The do-operator is odd, but useful. nothing-so-practical.com/post/do-the-... #CausalSky #CausalInference #DAG

Perplexity’s CEO is just the latest tech leader to tell the public their jobs will be sacrificed on the altar of the glorious AI future. It’s a compelling narrative, but it distracts us from the real impact of AI: not to take the human out of the loop, but to take away their power and cut their pay

Sexual assault, forcing citizens to strip naked, Israeli men exposing themselves to children. The latest human report on Israel's actions against people in the West Bank is shocking. When will western leaders stand up for international law and denounce the terror state? www.nrc.no/resources/re...

Carney is saying "Canada's economic ties with U.S. are a weakness that must be corrected." So why is his Energy Minister promising to send fossil gas to fuel Trump's AI strategy? www.desmog.com/2026/04/08/c...

while not comprehensive, the Strokes' Coachella performance apparently did a good job of summarizing the US's violent and anti-democratic foreign policy during the last ~80 years, up to involvement in Israel's on-going genocide: www.theguardian.com/music/2026/a...

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

I would really like to see folks in neuroscience and ML choosing to boycott the US. I have decided to not travel there for conferences anymore myself, but I have not seen any collective initiatives in the community---at least not yet

What Israel is doing to Lebanon is obscene, carpet bombing civilians, massacring people in their hundreds, total disregard for human life. Truly plumbing the depths of evil. The single greatest source of violence and instability in the region and it's not even close.

Google’s AI Overviews are providing “tens of millions of wrong answers … every hour — and hundreds of thousands every minute.” wow, i love the AI future!

Atlantic opinion piece on LLMs worth reading: archive.is/IXGlH. It argues "speech without enforceable consequence undermines the social contract". I feel the idea might be more general than the punitive angle of the author. Zoom out from "words without consequence", to 'words without relationships'

1/2: Two updates to share! I have started a research position in London (UK)! I’m excited to pursue new science, and a new city. With the horrors that our economic system and those currently in power inflict upon the world, I am increasingly looking for ways to make change---enter my second update…

You guys in the USA need to go in GLOBAL STRYKE. JUST STOP WORKING. Do this for days. Stop the country. Stop the fool, my goodness. You have massive power. Use it !

Some reports say over 500 schools, 55 libraries, & 25 universities hit. You can debate the numbers, but hitting Sharif University & Beheshti is like hitting MIT & Stanford. I keep wondering: How would the scientific community respond differently if it was those universities? What’s the difference?

It just happened, for the first time, that reviewer 2 (in the metaphorical and literal sense) bashed my recent anonymous submission and told me to cite work that I have co-authored 🫠 What is the correct emotional response to this? My default is imposter syndrome but not sure that it applies

To every volunteer, donor, organizer and NDP member who helped power this history-making movement: thank you. We are building a new foundation for our party, and we are ready to come roaring back on the Canadian political stage. Let’s get to work!

SCOOP: Former fracking CEO Gwyn Morgan has been funnelling millions into a network of right-wing think tanks, organizations, and far right-media in Canada. Check out our analysis and map of Morgan's network: @geoffdembicki.bsky.social www.desmog.com?p=94865&prev...

@avilewis.ca elected new NDP leader!!! ABSOLUTELY STOKED. This a big day for Canada

This is so insane: www.newsweek.com/nyc-spends-a... It's also insane that nobody in this article mentions the possibility of converting the money into a very generous UBI and probably those people would be better off.

A personal update.

yeah no shit, leo saw what happened to the guy before him

the thing that always blows my mind about all of this is that people do not usually put two and two together, and recognize that a fundamental feature of capitalism--organizing an economy around capital accumulation--is anti-democratic. The fight for democracy is a fight for economic reform.

PhD opportunity in "The role of neural development in multimodal intelligence" with me, @marcusghosh.bsky.social and @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social. Read details below 👇. Note there's a very short window for applying (deadline Feb 27). 🤖🧠🧪 www.imperial.ac.uk/school-of-co...

