@neuronasko
CUNY neuroscience PhD candidate. Interested in comp neuroscience, comp social science, causality, and philosophy of science. Previously at UMich[as visiting student]/Stanford/ETH Zurich & UZH/UIUC. Opinions are my own.
MacBook Neo and Steam Machine are worth something to get excited about. UNIX/LINUX is fundamental.
It’s not Apple and Valve’s fault that Google/Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo/Samsung/others have particular disdain for the their consumer.
It’s funny some corps still have standards for personal computing.
I had a nasty dream I got into an altercation with someone on whether the brain is a prediction machine or not. Can the big AI era end already so we can just get back to doing cool collaborations and have fun?
Forget energy crisis. The Ukraine War showed, to a limited extent, alternative adaption is possible within a few years. The desalination plant strikes are quite terrifying after learning the many Persian Gulf states have no large scale backup.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=eOsH...
It’s perfectly okay to spit venom as a science communicator to fight fascism and fight big tech scientism. In fact, it’s y’alls job.
Whoa big moves. I liked her leadership even though the app is struggling. I don’t have confidence in the new.
bsky.social/about/blog/0...
Coincidentally last year ago a Bulgarian politics prof on TV had made the same astute observation about post-COVID in Bulgaria, in the US, and the world. These can be times because major flux like is the putative causal mechanism for democratization. 2/2
GIF source: eguvep.github.io/jpiv/introdu...
Charles Tilly talked about small microcosmic counter-revolutions happening halfway into the French Revolution. It’s happening in the US with all kinds of social issues. Social dynamics are like a Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction or a critical sandpile slide. 1/2 www.reddit.com/r/chemicalre...
Dario Amodei’s recent clashes with various industry and government entities interlope all these social networks. Something has to give because I’m sure everyone is feeling multifold AI exhaustion/burnout. Let’s just have some consensus develop, hopefully. 2/2
If some computationalist folks previously skeptical of conscious AI flipped, its prudent to acknowledge it is fair to double down on supporting Ned Block’s hypothesis and also acknowledge the geopolitical pressure of the AI industry has only gotten hotter. 1/2
I bet and I’m trying to relate. I did a wet lab internship in as physics major with no bio classes priors. Those post docs had no chill.
Also flipping flies is something I hear changes career trajectories.
The training path of the PhD is being dropped in the deep end of the pool. Not cool.
That’s because time has passed. It was one of the first weed out courses (lab section) for bio majors so it was a roller coaster.
Sorry you experienced that.
I had to teach wet lab for three semesters stuff to pay the bills. It was fun, aggravating, and helped my complex systems understanding.
Hypothesis that I obsessed over this morning: ephaptic coupling modulating the composition of hippocampal short wave ripples. As much I don’t like fuzzy definitions of neural representation and compositionality bc they make theorists write wack philosophy papers, they do wonders for idea generation.
Hot-take: Calcium imaging theory methods aren’t the best for large-scale recording theory. Just because it makes nice over there doesn’t mean it makes nice over here.
The comment section here for some reason still fails to realize this is such bad PR that it hurts the company image regardless of the nuances of the “how”. A chunk of their consumer base had a perception that benefited the company and that is now broken.
www.reddit.com/r/technology...
We need rally together. Not sure what the messaging is and this is all new. Business as usual not working. How did the NoKings protest emerge? How did the George Floyd protests emerge? Occupy Wallstreet? Peace assembly and new community building. You know that feeling in your gut? Use it.
There’s a lot of bad authoritative noise (across strata) that needs to tuned put by folks with collective acrivism (I called it “bottom-up stick” or “prosocial bottom-up criticisms”). A possible paper. Not sure if one can be constructive polemicist. How did Danny Dennett do it so smoothly? 2/2
Had a chat with a friend about science comm and trying to play with negative affect (TBH I’m also copying this from authority) and how it can never play out the way one intends when using intent. Anyhow I don’t know what angle to play. Negative affect via weak network links works well. 1/2
Hot-take: A lot of theories of neuronal firing rates can summarized by a Drake lyric.
Reality is emergent and theory-of-everything people don’t like that. Also AGI people don’t like that. Stop trying to define everything and just accept life as it comes in, if you don’t do so already.
One bias that always bothers me here is the patronization of users. They are self-sorting and will seek out the view they want versus they are some idiot that falls for a scheme. People use willful ignorance and not always fall to some marketing ruse. Bottom-up versus top-down causality.
Happy International Women’s Day
I always understood the “perestroika” of the USSR because institutions needed reshaping but never took “glasnost” seriously until now. One of my Stanford supervisors had said once can only be rebellious later in the academic career with tenure but it’s a different vibe now. Line live transparency!
Do something up-and-comers? Emergent phenomena? Bio instances of DL? People need to be called out. And the star children of emeritus profs are often just a bunch of hype going to major AI labs? Where’s the magic? Winning a major grant ain’t working anymore. So disappointing. 2/2
Nothing happens with neuro theory. No recent papers has done any significant damage to establishment hypotheses or driven consensus. Several prominent figures lost it so much to stagnation they committed to NeuroAI but that’s just profit driven marketing. 🧪 1/2
If one or few school of thought dominate a field for years maybe its time to stop recruiting trainees for more citations.
Taking nerdy concepts and memeifying them for hot takes isn’t nuisance but part of the job description of doing research and being a science communicator to the public.
With that being said, lab rat workaholism has always been an ego project.
Pure math department have been slowly shuttering for many years. Some may have found a home as dynamicists in theoretical neuroscience departments to write more ML papers. But what do I know, I’ve been out of the loop for a while.
A way of understanding how institutions arise is to create theoretical models of how to take them apart from the inside and from the outside. For example, conservatives use willful ignorance to undermine institutional authority all the time. Knowledge is malleable when translated to decision making.
