i am curious how continuous learning will be solved. it is often said humans are more efficient learners since they need fewer training examples than DNNs. but this is only true if you do not consider evolution to be part of the learning process

i like cognition but i dislike consciousness and i hate, hate, hate, hate everyone who constantly forces me to think about it. NYAAAAAA FUCK THIS SHIT NYAAAAA

during training an NNs weights take on a shape that encodes symbols necessary for a task. animal brains do the same, but the genome also encodes a developmental program that leads to a brain with pre-initialized weights encoding some concepts, a bee knows what a flower is before it ever saw one??

having a tender moment with a sweat bee

The interaction they are destroying is mostly human viscera with car hoods

aftermath of violent altercation between canada goose and egyptian goose in, you guessed it, western europe. The canadian attacked the slightly smaller egyptian unprovoked. i witnessed something similar recently, canada goose attacking crow. sadly for me they never attack humans

"ouch! i think there is a chance that it thinks im prey" www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl0g...

Lay not you hand upon me simpleton

why dont my stupid models understand that they are supposed to do what pleases me and not min/max their loss when the going gets rough?

life update: i trained a model 3 times on bugged data before noticing. source of the bug: me. but at least i got bee-themed grippy socks now

parabel of the digging bees. Me: adaptive, general intelligence, applying knowledge competently. You: pattern matcher, pudding for brains, lack of critical reflection

i feel like i should spell out which animals im comfortable embodying, that is if i found out a coworker drew me as one of those animals in a compromising situation i would not be disturbed. among insects: dipterans but only brachycera the true flies, all hymenoptera, all lepidoptera, all mantids...

what the hell is her problem?

im re-reading gravitys rainbow and it occurs to me all great novels are about the synthesis of sex drive and death drive. however i have only read 2 authors so far and i should get at least a third data point in

Arent Genomic sequence transformers kind of strange? they are probably strange in similar ways to LLMs, but LLMs operate in natural language for which we have an intuition, but for genomes we dont. Maybe the more transparent interpretability work on LLMs can be translated to genomics

very strange but also very interesting moment with some lab mates who have no familarity with deep learning. i dont need to understand anything about their problem, i only need to change the number of output channels for the new data set and in 2 days their task will be fully automated

hah, someone experiencing the mirror shock that I experience when I think of anything biological: "how does any of this even *work in principe*, this is clearly too poorly factored and incoherent to function"

i decided to write the code for my current project mostly by myself, with occasional input from claude. it does mean things move at 0.1% of their possible speed, but honestly what would i even do with my 17 hours of daily waking time? just wander around the gardens all day? thats no way to live

apparently the friendship between achilles and patroclus meme doesnt depict an ancient statue, but a still from a surprisingly artsy claymation short. it certainly does depict a very friendly relationship between the 2 www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zhE...

i think the impressionist, stream-of-conciousness depictions of events and environments in gravitys rainbow could work well as a cartoon. translating it into exaggerated character designs instead of narration. slothrops chapters are like looney toons episodes anyway

Our paper is on the cover of @currentbiology.bsky.social : a strawberry poison frog with the most common color morph, living up to its common name 🍓. In this issue, we uncover the genetic basis of color variation in frogs from Bocas del Toro, where blue, green, yellow, orange, and red morphs occur

what secrets are down there?

Its common name suggests lowly status, but the least flycatcher belongs to the genus empidonax which means mosquito lord and it belongs to the family tyrannidae, literally tyrants. what to make of this?

How finegrained is the for you recommendation algo? if im getting a bunch of posts about insects, including many about caddisflies and i click 'show less of this' on every post about caddisflies does the algo know i specifically dont want caddisfly content? or will it now penalize all insect content

a lot of animals have some behavioral plasticity in a certain context, but no ability to solve complex problems. despite this, we know biological brains are in principle capable of complex problem solving. we know because of we observe this trait. the difference is in degree rather than kind...

Im not surprised. i never publicly registered a prediction, just believe me that i knew all this time and that im currently not surprised at all by this result.

The lfsc Rosetta Stone bsky.app/profile/sili...

Do i like innocent for its somewhat clunky exploration of morality or because it is beautifully drawn, has a gorgeous twink main character and grotesque violence? the former is definitely what i would tell people when recommending the manga

very good. and it made me realize that i often try to justify my enjoyement of violent media with some deeper moral purpose, but i think i can admit i just like violence for its own sake. im a childish dweeb like tarantino. although that realization has been developing for a bit now...

“Come on, it’s fine—let me do it.” “But I’m Medusa.” 'hiss' “Ah… no… Mr. Yamada, you’ll turn to stone!” “As long as I don’t look at your face, I’ll be fine.” 'hiss hiss' “The next day” “Ow… ow…” “It’s a urinary tract stone.”

apia. gouache painting from 2017

hate it when my nervous system that has been finetuned for a billion years goes ∮∂Ω​eiθdμ⇝α⨆​∅?⊕Ξ¨⌊¬Γ⌋⊨⊤ for 1 millisecond and i spill carcinogenic chemicals all over me

this title implicitly throws a chicken and an egg at me, but i will never know the answer, because my useless institution doesnt grant me access and you-know-where doesnt have it

headache and mild fever for exactly one day and then they are gone. what is that about? my guards dispatched the invaders swiftly and impaled their corpses at the entrance, yet the germs got what they wanted in the days leading up to this i spread them to other people to continue this cycle

im not writing code, im doing my shift at the shape factory, making sure all the little blocks have the right shape and size at the right time

i recently heard a lecture about frog sex chromosomes and i thought 'this is a lot to take in, very confusing, should read more about it' this paper is more digestable, but im still none the wiser

At the botanical gardens my thoughts become 'im at the botanical garden' 'im looking at a bee' 'im enjoying being at the botanical garden and observing bees' feels very in the moment, my thoughts are usually not this clearly connected to my present state. im not sure if this is enjoyable though

On this flower patch all the other bees were flying, only this one was climbing from flower to flower. did she realize the energy cost of flight and decided to walk? is she smart? is she stupid? did parasite load force her to do this?

the apian body is objectively more aesthetically superior when the distorting lens of lust is removed

after all knolwedge work has been automated, someone still needs to measure the distance between snake anus and tail tip

i dont know why im so into all this genomic structure stuff. i dont get it at all. and every lineage just does its own thing, not like there are many repeating patterns or things to anchor myself on

A pretty radical adaptive shift in metabolism, not through genetic novelties, but through regulation of existing genes

I just didnt know he had this dawg in him, especially discovering it at age 68 apparently

really enjoying this, especially as the last part seems to have been ghost written by a rabid fujoshi

See you space cowboy

i went to the botanical garden again yesterday and the bee community already noticeably changed. in addition to all the bees i saw the day before there were now also mason bees (osmia) and a few blood bees (sphecodes)

Well i don't care-for, th' things i eat, Can't stand that boogie-woogie beat- But i'm sold, on, suicide! You can keep Der Bingle too, a- And that darn 'bu-bu-bu-boo.' Cause i'm sold on suicide! Oh! i'm not too keen on ration stamps, Or Mothers who used to be baby vamps, But I'm sold, on,suicide!

something like this happens every 50 pages in almost all thomas pynchon novels

My most controversial opinion is that im quite fond of invasive rose-ringed parakeets. sorry to the natives, but now there is a smarter, larger,more beautiful bird in town, and it also has sharp beak and conquerers spirit