This is another one of the reasons I’m so deeply troubled by the fabulous new plan to just pivot to private philanthropy. Billionaires will not save science

Not despondent to share our new work arxiv.org/abs/2601.17427 with Santiago Acevedo and Cristopher Erazo from SISSA, where we show that Binary Intrisic Dimension (BID) [ nature.com/articles/s42... ] is able to detect phase transitions in the Hopfield model. 1/N

Really hard to look at this and all the other examples of bravery and kindness from ordinary people in this moment not think also of the tremendous cowardice exhibited over the past year by some of the richest, most well-protected people in business, media and politics

Wonder why Danielle Smith isn't speaking out about Trump threatening Greenland? I'm sure it has nothing to do with her cultivating connections to the Trump official tasked with annexing the territory. Read more from @marylouisestuart.bsky.social in @desmog.com www.desmog.com/2026/01/14/d...

when doing neuroscience projects I often advocate for computational modelling, followed by data analysis to test model's predictions. however a few times now I have had pushback from collaborators/reivewers suggesting it would be better to do the data analysis first, then the modelling. thoughts?

added to priority reading list 😻

Required viewing

New Interview: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

Fantastic article. Like the author, I am not so struck by the US's actions--given Iraq, Chili, Iran, Grenada, etc etc--but am rather floored by how the US administration is no longer trying to hide resource theft under a veneer of "rules based law and order".

Yet to be Dr. shinapses but one day I’d love to. Thanks to @alleninstitute.org for the amazing dataset so that @haiderlab.bsky.social and I can find interesting scientific results!

🚨 THE FINAL EIGHT 🚨 We’ve made it to the quarter finals — only two days away from crowning a winner for Worst Person in Tech 2025. Don’t miss your chance to vote! 🗳️ Cast your ballot: twsu.forms.app/wpit2025-qf

🚨 What if evolution is the ”law”… and networks are the machines that do the work? In this paper (just published) I try to formalize how living systems are non-equilibrium, information-processing, adaptive matter. With a great biological flavor! 🧪🌐🌍🧬🦠 👉 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... 🧵 1/

Always such a vibrant NeuroAI community in Montreal !

1/4 Psyched to have our paper, 'Irresponsible AI: big tech's influence on AI research and associated impacts', at the Algorithmic Collective Action NeurIPS workshop today! This was a collaboration with @alexhergar.bsky.social, Alexandra Volokhova, and @dounia-kabakibo.bsky.social. Details below...

Many, many unpaid labour-hours will be required for the ICLR authors and organizers to sort this mess out, and the conference will be worse for it. A perfect case study on why AI productivity gains are largely a mirage.

If we look back at old science papers, what percentage drew incorrect conclusions? I don't mean how many had data that turned out to be flawed, but how many used good data to claim something that later turned out to be Wrong? I suspect the percentage is quite high but it would be hard to check.

Carney’s deal with Danielle Smith is the sellout of the century: scrapping climate legislation for a pipeline that will never be built. We need powerlines, not pipelines. Our path is through climate leadership & building good jobs in the clean economy.

feeling a need to reread this in advance of tomorrow, for some reason. ieefa.org/resources/fi...

I'm anxious about being in Hawaiʻi and I just realized why. In Honolulu, where a car is needed to get around, I often agonize about when to go out so I'm not stuck in traffic. In London or Paris, I just go because I cycle everywhere and cars on the road don't impact my travel times. #CarsRuinCities

Incredible…… Colombia declares its entire Amazon Biome off limits to mining & oil extraction.

Reminder if you missed #SNUFA spiking neural network and neuromorphic workshop earlier this month, all our talks were recorded and are now available to watch. 🤖🧠🧪 www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Half your brain cells are astrocytes, oscillating and modulating activity without spiking, while cortical neurons spike sparsely. So nearly 100% of cells are oscillating almost all the time, but only a minority of cells emit rare spikes. Maybe spikes are the tail and oscillations are the dog.

This monster also promoted the invasion of Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and created mass child malnutrition.

#BREAKING | The israeli deportation of Palestinian families from Jerusalem to Gaza in an attempt to alter the demographic population constitutes a war crime, UN reports

WATCH: Seriously, if you’re following ANY bike-lane debate, you HAVE TO WATCH this news story. You actually can’t make this up. Ford claims without evidence that bike-lanes are bad for small business, and THE ACTUAL BUSINESS ASSOCIATION obliterates him with data. Safe bike-lanes mean business.

Following today's political developments I realized there is a disturbing neuro-AI connection to Epstein: apparently Minsky--famed for work on the perceptron--attended Epstein's island and was accused by one of Epstein's victims of r**ing her. Discussed here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_...