Hello, if you are looking for reliable resources to follow as things escalate in Lebanon, I've got you ! Now is an especially good time to check out these accounts since there is very little media coverage of what's going on in Lebanon !
go.bsky.app/Bwe7hSf
I did not realize that emulation was this far ahead. The previous iteration was able to do very simple behavior like extending and retraction a tongue based on smell, but now they have an uploaded fly brain capable of controlling a simulated fly. Won't be too long until lobsters at this rate
Picture of DOGE guy Nate Cavanaugh
Screenshot of my DOGE letter “Dr. Joseph Rezek Dear NEH Grantee, This letter provides notice that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is terminating your federal grant (Grant Application No. FEL29509824) effective April 3, 2025, in accordance with the termination clause in your Grant Agreement. Your grant no longer effectuates the agency's needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination due to several reasonable causes, as outlined in 2CFR§200.340. For instance, NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda. The President's February 19, 2025 executive order mandates that the NEH eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions. See Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, E.O. 14217 (Feb. 19, 2025). Your grant's immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities. Any objections or appeals to this termination will be managed in strict accordance with the President's Executive Orders,
Last year, this guy (left) from DOGE used ChatGPT to find NEH grants that were too “DEI” for Trump, and canceled them, including mine, as shown by the letter I received last April (right). Huge new NYT article on the back story link below
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/...
additional nail in the coffin of model collapse: better results so far on a model retrained on its own synthetic traces.
New study finds learning makes neurons work better together, not independently. Tracking the visual cortex showed that as skills improve, neurons share more info, blending vision with expectation to build a flexible, inference-based model of the world.
#NeuroSkyence
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Awesome work, using RT modelling to show clear prioritisation of semantic features during WM maintenance! Especially for information that had fallen outside the focus of attention ➡️ more evidence that “silent” WM traces behave like episodic memory.
New preprint 🚨
Across multiple tasks, we show that higher-level info is more readily accessible in WM before evidence accumulation begins. Attention then boosts perceptual detail.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
A lot of fun with my colleagues @ckerren.bsky.social and @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social
This Wednesday at UCL, come by if you’re around!
New paper 🥳 RL relies a lot on an agent’s capability to explore. Our strategy-guided exploration makes the agent find new solutions more efficiently. It learns faster, and in some environments its Pass@1 surpasses the base model’s Pass@128. 🧵 1/6
📄 arxiv.org/abs/2603.02045
If you were interested in the original paper, but no longer have time for reading or just like videos, I recently gave a talk hosted by the kind and erudite @drmichaellevin.bsky.social, which you can now view on his youtube channel.
Thank you enormously for having me!
@jaanaru.bsky.social
Earlier this week, we published an essay by @jvoigts.bsky.social on the consequences of low peer review participation: lnkd.in/edfaWQBW. We continue the conversation on peer review today with a piece by @eblancosuarez.bsky.social about how to teach students how to be thoughtful and fair reviewers!
Peer reviewed academic journal publishing high quality research on how people write and how writing can be effectively taught. Please help us spread the word by following, retweeting and adding us to your starter pack!
@jneurolang.bsky.social
🚨New Paper!🚨 How do reasoning LLMs handle inferences that have no deterministic answer? We find that they diverge from humans in some significant ways, and fail to reflect human uncertainty… 🧵(1/10)
Can large language models *introspect*?
In a new paper, @kmahowald.bsky.social and I study the MECHANISM of introspection in big open-source models.
tldr: Models detect internal anomalies through DIRECT ACCESS, but don't know what the anomalies are.
And they love to guess “apple” 🍎
Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one?
In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵
the human hippocampus receives convergent input from multiple sensory systems, yet we lack a basic understanding of how this structure integrates across senses.
we tackle this problem in our new preprint!
paper: doi.org/10.64898/202...
w/ Aryan Agarwal, @yannanzhu.bsky.social, & Nick Turk-Browne
it's out!
@hazimi.bsky.social and i explore how higher order representations of *one's own first-order representational uncertainty* -- not representations OF noisiness in the world -- can be studied, including how they are constructed in the first place.
philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...
Out now in @plos.org CB: doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Neural representations of tasks change over time, even in the absence of changes in task performance. But neurons change tuning at different rates. How does a neuron's stability relate to its interactions with the population?
#compneuro #neuroskyence
Today's evacuation orders in Beirut displace 100,000s - including elderly people, children, people with disabilities, etc. etc., all having to leave in a hurry with no idea what will happen to their homes. This kind of mass forced displacement is illegal under international law.
www.bbc.com/news/article...
- Lebanon's government sovereignty has been on the ropes for a long time, but it's now essentially dead
- The Hezbollah disarmament process has been completely discredited
- Electricity in Beirut is already unreliable and the economy near-shambles
I saw a joke tweet saying "grep is the most important agent tool" so I decided to benchmaxx a faster grep tool in Rust.
It worked lololol
I think one of the most staggering industry shifts in my 16 years as a tech reporter is that it’s not become a question of “should our product help the government kill and/or surveil people?” but “to what extent?”
www.anthropic.com/news/where-s...
It’s not disingenuous to point out that the NYT did not run a single front page story of the Minab bombing. You don’t dispute this claim because it’s true. And the story that you reference on your webpage does not attribute blame to US/Israel and frames it as an allegation by “Iranian state media”
DART's impactor shifted asteroid Dimorphos' velocity by 2.7 mm/s.
Based on an asteroid density of 1500 to 3300 kg/m^3, that means the momentum enhancement factor is 2.2-4.9x thanks to kinetic energy ejecting additional debris upon impact:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The view from the ground in Iran - people running away from the US/Israel regime's bombs.
This new cycle of violence was all too predictable. For months, Israeli officials had signalled an escalation of their campaign against Hezbollah. Despite a ceasefire that ended a devastating 13-month war in 2024, Israel had continued with its bombing of Lebanon almost every day, saying the group was trying to rebuild its capabilities. Hezbollah, however, had remained quiet, aware that any move would inevitably be met with a powerful retaliation.
Interesting admission by BBC
A cochlea imaged in light-sheet microscopy (right) with staining for spiral ganglion neurons (red) and inner hair cells (blue). You will develop AI-based methods to analyze these structures, for example via segmentation of the individual cells (right) that will support gene therapy development for hearing loss and a better overall understanding of the anatomy of hearing.
Looking for a PhD position at the intersection of AI, imaging, and gene therapy? Apply for this position in my lab: tinyurl.com/2a2v6tvx
Part of sfb1690.uni-goettingen.de to study hearing, vision, and more.
Plus, you can create pretty pictures as the one below :).
Feels a bit late now that all of the South and southern suburbs have been ordered to evacuate. As well as 3 major towns in Bekaa.
But I’ll take all the help we can get. I don’t expect Macron to come thru but if he can put this into action, I will take it
Chickpeas were able to grow, flower and produce seeds in fake lunar soil that had been treated with fungi and compost.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chickpeas-moon-dirt-seeds-space-farming
