Eli Sennesh

Discworld QOTD, from Men at Arms

The Oversight Committee subpoenaed the DOJ for the Epstein files. They now have 2 weeks to release the files to the committee.

It’s time to find out who’s been protected, who thought they were above the law, and who’s been hiding behind power.

this, i think, is partially why zohran was successful. he knows new york city is real america and isn't afraid to say it

They should make ads in which Park Slope is pictured as "real America" and force journalists to ship out to the Maplewood Diner in NJ to get in touch with real Americans.

I appreciate and understand that the impulse behind this is noble, but I am tired of unilateral disarmament in this fight. My entire life my home (when in US) has been places that got constantly spit on by republicans, while pearls are clutched if it’s ever reciprocated. People are tired of it!

If the Powers That Be could have gotten the same results out of a universe made of spirit, they'd have done that. They couldn't. So materium it is. You can claw your way up to being able to embed your necessary causal structure in another medium, but it is what it is.

The average shit-tier socialist basically believes this, yes.

The average next-tier-up socialist thinks that council democracy can just plan things out by "democratic deliberation" without alienating consumer from producer.

The top-tier socialist actually engaged the Economic Calculation Debate.

Representation biases: will we achieve complete understanding by analyzing representations? A common approach in neuroscience is to study neural representations as a means to understand a system -- increasingly, by relating the neural representations to the internal representations learned b...

Many representational analyses (implicitly) prioritize signals by the amount of variance they explain in the representations. However, in arxiv.org/abs/2507.22216 we discuss results from our prior work that challenge this assumption; variance != computational importance.

What do representations tell us about a system? Image of a mouse with a scope showing a vector of activity patterns, and a neural network with a vector of unit activity patterns Common analyses of neural representations: Encoding models (relating activity to task features) drawing of an arrow from a trace saying [on_____on____] to a neuron and spike train. Comparing models via neural predictivity: comparing two neural networks by their R^2 to mouse brain activity. RSA: assessing brain-brain or model-brain correspondence using representational dissimilarity matrices

In neuroscience, we often try to understand systems by analyzing their representations — using tools like regression or RSA. But are these analyses biased towards discovering a subset of what a system represents? If you're interested in this question, check out our new commentary! Thread:

Honestly I think a lot of people are just socially "spikey" the way they might be academically or athletically "spikey". We need to stop telling people that they only really enjoy socializing if they enjoying socializing with the most generic crowd possible.

I have very bad news for you: the meat is the evolutionary precondition for even the illusion of being a "fragment of divine light". Hell, even the concept of "divine light" is coming from the configuration of the meat.

It's definitely a class thing, because leisure classes throughout history have always focused on achieving both physical and intellectual mastery.

There was a strain of this in the more extreme manifestations of 20th century jock/nerd dichotomy, like having a high-functioning brain and a high-functioning body were somehow antithetical.

Which was a bad, wrong and damaging idea IME. Even if you're average at best, it's worth working on both.

The point I'm trying to make is just that part of this is not so much the technology itself as much as just it being an outlet for a particular feeling that you're not used to seeing people express up until now

Again and again, contemporary "technopessimism" turns out to rest on an optimistic and whiggish interpretation of the past—where at least the telegraph was never overhyped, radio had no bad political effects, &c

Ppl really hate "change is complex, can be bad, and we don't usually know in advance"

this is, of course, not a race-based preference or an attempt at one. one other notable thing about this is that holding back NSF grants is not an authorized remedy for this

Alison Gopnik's review papers?

Sometimes when people find out I have some (limited!) background in cognitive science, they ask me about human cognitive biases & deficits, etc.

Unfortunately the tradition I'm trained in is all about how rational & intelligent even human babies are!

Ok literally DM me I gotta see this.

I was asking him, but I appreciate your clear understanding of the situation.

Oh cool you guys hiring?

this won’t happen and I would like more of the opposition to these people to center around them taking America further and further away from being the kind of country that can do this kind thing rather than reacting like it’s supervillain plans.

Both his advisors quit and went to industry.

Just caught up with a friend doing a PhD in a top CS program. He got double-fucked by DOGE. His grant is in limbo because everyone who knows how to access the money got fired, and all the data that made the basis for his thesis got deleted.

This deserves and out-of-context quote repost

Yeah the United States will fall like the Roman Empire fell: with half a dozen different little statelets all claiming to be the authentic successor-state.

Defending the current system means you're also defending the cancer killing the current system.

Similarly with housing, "we saved higher ed, but nobody without a trust-fund can actually afford to work there" means we've basically conceded the whole field.

Well, the problem is, if the left-liberal coalition doesn't fix its shit on housing, people move out of "our" states/territories and then either become wasted votes in "their" states/territories or just straight-up vote for the other guy.

> "Kitchen table issues," are dead at a federal level.

That's what people vote on, so best of luck if you don't at least pretend to address them!