Null models for comparing information decomposition across complex systems journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

God help me, I think I'm becoming microtubule-pilled.

The Government isn't coming back, is it? Even if this or that gets re-funded, I feel like we've moved into a qualitatively new chapter of American history.

I'm not even particularly religious, but the whole idea of "automating pastoral work" seems genuinely evil. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Are there any fictional mantras that go anywhere near as hard as "Fire walk with me"?

This is hugely significant since it seems like a killing blow to the fundamental premise of liberalism: that the population is rational and deliberative enough to be trusted to work out a just structure for society.

I actually love this - I would 100% play a surrealist survival game where the world around you follows some kind of unstable dream logic. There's some awesome potential for psychological horror here.

I feel like we have a lot of difficulty threading the needle between "normalcy bias" and "catastrophizing". It seems every take is either: "we're all doomed" or an optimistic "don't worry, nothing fundamental will change." Where is the take saying: "doom is not inevitable, but certainly possible."

One thing I didn't anticipate about the Musk-ification of The Other Site is the sheer number of confident crackpots that have come out of the woodwork. It seems like every third bluecheck wants you to know that they "solved consciousness" or whatever.

Is it insane to keep trying to make a career in science? I'm on year 2 of the academic job market, and every piece of news makes me think that I'm putting my eggs in a basket that may not even exist in a decade.

Proclamation of the Imperium - III 2022

The undeniable truth is that the American Left has *utterly failed* to provide even a bulwark of resistance against the Right, let alone inspire a popular mass movement with its own vision. Would-be revolutionaries should probably sit with that a bit before condescending to all the liberals.

people playing music/videos on their phone speakers in public is more than just mildly annoying and is instead a leading indicator of the decline of community and empath

Cocktail idea: a Leland Palmer - iced tea, lemonade, and two unexpected shots of bottom-shelf vodka.

Evaluating oscillatory mechanisms underlying flexible neural communication in the human brain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.16.682957v1

We are watching a civilizational crash-out of world-historic proportions here.

Every time we find a way to use technology to satisfy some rewarding urge, it has been a problem. From opioid drug dependency to obesity and metabolic disease, we just can't handle it. I have no idea what the psycho-sexual equivalent of diabetes will be...but we'll find out, I guess.

It is finally out! Have you ever wanted to get into information theory, complexity, and networks? If so, this is the paper for you: a comprehensive tutorial review on information theory for complexity scientists specifically. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

For the past year, we've analyzed hundreds of primary sources spanning nearly a decade—emails, transcripts, texts, recordings, slides & other materials—revealing how a group of Silicon Valley elites sought to capture the psychedelic industry. Out now: "The Psychedelic Syndicate”

New paper dropped! Led by @thosvarley.bsky.social and Pai Vaibhav, we show that flows of information within a #xenobot resemble flows of information observed in adult human brains. Thomas provides caveats and context below. w/ @drmichaellevin.bsky.social, Caitlin Grasso, & Jeantine Lunshof.

New paper! This one is going to raise some eyebrows, so I want to explain the details before people get all worked-up about the title. 1/N www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

New release of Nvim-Lab, with better LSP configuration, and some new QoL plugins. github.com/thosvarley/n...

This is probably a good look at the future of AI - small, lightweight systems optimized for a given task getting wired together to produce high-level behavior.

A political scandal involving shoddy construction of a dam: Watergategate

The rate of change is too damn high. AI, politics, climate change...there is too much stuff all coming to a head at once! I feel like it is genuinely starting the wear on my mental health and/or soul.

I wonder how much of the current AI market is literally being driven by 5-10 men who genuinely think that, if they can pull this off, they will actually rule the world. I don't just mean "will have tons of money", but actually taking over the world.

I already worry that a lot of independent scientific software is buggy (leading to unknowingly publishing wrong results) -- the introduction of "vibe-coding" is going to make this infinitely worse. Scientists *need* to get training on software engineering/development.

📌 Save the Date! The flagship conference of the Network Science Society - 𝗡𝗲𝘁𝗦𝗰𝗶 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 - is coming to Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute, 𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝟭-𝟱, 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲. Prepare to share ideas, discoveries & challenges in network science. Registration opens soon! 🔗 www.netsci2026.com

This is objectively the correct response, but it also feels like a pretty big step down a road that ends in open and hostile conflict between the federal government and the biggest state.

This shit is actually evil.

Dropped by the Other Site for a moment and hoo boy. I don't know if it's gotten worse in the 3 months since I was last on, or if my tolerance has just waned, but man - I kind of feel like spending too much time there will give you actual brain damage or something.

Probably the biggest personal change in my views has been the transition from being essentially libertarian on issues like drug legalization, gambling, etc. to being a lot more skeptical that society should be permissive when it comes to products designed to exploit known bugs in human cognition.

This is something I have been very worried about for a while - the era of COVID-as-an-acutely-deadly-virus seems well and truly behind us (thank God)...but what happens in a decade when everything has gotten COVID 10-20x? Or to kids who get it throughout development? www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/h...

I really thought that "The Chthulucene" referred to something a lot cooler than what it actually is.

A weird failure mode of LLMs I've run into: since they are trained on old data, if a package you're trying to configure substantively changes its syntax, the AI will insist on using the old version and never recognize that its has changed. This post brought to you by Neovim LSP configuration.

This is really interesting - the common narrative seems to be "lonely men become angry, Andrew Tate-watching reactionaries", but liberal men blow conservative men out of the water when it comes to feeling lonely.

I maintain that this is one of the great albums of the 21st century www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YoE...

Super proud of this collaboration with rockstar Ryan Raut - born out of playing in the sandbox in our last year of grad school! Multi-scale brain activity can be predicted from a simple measure of arousal like pupil diameter. Out with linear causality, in with dynamic systems to explain neurobiology

one thing that is true for everyone reading this: unless something changes dramatically the number of people who agree with you on what basic facts constitute "reality" will shrink every year for the rest of your life

Ngl, I didn't see the Tylenol thing coming. I was really sure that RFK Jr. was going to get up there and say: "yep, it's totally the vaccines, I've been right all along." I wonder what internal discussions pushed them the other way.

I'm low-key convinced that the rapture actually happened back in 2012, but no one was good enough to get in, so we just slid right into the Tribulation without anyone noticing. Think Left Behind meets The Good Place.

I have a theory that a whole generation of tech people missed the boat on becoming hilarious rich on crypto, and have been FOMOing into anything that looks like it could give them another shot at striking gold.

Writing this out made me realize that I've done some cool stuff in my time. 2013-2016: Emergency medical tech. 2012-2016: Indie circus performer. 2016-2017: Math tutor. 2018-2023: Research assistant. 2021-2023: Apprentice glassblower (evenings). 2023-now: Postdoc.

This seems colossally bad.

Re: H1Bs - I think we're about to see a massive schism in the Left between who think that borders are fundamentally illegitimate and racist versus those who think that a country has a reasonable duty to prioritize it's citizens interests.

"Orforglipron" has got to be the single least-inspiring drug name I've ever seen.

While I recognize that not every field can (or should!) be physics, and that qualitative, humanistic scholarship is a useful and valid area of research...I will maintain unto death that the concept of "autoethnography" is absolute horseshit.

It's not fair to blame the Left for the current ascendancy of the reactionary right...but it's very clear to me that the Left, from center-left Dems all the way out to Antifa radicals, has completely and utterly failed to mount any kind of effective resistance or provide an alternative vision.