Alice Schwarze

Task learning increases information redundancy of neural responses in macaque visual cortex How does the brain optimize sensory information for decision-making in new tasks? One hypothesis suggests that learning reduces redundancy in neural representations to improve efficiency, whereas anot...

RIP redundancy reduction?

Beautiful work by Liu & colleagues showing that neural redundancy increases with learning, as predicted by a Bayesian model:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Captcha but it is a where's Waldo challenge

I gave up at 11

1908: the Lancet, one of the most respected scientific journals, calls for 18 age limit on reading in bed amidst a moral panic surrounding children becoming "addicted" to novels, which were "designed to keep kids hooked" and destroy their attention/mental health

2yo loves playing with all sorts of tissue paper

2yo learns where I keep the toilet paper in the bathroom

2yo makes it her morning routine to transport the all (yes, all) toilet paper from the bathroom into her room to play with it

So now I need to inform house guests that my bathroom is BYOTP

We have automated much of coding, but software engineering is still very much in the human domain

I've recently used Claude to refactor a whole python library. It was helpful for finding the cause of some errors quickly and definitely saved me days on writing docs. But when asked to add a new functionality, it ignored all existing classes in the code and added a bunch of redundant ones

Javascript code for a noncentral t cdf produced by Claude. It is simply a call to the normal CDF, which is not correct (though will be a decent approximation with large N).

I've been testing Claude to see how well it can "vibe out" a stat. power app that I've already coded completely myself - so I know what I want. It mostly gets things right with animations (those are easily verifiable) but looking into the backend stats code is nightmare inducing (see pic).

I believe they do sometimes, but the Blackpink ladies seem to be too iconic and too loved by their fans to be replaceable

Just realized that Blackpink has been an insanely successful girl group for 10 years already. The best thing about that is that K-pop producers are now forced to let women in their 30s be pop idols.

Latest working paper 🧪 w/ @shalmoli-ghosh.bsky.social and @matthewdeverna.com shows that AI porn and NSFW deepfakes targeting women are being commoditized

A Marketplace for AI-Generated Adult Content and Deepfakes

Preprint: doi.org/10.48550/arX...

‘Red team’ students stress-test NYC health department’s AI | Cornell Chronicle People usually strive to be their true, authentic selves, but this fall, five master’s students at Cornell Tech adopted not only alter egos but also “bad intent,” in an effort to make AI safer for hea...

Hello!

This is a reminder that @cornelltech.bsky.social runs a Red Team Clinic that provides a *free* safety consultation to nonprofits / public sector orgs that are developing a public-facing AI tool and want to stress-test it for possible abuse vectors.

Applications welcome on a rolling basis:

True for vibe coding but also for writing in general. I miss reading succinct texts

Breaking the Spell of Vibe Coding – fast.ai Sinister variations on the positive state of flow

www.fast.ai/posts/2026-0...
"AI coding agents can produce syntactically correct code... they don’t produce useful layers of abstraction nor meaningful modularization. They don’t value conciseness or improving organization in a large code base. We have automated coding, but not software engineering."

waiting for some experiments to run, so a quick thread about base models and pretraining contamination, with some weird & interesting base model generations i've collected over time.

or, why do open source models claim to be claude or chatgpt?

Probably not making any friends with this but consciousness is a social construct.

Not to be a downer, but I firmly believe that there needs to be more transparency into how precarious the academic job market is for young researchers. I had a spreadsheet like this. When I left academia in 2024 it had over 250 entries - all rejections, no responses, and one abruptly rescinded offer

What a simple question about My Cousin Vinny taught me about LLMs If you want to see an LLM really malfunction, ask it to reconstruct a story from pieces. Also: Should this be a benchmark?

I heard what everyone has been clamoring for is 6,000 words on what a simple question about the 1990s comedy My Cousin Vinny can teach us about the capabilities and surprising weaknesses of current LLMs. Well, I hate to disappoint people, so I went and wrote it. open.substack.com/pub/mikecaul...

Reflections on Vibe Researching My year-long experiment in AI first research

Really appreciated Joshua Gans' postmortem on an experiment in vibe researching

joshuagans.substack.com/p/reflection...

Taste is still paramount and the models are instruction-tuned to sycophancy to all hell

Please read the whole thread through, starting from the skeet that this is in reply to.

NYC Wegmans is storing biometric data on shoppers' eyes, voices and faces The supermarket chain says it’s a move to ensure shopper safety. Surveillance experts warn of privacy risks.

“Don’t walk in” instead of “just walk out.”

The auto generated alt text on this meme is ... extremely misleading.

(Better alt: Troy from Community enters a room with a stack of pizzas but the room is on fire.)

a man in a suit is carrying a stack of pizza boxes into a doorway . Alt: a man in a suit is carrying a stack of pizza boxes into a doorway .

Keeping up with the tradition to start the new year like this

Why Most AI Features Fail After Launch (And How PMs Can Prevent It) | HackerNoon Read up on why most AI features and products fail after launch and learn how product managers can prevent it.

Is your AI feature suffering from "silent failure"?
Product managers often treat AI like traditional code—ship it and move on. But AI requires "gardening," not just building.
More on handling post-launch decay for product managers: buff.ly/Hv8Q1yN

Rise of the machines but it is just a single agent forcing me into total submission by deleting my password manager

All AI agents: "pleeeeaseeee micromanage me"
Me: " I don't want to"
Agent: "OK in that case I'll delete all your files forever"

Prof Steven Aaardvark has moved to Bluesky. Twitter is so over

The person, yes. He passed a few years ago, so I would be surprised if he made the account

If you see this, post a random fact about yourself:

I once made Robert May very hangry.

I mean just think about how bloody and savage the discussions on those discussion pages would be