2024: A Review of the Year in Neuroscience Feeling a bit wired

Cutting it a bit fine, but here’s my review of the year in neuroscience for 2024

The eighth of these, would you believe? We’ve got dark neurons, tiny monkeys, the most complete brain wiring diagram ever constructed, and much more…
Published on The Spike

Enjoy!

medium.com/the-spike/20...

If you can’t wait for this release we have about 4 million books as part of Common Corpus. In multiple languages. huggingface.co/datasets/Ple... Easier subcollection browsing for cultural heritage monographs on here: huggingface.co/collections/...

A Scraper that turns Bluesky Starter Packs into Lists A Scraper that turns Bluesky Starter Packs into Lists - starterpack_scraper.js

Wrote this NodeJS script that can turn Starter Packs into Lists that you can follow and turn into custom Feeds.
Hoping this helps people build and recreate communities displaced from the Bad place.
Feel free to remix or modify, or build a public webapp!

gist.github.com/Makermed/dd0...

That’s why I love using writing tools to rewrite and improve my writing. It’s not just about fixing things—I’ve learned so much along the way.

All above has been rewritten by writing tools. I am still learning and hope I can be comfortable without the writing tools someday💫💫

As a non-native English speaker, I often feel like my writing isn’t good enough for communication. My vocabulary feels too simple, I don’t know much about slang, and I struggle to describe things concisely. I’m always second-guessing whether I’m using the right words to express my thoughts.

"Apple Intelligence is for the stupid ones," a journalist from CNET said in a recent video.
After watching Apple's ads, I guess I’m one of those "idiots"—because I really like the writing tools they offer.

a smiley face with red eyes and the words " it 's making me nervous " below it ALT: a smiley face with red eyes and the words " it 's making me nervous " below it

feeds are down

It's helpful for me as a non-native English speaker. I can learn a lot from the rewriting.

Can I sort the people I follow into different lists? Like, when I’m at work, I just want to see stuff from the tech list, but when I’m chilling and reading, I want updates from both the science and news lists.

🙋🏻‍♀️🙋🏻‍♀️🙋🏻‍♀️🙋🏻‍♀️

Hype, Sustainability, and the Price of the Bigger-is-Better Paradigm in AI With the growing attention and investment in recent AI approaches such as large language models, the narrative that the larger the AI system the more valuable, powerful and interesting it is is increa...

Now that "scale is all we need" has predictably faltered...

1. Small AI models often perform better in context.

2. Obsession w bigness has bad consequences, from climate, to power concentration, to research capture.

Me + @gaelvaroquaux.bsky.social @sashamtl.bsky.social

arxiv.org/abs/2409.14160

A statistical approach to model evaluations A research paper from Anthropic on how to apply statistics to improve language model evaluations

Great to see Anthropic highlighting the importance of uncertainty quantification (UQ) in AI.

Having spent my PhD and postdoc developing scalable UQ methods for real-world, high-dimensional problems, I’m currently on the academic job market—feel free to reach out!

I like Bluesky more. Threads is like, “Oh, you’re in Hong Kong ? Stay local ! No tech/science posts from outside !” It feels like Facebook—just people near me. Twitter (pre-X) showed me the world. And Bluesky brings that feeling back. Hello world again 🙋🏻‍♀️🙋🏻‍♀️

How do LLMs learn to reason from data? Are they ~retrieving the answers from parametric knowledge🦜? In our new preprint, we look at the pretraining data and find evidence against this:

Procedural knowledge in pretraining drives LLM reasoning ⚙️🔢

🧵⬇️

What’s the Matter with Men? They’re floundering at school and in the workplace. Some conservatives blame a crisis of masculinity, but the problems—and their solutions—are far more complex.

Men are floundering at school and in the workplace. Some conservatives blame a crisis of masculinity, but the problems—and their solutions—are far more complex.

hello world