Huw Swanborough
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huwroscience.bsky.social
Huw Swanborough
@huwroscience.bsky.social
Cognitive neuroscientist at ETH Zurich. Primary interests in the neuroscience of affect processing/perception!

Outside of science: Hiking, huts, snow, bluegrass, folk, and all things creative.

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Everything's a signal, man.... Everything's a signal
The mechanisms of a coin flip are scale invariant.

The mechanisms of a classifier are scale invariant.

If stimuli A are labelled accordingly because of which side of a graph line they fall, asking which side of 5000000 lines doesn't give new inferential power, it's just more granular.
December 16, 2025 at 11:43 PM
Yeah, there are some cool AI tools like inverse kinematics for animation, frame interpolation for movies, rigging models for motion capture. These are great tools because they do reduce resource/technical burden.

But they aren't making choices for you. You still engage with the point of the craft.
December 16, 2025 at 8:45 AM
It would make the creative choices for me.

Which is the entire point of engaging in a creative task.

Just because I think a witch looking for her lost cat in the alps is a nice story, doesn't mean I have made anything until I've created the whole work.

genAI robs you of that
December 16, 2025 at 8:42 AM
..and not the purely creative aspect free from technical skill.

I lack technical skill in woodworking, so I 3D print. I lack a film studio, so I use game engines to make vignettes. I can't draw, so I take photos.

I get to engage in the same processes without obstacles, so what would AI do for me?
December 16, 2025 at 8:41 AM
Ideas are worth nothing. Especially creative ideas.

Every single person has amazing ideas for a story. Not every single person works on their creativity so that the choices they make when writing the story are actually good. This is what people get stuck up on, they view this aspect as busy work...
December 16, 2025 at 8:39 AM
..except the actual task of being creative. Making creative choices at each stage.

When people say "I have a good idea for a story but I lack the skill to make the idea real" what they mean is that they have a nice concept but aren't creative to make all the small scale choices in writing.
December 16, 2025 at 8:38 AM
Glue and a knife making up for my design skills
December 15, 2025 at 6:06 PM
All pics taken in Ushant (Ouessant) which is really a 10/10 for dramatic, windswept, belighthoused landscapes.
December 15, 2025 at 1:35 PM
ah love those pics!!

Sadly I realise my lighthouse pics are all non-valid but I am going to jump on the light house pic trend anyway :P
December 15, 2025 at 1:34 PM
with you... I'm spending this week having major "Can I be a secular priest?" mood.

I would like to look after a building and it's grounds, help people, sing at least once a week, and spend the rest of the time reading and writing.
December 15, 2025 at 11:51 AM
I hope I never ever meet someone who decides carrots are problematic due to too much sugar... IN A CAKE.
December 14, 2025 at 8:19 PM
Haha yeah I'm temporarily trying to avoid getting too into electronics as I fear that rabbit hole lol.

But yes, being spammed with what I print is absolutely unavoidable.
December 14, 2025 at 7:27 PM
Yup!

Got it a few days ago after many years of coveting one and I am obsessed with it.
December 14, 2025 at 5:02 PM
Are you saying that if I flip a coin and it chooses the same moral decision that a human does, that the coin doesn't have a system of moral decision making?
December 14, 2025 at 3:34 PM