why? Because you provide the content. Your brain is doing the most important work Generative: ChatGPT & Co. You only supply the prompt, the AI supplies the content. Why is this delegation of work problematic? 3 domains: ethical, environmental, intellectual engagement. (Caveat: generative is probably ok for computer programming, where it can be useful and save time. Not relevant to this class.) 1) AI and ethics Mass theft of all and everything «learning» on books, articles, blogs, social media, images, music, cultural production, without permission of authors/creators, and leading to their mass joblessness. Profits are not reditributed to originators. Permanent destruction of the mental health of underpaid precarious tech workers in the Global South (Kenya, Philippines …): «correction» to avoid production of violent and pedophile contents etc, tech workers are obliged to watch and correct super violent contents for days on end, leading to extreme psychological suffering and trauma, from which recovery is doubtful. No or little compensation (certainly not at the level of the suffering inflicted). In short, an industry built on theft of real human creation and sacrifice of real human health, profiting a few megafortunes. 2) AI and (un)sustainability Massive consumption of electricity, water, server capacity for generative AI. Outcome: keep fossil fuel companies in business, using up new renewable capacity, without any satisfaction of basic human needs. Massive misappropriation of the finance necessary for climate and ecological action (renewable generation, efficiency and retrofit for buildings, public transit, infrastructures for cycling etc) towards AI industry. Overall: undermine climate action, reinforce fossil industry, waste resources necessary for human development. 3) AI and intellectual engagement First, what learning is (or should be) about: The goal should not (only) be the reproduction of «correct» knowledge, But mainly personal engagement and experience of thinking about topics of interest. Personal engagement = using one’s own brain. The most important activity for learning and intellectual engagement is the experience of making one’s own mistakes, by trial and error, corrections based on new ideas, starting over again. Learning to recognise nuances, knowledge gaps, better explanations This kind of learning is possible only through using your own brain, not AI. Also, Ais are not «intelligent». At all. They simply reproduce pre-existing patterns. They «bullshit», invent false references, false facts, false data, simply because those sound plausible. VERY DANGEROUS. If you learn how to NOT use AI, and how to research facts and data on your own, this will serve you and your communities for the rest of your life.
February 23, 2025 at 1:45 PM
Reposted by Stu Church
uxcollective.bsky.social
Technological lust for AI https://buff.ly/3QcK6BY
February 10, 2025 at 9:14 AM
stuchurch.bsky.social
Looking forward to the 'Finding Product Market Fit with AI' meeting in Bristol next week. I'm going to be sharing a few thoughts about AI, fitness landscapes and products as evolutionary experiments.

lu.ma/qofk5vv7
Finding Product Market Fit With AI · Luma
Dive into the Future of Product Development! Join us on February 11th at The Square Club for an evening for on how product & marketing teams are using AI tools…
lu.ma
February 4, 2025 at 1:10 PM
stuchurch.bsky.social
Highly recommend the Disco Elysium soundtrack by Sea Power as music to work to (and listen to!) open.spotify.com/album/5IhBwG...
Disco Elysium
open.spotify.com
February 4, 2025 at 10:45 AM
stuchurch.bsky.social
I think the UX designers were on holiday when this screen was built. Also, there is no ticket.
Car park payment screen, giving options of 'subscription' or 'transaction' (confusingly)
January 30, 2025 at 6:21 PM
Reposted by Stu Church
almostexact.bsky.social
Does anyone know of any companies/orgs that have old IT equipment they would be able to give to a primary school in Bristol? Particularly computers and iPads needed ❤️
January 29, 2025 at 6:01 PM
stuchurch.bsky.social
Wrote a little non-techie guide about how to get DeepSeek R1 running locally on a Mac for free (thus avoiding the potential data & security issues that come with using the cloud version) medium.com/@stuchurch/h...
How to install DeepSeek R1 locally on a Mac (for the relatively non-techie)
There are potential security risks with using DeepSeek online, but it’s quite straightforward to safely run a local version, even if…
medium.com
January 29, 2025 at 9:11 AM
stuchurch.bsky.social
So it turns out that, unlike ChatGPT, DeepSeek R1 doesn't have safeguards to prevent it from doing evil things (the 'Evil jailbreak'), like provide information about how to launder money or write malware to steal personal information 😬 www.kelacyber.com/blog/deepsee...
a cartoon dog is sitting at a table with a cup of coffee in front of a fire with the words this is fine .
ALT: a cartoon dog is sitting at a table with a cup of coffee in front of a fire with the words this is fine .
media.tenor.com
January 28, 2025 at 9:42 AM
stuchurch.bsky.social
Having Googled it, it turns out that the opposite of a nudge is a 'sludge'! thedecisionlab.com/reference-gu....
Sludge - The Decision Lab
Sludge is essentially the opposite of a nudge, wherein it makes a process more difficult, making the consumer less likely to continue the process.
thedecisionlab.com
January 24, 2025 at 10:01 AM
stuchurch.bsky.social
Does having to call the US to cancel your subscription count as a deceptive pattern? Or is it just the opposite of a nudge in that it's adding friction to stop you doing something that is deemed undesirable?
Screen grab showing the need to call a US number to close your account
January 24, 2025 at 9:58 AM
Reposted by Stu Church
marklittle.bsky.social
“In a world fragmented by increasingly bespoke reality perceptions, science, facts, rationality have become an existential threat to most of our cherished co-created beliefs and worldviews” www.protagonist-science.com/p/how-social...
How social media destroys democratic discourse, explained in 6 easy figures
Where we all went wrong
www.protagonist-science.com
January 21, 2025 at 8:59 AM
Reposted by Stu Church
katestarbird.bsky.social
This multi-year, multi-country analysis shows that right-wing populist politicians spread more online misinfo than their mainstream counterparts and explains how “the rise of political misinformation is associated to the recent wave of radical-right populism.”

