Author | Lightnews

Kyle @darsnack.bsky.social · 2d

Personal bias but I liked this transmitter article: www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

“You won’t catch an engineer trying to formulate a grand unified theory of the brain”

“Engineers know how to make things work […] This is what makes engineering closer to biology than to other […] sciences”

Neuroscience needs engineers—for more reasons than you think

Adopting an engineering mindset will help the field focus its research priorities.

www.thetransmitter.org

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Kyle @darsnack.bsky.social · 4d

Fortunately this is a private metric used to tune just what you want to see in your feed. bsky.social/about/blog/1...

Progress Update: Building Healthier Social Media - Bluesky

Over the next few months, we’ll be iterating on the systems that make Bluesky a better place for healthy conversations. Some experiments will stick, others will evolve, and we’ll share what we learn a...

bsky.social

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Wei Wen @wwenneuro.bsky.social · 6d

After 13 years in the US, I’ve made the difficult decision to leave. Having packed up everything and rethought about priorities, rather painstakingly, while I’m sad to leave the life I’ve made here, I’m also relieved that I won’t have to plan my life around immigration policies anymore.

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Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 7d

I wish the whole unicode set was available from every emoji picker.

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Chad Scherrer @cscherrer.bsky.social · 8d

We're hiring in Seattle! HMU if you're affected by Amazon layoffs and have #julialang experience

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Hell Gate *subscribe today!* @hellgatenyc.com · 8d

Is this what Cuo-mentum looks like? How close is this race? And how can we even predict an unprecedented competitive general election mayoral race when New York City hasn't had one since 2009?

Dear reader, we have the answers at this week's edition of MAYORAL SPEW.

hellgatenyc.com/oh-god-elect...

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Tony Zador @tonyzador.bsky.social · 14d

Apply to the new CSHL grad program in BioAI/neuroAI!

(Masters degree or equivalent required in a quantitative area such as computer science, physics, mathematics, or engineering)

www.cshl.edu/phd-program/...

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Kyle @darsnack.bsky.social · 19d

Learning it aside, would you use it to submit a paper today?

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Kyle @darsnack.bsky.social · 19d

Typst was honestly faster to learn up to my Latex proficiency. I think it’s cause there’s a clear programming model vs. latex packages are a mix of everything. It makes it so the intuitive thing is the correct thing.

Also: lilaq.org. Typst knowing about other file types is amazing.

Advanced data visualization in Typst − Lilaq

Advanced data visualization in Typst

lilaq.org

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Dolan's Knicks @ndhapple.bsky.social · Oct 2

Moves as many people as every other transit agency in America put together! Twice as many people every day as the entire federal aviation system!

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Batman or halo @milesklee.bsky.social · Oct 2

This is the biggest, toughest article I’ve done about so-called “AI psychosis.” It’s the story of a man who committed a horrific crime in his youth but served his time and against all odds found love and a new life—one that completely unraveled after he started talking to Google’s Gemini chatbot.

He Grew Obsessed With an AI Chatbot. Then He Vanished in the Ozarks

Jon Ganz committed a terrible crime in his youth, but he survived prison, fell in love, and started over. His new life unraveled in a way nobody could have predicted.

www.rollingstone.com

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Naomi Saphra @nsaphra.bsky.social · Oct 1

really neat clear explainer for the new on “centralizing flows” to theoretically model learning dynamics

Understanding Optimization in Deep Learning with Central Flows

centralflows.github.io

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Dave Vanness @djvanness.bsky.social · Sep 29

A lot of people think that every international student admitted means one fewer spot for domestic students, when the opposite is more likely true - the tuition revenue international students bring allows public universities to provide substantial discounts to domestic students, improving access.

Nick Fleisher @nickfleisher.bsky.social · Sep 29

30% drop year over year!

