Yohan J John

"Oscar Wilde once defined fox hunting as the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable. Were he alive today he might describe the quest for artificial general intelligence as the unfathomable in pursuit of the indefinable."

Regardless of what explainability/mech interp in AI is actually after, and whether or not they know what they’re searching for, we can confidently say they’re pursuing what systems neuroscience has pursued for decades, with very similar puzzles and confusions.

It looks like the Wikipedia page for Mary Brunkow got created literally just this morning, after her Nobel Prize was announced. I had heard that women in academia tend to be somewhat under-represented on Wikipedia, but this is a particularly stark example.
en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...

Good god that Taylor Swift album is atrocious.

Perhaps it will put the final nail in the coffin of nihilistic millennial poptimism.

YouTube video by Dwarkesh Patel Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

I'd never heard Richard Sutton speak before. He's sharp! And I think this discussion has changed how I think about the bitter lesson.

youtu.be/21EYKqUsPfg?... #AI #ML #RL

Gitanjali 35 BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45668/...

Geese: Getting Killed Read Sam Sodomsky’s review of the album.

"This is anxious, fragmented music as liable to erupt in a paranoid shriek as a bald declaration of love."

Just heard it. Brilliant, unhinged album.

A great follow up to Cameron Winter's solo album.

pitchfork.com/reviews/albu...

Once in a while a friend will send me an excerpt from a book and I'll react with something like "Ooh that's spot on, where's it from?"

And it will turn out to be from a book that I myself recommended to them a few weeks or months earlier. 😅

They just want more HF for their RLHF.

THE MEME IS REAL

There is a long tradition in philosophy of science that tries to expunge metaphysics by appeal to operational definitions and extensional semantics. I doubt most neuroscientists are thinking in these terms explicitly, but they often succumb to an implicit set of operational assumptions.

The new TOC from academia dot edu. By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, permission, and consent for Academia.edu to use your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting the use or purchase of Academia.edu's Services.

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

Yup! I'm finding that there are songs I didn't really like when I heard them on MTV as a kid, but now with better speakers, I can hear layers I was barely aware of.

Bland, easy to follow, for fans of everything: what has the Netflix algorithm done to our films? When the streaming giant began making films guided by data that aimed to please a vast audience, the results were often generic, forgettable, artless affairs. But is there a happy ending?

"The strange paradox of the streaming era is that as the quest to personalise entertainment has continued, entertainment itself is becoming steadily more impersonal."

www.theguardian.com/media/2025/a...

To a first approximation, pop music is music that sounds decent on shitty speakers.

So many people are referencing Baudrillard in the context of AI.

Generative AI is such a great way to understand hyperreality (and vice versa).

Thanks!

Yup. The lag now has become dizzying.

Where does he say this? I've never read Dewey.

"Signs are produced and circulated at a growing speed but the human terminal of the system (the embodied mind) is put under growing pressure, and finally it cracks."

This was written in 2009, so he had no idea that generative AI was just around the corner.

Excerpt from 'Precarious Rhapsody' by Franco Berardi.

Love this contrast between cyberspace and 'cybertime'.

a thing I have found increasingly important over the past decade: there is no amount of political or intellectual sophistication that will survive giving into the "history is driven by the people I find personally annoying" impulse

In This House, We Believe Custom Custom Custom...

David Hume's lawn sign

...

And given the connectivity, it is hardly surprising that over time, information gets "smeared" across the entire brain.

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

"Representations of visual stimuli transiently appeared in classical visual areas after stimulus onset and then spread..."

In my experience, transient activity seems to comform to traditional notions of functional specialization, at least for primary areas.

...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I heard Stephenson is quite in with the tech bros though. (I loved Snow Crash but haven't tried anything else.)

"The new phenomenon is not the precarious character of the job market, but the technical and cultural conditions in which info-labor is made precarious. The technical conditions are those of digital recombination of info-work in networks."

“Human freedom has constructed, in the course of the modern age, a fate that objectifies itself in technology up until the point it has penetrated language, enfolding it in its automatisms.”

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, ‘Precarious Rhapsody’ (2009)

The new intake of undergraduates will have be born around 2007 (just before the financial crisis began), the Brexit vote happened when they were 9, and Covid started when they were 13. So avoid making cultural references to The Simpsons, The Matrix, or optimism about the future.

A cautionary tale for PhD's from lower-income countries who are on "stipends": often regarded as disposable, their vulnerability (precarious access to healthcare, social security, etc...) makes them prime targets for a "flexible" form of abuse that hides in plain sight. Let us not normalize this👇

trying this with GPT-5 and charting new frontiers in gaslighting