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Yohan J John

@dryohanjohn.bsky.social

1.5K followers 1.1K following 600 posts

🧠 computational neuroscience | neurophenomenology 2.0? 🤖 Science Writer, Kempner Institute for the study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University (views here are my own)

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · Aug 19

Here's the latest installment in my series on neuroscience and the hyperreal. I look at the potential dangers of "walled garden thinking", and why extensible modeling is important.

open.substack.com/pub/yohanjoh... #neuroscience

To model biological neurons, step outside the "walled gardens" of machine learning

Part 3 of a series on neuroscience and the hyperreal, featuring rebound excitation and poor Yorick's skull

open.substack.com

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 8h

"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."

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Shahab Bakhtiari @shahabbakht.bsky.social · 10h

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.

Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 10h

What problem is explainability/interpretability research trying to solve in ML, and do you have a favorite paper articulating what that problem is?

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Raj Raizada @rajraizada.bsky.social · 2d

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?...

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 3d

Good god that Taylor Swift album is atrocious.

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

Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 6d

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

Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

YouTube video by Dwarkesh Patel

youtu.be

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Yusuf @yusufimaadkhan.com · 8d

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

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.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 9d

"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...

Geese: Getting Killed

Read Sam Sodomsky’s review of the album.

pitchfork.com

Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 9d

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. 😅

Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 9d

They just want more HF for their RLHF.

Zoë Schiffer @zoeschiffer.bsky.social · 9d

Scoop with @lmatsakis.bsky.social: OpenAI is about to launch a TikTok-style social app for AI generated videos. We got the deets (and the docs): www.wired.com/story/openai...

OpenAI Is Preparing to Launch a Social App for AI-Generated Videos

The platform appears to closely resemble TikTok and is powered by Sora 2, OpenAI's latest video generation model.

www.wired.com

Reposted by Yohan J John

holden m. accountable @noahs.bsky.social · 10d

THE MEME IS REAL

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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 17d

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.

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Ordinary Notes @hystericalblkns.bsky.social · 21d

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

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.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 28d

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.

Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 29d

"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...

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?

www.theguardian.com

Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 29d

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

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · Sep 8

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

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

Sarah Badr @sarahbadr.bsky.social · Sep 8

on ai slop economies:

“this instability creates space for what we might call ‘post-synthetic’ cultural organization…requires not a nostalgic return to pre-digital cultural forms, but practices adequate to our ecological and social moment.” @katecrawford.bsky.social

www.e-flux.com/architecture...

Intensification - Kate Crawford - Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop

AI slop isn’t invested in the order of events or even looking like reality. The slop is not the territory: it just smothers it in synthetic goop. It’s flooding the zone with AI shit.

www.e-flux.com

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · Sep 8

Thanks!

Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · Sep 7

Yup. The lag now has become dizzying.

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

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · Sep 7

"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.

Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · Sep 7

Love this contrast between cyberspace and 'cybertime'.

Excerpt from 'Precarious Rhapsody' by Franco Berardi.

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · Sep 6

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

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · Sep 6

serious question. does no one know anything anymore? you're saying the people you hate on bluesky are of the same type as the ones that produced the democratic wipeouts in the 1980s? you know, when the democratic party still had a conservative southern wing and strong support from white ethnics?

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Peli Grietzer @peligrietzer.bsky.social · Sep 5

David Hume's lawn sign

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

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · Sep 4

...

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

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · Sep 4

"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...

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...

www.nature.com

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · Sep 4

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

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