Amid visa restrictions, international freshmen enrollment plummets at UW-Madison

This year’s number of international freshmen is the lowest recorded since at least 2015.

www.jsonline.com

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Marius Schneider @mariusschneider.bsky.social · Sep 22

🚨Our NeurIPS 2025 competition Mouse vs. AI is LIVE!

We combine a visual navigation task + large-scale mouse neural data to test what makes visual RL agents robust and brain-like.

Top teams: featured at NeurIPS + co-author our summary paper. Join the challenge!

Whitepaper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.14446

Mouse vs. AI: A Neuroethological Benchmark for Visual Robustness and Neural Alignment

Visual robustness under real-world conditions remains a critical bottleneck for modern reinforcement learning agents. In contrast, biological systems such as mice show remarkable resilience to environ...

arxiv.org

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Kyle @darsnack.bsky.social · Sep 22

I mean the simple answer is that the team building the “100% agentic coding” product is going to attempt to reach that goal internally?

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Ari Benjamin @aribenjamin.bsky.social · Sep 18

Do you plot transcriptomic data, coloring each cell by its cell type? ~ Don't use a default colormap! ~

Instead, use colormaps that capture biological meaning. If two cell types are very similar, their colors should be similar too. Read on 🧵

🧬💻

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Stand Up for Science! @standupforscience.bsky.social · Sep 16

🚫TOMORROW'S FIGHT FOR SCIENCE RALLY POSTPONED🚫
We would like all our rallygoers to be safe and are postponing due to inclement weather!
Fret not — we will let you know the next opportunity to join us in the fight for health and science for the people!

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Grace Lindsay @neurograce.bsky.social · Sep 14

Understanding the "why" of biology requires knowing a fair amount of what could rightly just be called history. Like, a specific thing happened a certain way at a certain time. This is not how people usually like to think about the study of biology...

Consider the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which takes a dramatic detour around the aorta, traveling far longer
80 than a “designed” nervous system would require (Dawkins, 2009; Held Jr, 2009). This circuitous route evolved as
81 the neck elongated during mammalian evolution, with each incremental change being selectively viable despite the
82 growing inefficiency. No engineer would design such a pathway, yet evolutionary processes made it inevitable. The
83 persistence of such “suboptimal” features demonstrates how historical contingency shapes biological systems in ways
84 that optimization models fundamentally cannot capture.

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Kyle @darsnack.bsky.social · Sep 14

And in both cases history tells you way more of the story than optimality

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Kyle @darsnack.bsky.social · Sep 14

Tbh any large engineered system is the same. Evolutionary optimization dynamics will certainly add their own twist, but I think this is a property of any system with a large enough set of things it needs to do + some flexibility in how it could be done.

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Grace Lindsay @neurograce.bsky.social · Sep 14

"evolutionary process is opportunistic, working with whatever variations arise, and it cannot be meaningfully equated with engineering toward an ideal."

It is funny how anyone who has worked with evolutionary algorithms knows they're not so great, yet we assume real evolution is a perfect optimizer

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Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · Sep 7

When reporting on these kinds of claims, the media should ask:

1. Is this a one-off study or a replicated finding?
2. Is it cherry-picked or consistent?
3. Was the study big enough to be reliable?
4. Did it employ robust statistical methods?
5. How big is the effect size? (If there’s a statistical association, does it amount to a big risk or a small one?)
6. Is there any evidence for a causal link or is it just a correlation?
7. Could the correlation reflect some confounding factor?
8. How does this supposed factor sit in the context of other factors (especially genetic risk for autism, which is very highly heritable)?

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News Eye @newseye.bsky.social · Sep 6

NEW: The anti-Trump protest happening right now on the streets of Washington DC is HUGE!

It looks like tens of thousands have joined.

This is the view from 16th Street - people stretching as far as the eye can see 👏

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Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · Sep 2

Lovely morning on the North Dublin Riviera! 😊

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Adam Kucharski @adamjkucharski.bsky.social · Sep 1

Results so stunningly clear they inspired this classic xkcd (xkcd.com/2400/):

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