nomadpenguin

This person thinks there's a 98.7% chance of AI extinction and that we should nuke data centers. I'm not sure that they're an unbiased observer.

I'd love to see a robot load a mouse onto a rotarod

You can get most of the benefits of walking barefoot without the hookworm by wearing a good pair of barefoot shoes. I personally love my Xero Prios. If you want the full experience at the expense of looking like a freak, you can get those Vibram Five Fingers toe shoes.

Is that even a conspiracy? It's well documented how closely the military works with Hollywood -- of course government apparatuses are interested in funding media that aligns with their goals.

It's a genuinely fascist tendency. Only the elite few are "real people" who think. Everyone else is irrelevant, democracy is a failed experiment, wealth = worth, etc etc etc

Yeah, this smells very fishy to me. It's almost trivially easy to gather a small validation dataset in humans for the paper. At my institution, it's about $800 an hour to scan someone. You can probably get enough data to validate the model with a half hour scan. Surely the group has enough grant funding to pop a few healthy controls in the scanner.

I haven't looked in super close detail to the paper, but their methods section says that they fit a video model (V-JEPA2) to the fMRI dataset in a voxelwise ridge regression, meaning that the baked in assumption is that the visual response affects each voxel independently. Voxelwise models are very nice for making statistical inferences, but are less good for prediction and modelling tasks, because our brains certainly do not work as collections of independent regions.

BOLD is intensely messy data, and their design is far too simple IMO to reflect anything of reality.

For me, the biggest AI writing tell (other than the blatantly obvious ones) is an unnatural consistency in style, whatever style that may be. It's most apparent in longer pieces, and I'm not sure I can really pin down exactly what it is. But human writers seem to lack the ability to keep a 100% consistent voice and lapse into different registers at different times. LLMs don't have this natural rhythm, which makes for an exhausting reading experience.

The Cincinnati Zoo covered all their parking lots with solar panels last year. Your car stays cool in the summer, and there's motion activated lighting under the panels after dark. It's awesome.

"Genetically encoded" is the appropriate term here -- it was used in the original journal article. It's a common industry term in neuroscience research. For example, GEVIs and GECIs are "genetically encoded voltage indicator" and "genetically encoded calcium indicator" respectively. "Genetically encoded adenosine sensor" here is a term of art.

> I have over 14 years of education in developed countries, and out of those, maybe 1 year combined meaningfully helped me in my jobs/career in terms of skills.

I think you're underestimating the effect of 14 years of daily training in literacy and numeracy.

I believe Macrofactor has had these features for quite a while now.

I think Buddhism still (arguably rightly) doesn't sit entirely well with non-religious Westerners. I have studied with a Zen Sangha and transmitted teachers on and off for a bit and have found their explanations helpful. However, it's absolutely undeniably that the Buddhist cannon is full of batshit insane stuff, just like any other religion. You can write them off as skillful means, but in some ways I think it's more honest to say that you practice meditation with Buddhist characteristics than to say that you're a real Buddhist if you don't have the time of day for spirits and dieties.

Again, this isn't saying that Buddhist modernism is bad. I'd argue that having clear eyes about what parts of Buddhist practice you're willing to take and leave is good.

As Freud said, there is no negation in the unconscious.