@dtemkin.bsky.social 's Rivulet esolang prompts ideas around code and #datavis comprehension. How do we make sense of visualizations when we are unfamiliar with the 'grammar' of their design? An introduction Rivulet: observablehq.com/@jwolondon/r... An editor: observablehq.com/@jwolondon/r...

Good Science xkcd.com/3101/

If a seven-year-old can’t walk to the store the fault lies not with the parents but with the community.

The Neuromatch #ImpactScholars Program is a global initiative that provides early-career researchers with hands-on mentorship, collaborative project work, & next steps to grow as computational scientists. 🤓 Berilsu Öner shares her #MyNeuromatchStory ⬇️ buff.ly/MBxDOJf #Neuromatch #Neuroscience

Finally finished reading Eshraghian et al guide to training SNNs, and wow. It's one of those review papers that feel so generous. Full of insights that could each generate entire research programmes, but rather than hoarding, they shared it with us all. arxiv.org/abs/2109.12894

Would it hurt people in tech to go and *talk* to someone with a degree in education? Most people don't understand what schools do. TL;DR: it's a lot more than info dumping into student's heads and it is certainly a lot more than daycare.

Was at a conference dinner a while back and one guy said "The future is AI. It doesn't replace senior developers, but no more need for juniors." To which i replied: "Where do you think senior developers come from. Straight from the womb?" He went quiet, then wandered off to a different huddle.

Bring physical buttons back on absolutely everything. Clicking, snapping, tactile friction. Chunky single-purpose electronics. Retreat from the gesture-based app-connected hellworld of the 2010s into the warm sensory embrace of the retrofuture 1980s

One weird trick for better diffusion models: concatenate some DINOv2 features to your latent channels! Combining latents with PCA components extracted from DINOv2 features yields faster training and better samples. Also enables a new guidance strategy. Simple and effective!

Today I was able to have an LLM generate a midi bass line, have it loop that on my synth via MCP, and then jam on that on my drum kit. This is the start of something exciting

As long as universities continue to have their main role be "ticket to middle class," it'd be insane to expect them to serve classical liberal education functions. It's too late, but I think things would be a lot better if job-prep and preserving the Great Conversation were separate institutions.

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

It turns out to be hard to evaluate natural language with natural language. What should we take away from the conundrum of LLM evaluation? www.argmin.net/p/evaluation...

Good presentation that makes sense of a messy research landscape.

This Github ticket is the kind of proposal that inexperienced engineers tend to make, because they think it's about code, and not about the humans who use the system. In any competent organization, these junior folks would get some very direct feedback and it would be a growth moment.

Stop everything you are doing and review the best Open Data chart you will see all year. Credit: @nkgarg.bsky.social's lab

We went through this in the 2010s. The Turing Test is a thought experiment for Turing to grapple with the fact that no one could define “intelligence” so he tried to operationalize it and gave the Imitation Game as as example. It was never meant to be conducted. The method is under-controlled.

20 years ago, Nine Inch Nails “The Hand That Feeds,” the first music video I directed. To celebrate this anniversary, I have constructed this immersive 2005 simulator to transport you to an authentic media viewing experience of the distant past.

Accepting “the bitter lesson” and embracing the brain’s complexity by Dyer and Richards. Great article! www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/acce...

This is fun - training NNs using only biases works well!

Rivulet is a language that prioritizes flow. Its script was influenced by mazes, space-filling algorithms, Anni Albers' Meander series, calligraphy-friendly conlangs and natlangs This program calculates the first set of Fibonacci numbers, stopping at 21. It can be found at github.com/rottytoot...

A friend pointed out that the quasi-religious way so many tech guys talk about AI is in part because they don't want to grapple with the guilt of what they do; AI is a God, AI will fix it. No need to be responsible for what you put in the world. I can't stop thinking about that.

Great crowd in Pittsburgh to #standupforscience2025

We're probably a little too obsessed with zero-shot retrieval. If you have documents (you do), then you can generate synthetic data, and finetune your embedding. Blog post lead by @jacobianneuro.bsky.social shows how well this works in practice. www.databricks.com/blog/improvi...

James Webb Satellite took a fantastic shot of the Planet Saturn with it's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). This is just an Amazing shot that shows the planet and the rings in brilliant detail.

🚨 Neuromatch Academy Course Applications are OPEN for 2025!! 🚨 Get your application in early to be a student or teaching assistant for this year’s courses! Applications are due Sunday, March 23. Apply & learn more: neuromatch.io/courses/ #mlsky #compneurosky #ai #climatesolutions #ScienceEdu 🧪

I love all my friends saying things like, “I wish I could make a career off being petty and making diss tracks” after the halftime show, and I’m out here like, “Have you considered academia?”

Sometimes I think about how there are worlds and cultures with depths that are impossible to fathom that you will somehow go your whole life never getting exposure to.

The Air Force is stripping Tuskegee Airmen lessons from basic training curriculum because of our White supremacist government. Put that in a headline. www.expressnews.com/news/article...

Apropos of a co-panelist's remarks today: If you're asking how do we get people to trust this technology, you're asking the wrong question. Should be: How do we build technology that is trustworthy & sufficiently transparent so people can make informed decisions abt when to trust it.

DeepSeek is a side project 🔥

So much good history in the comments on spiking statistics and E-I balance

Register for a neuroscience course this summer! Visit our new courses calendar to explore upcoming neuroscience courses. www.thetransmitter.org/courses/?utm...

Prefrontal cortex neuronal ensembles dynamically encode task features during associative memory and virtual navigation www.cell.com/cell-reports... #neuroscience

These fucking losers. Being bad at making music has never stopped people from making amazing music.

"AI" creative writing looks passable to people who don't look at writing all day long. To editors, it pops out like a sore thumb. LLMs are glorified predictive text machines and they predict, well, predictably. PS: if you submit an "AI" story, the editor WILL remember you, and not in a good way.

Hard to process the devastation I’ve witnessed in the last two days. Still in a state of shock for those who have lost so much in such a short period of time. #NoWords 💔

the ai bot isn’t “admitting” its secrets to you or “revealing” its creators intentions it’s just a word generating machine generating words the only meaning is that which you read into it and imo that should be none

Really enjoyed "Things we learned about LLMs in 2024" by @simonwillison.net, especially this analogy between today's datacenter buildout and the 19th century railway boom. The parallels are striking. simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/...

For Maths fans, 2025 is a square. 45² = 45 x 45 = 2025 Also, 9² x 5² = 2025 40² + 20² + 5² = 2025 My favourite? 1³+2³+3³+4³+5³+6³+7³+8³+9³ = 2025 #Mathematics #teaching #education

Happy new year! <insert cynical statements about the arbitrariness of time and the horror of existence>

I noticed some of these trends anecdotally early in grad school in my own dept's seminars, so I made tallies in my notes for two years. I found that "questions" to women speakers were statistically significantly more likely to be phrased as statements rather than actual questions.

Not that Google was ever good, but this cartoon is a good summary of now.

Agreed-upon Gross Income

What is or isn't a "BCI"? We argue in Nature BME today that if the tech stimulates or records brain activity AND does computation, it's a BCI. www.nature.com/articles/s41... But we still need a way to discuss different types of BCI separately... 🧵 #BCI #BrainComputerInterface

feeling a but under the weather this week … thus an increased level of activity on social media and blog: kyunghyuncho.me/i-sensed-anx...

Ah, the memories youtu.be/KQib7LUCdDI