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
Screenshot of a paper in the International Journal of Press/Politics. Title: When Do Parties Lie? Misinformation and Radical-Right Populism Across 26 Countries. Authors: Petter Törnberg and Juliana Chueri. Abstract: The spread of misinformation has emerged as a global concern. Academic attention has recently shifted to emphasize the role of political elites as drivers of misinformation. Yet, little is known of the relationship between party politics and the spread of misinformation—in part due to a dearth of cross-national empirical data needed for comparative study. This article examines which parties are more likely to spread misinformation, by drawing on a comprehensive database of 32M tweets from parliamentarians in 26 countries, spanning 6years and several election periods. The dataset is combined with external databases such as Parlgov and V-Dem, linking the spread of misinformation to detailed information about political parties and cabinets, thus enabling a comparative politics approach to misinformation. Using multilevel analysis with random country intercepts, we find that radical-right populism is the strongest determinant for the propensity to spread misinformation. Populism, left- wing populism, and right-wing politics are not linked to the spread of misinformation. These results suggest that political misinformation should be understood as part and parcel of the current wave of radical right populism, and its opposition to liberal democratic institution.
January 20, 2025 at 6:46 PM
Reposted by Stu Church
uxcollective.bsky.social
Human flourishing in the Age of AI: challenges, strategies, & opportunities https://buff.ly/4fTTLaM
January 13, 2025 at 7:42 AM
Reposted by Stu Church
georebekah.bsky.social
ABC, NBC & CBS dedicated about 16 minutes of airtime last night to the California wildfires without once mentioning climate change.

Since the news failed do it's job, here's a short summary of the role of climate change and wildfire risk:

www.noaa.gov/noaa-wildfir...
Wildfire climate connection
Climate change, including increased heat, extended drought, and a thirsty atmosphere, has been a key driver in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the western United States during the last ...
www.noaa.gov
January 8, 2025 at 8:03 PM
Reposted by Stu Church
dgrand.bsky.social
🚨In Nature🚨
Meta is dropping fact-checking to avoid anti-conservative bias- but is there actually evidence of bias?
We this test empirically & find that conservatives
* ARE suspended more
* BUT share more misinfo
So suspension isn't necessarily evidence of bias www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions - Nature
We find that conservatives tend to share more low-quality news through social media than liberals, and so even if technology companies enact politically neutral anti-misinformation policies, political...
www.nature.com
January 7, 2025 at 2:11 PM
stuchurch.bsky.social
Have been playing with Anaconda's (free!) AI Navigator www.anaconda.com/products/ai-..., which allows you to download and run LLMs locally. V.useful if you have sensitive data, or don't fancy giving your data away to OpenAI/whoever for training. Does need quite a lot of RAM though (ideally 16GB+).
Anaconda AI Navigator | Anaconda
Download and experiment locally with a curated repository of open-source large-language models with Anaconda AI Navigator.
www.anaconda.com
January 6, 2025 at 4:40 PM
stuchurch.bsky.social
A ChatGPT meta-tragedy in three acts.
Chat GPT Key Finding: A 2020 study by MIT found that disinformation spreads faster in English compared to other languages due to the emotional language and informal tone used. My response: What is the 2020 study by MIT that found that disinformation spreads faster in English compared to other languages due to the emotional language and informal tone used? ChatGPT response: I apologize for the earlier confusion. Upon further review, I couldn’t locate a 2020 MIT study that specifically found that disinformation spreads faster in English compared to other languages due to emotional language and informal tone.
January 3, 2025 at 11:55 AM