Whenever I see that happen, I think “wow, thanks for showing why this community needs that rule in the first place”. If dudes were more chill about women trying to build their own spaces, then perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary to have such a hard rule.

I think the lesson was that the holocaust was bad because it was against Jews, rather than it being bad because it was a fucking genocide

Man, I feel so much nostalgia over Halo, especially Reach. It was the first campaign I completed on Legendary. My brother and I used to play the Swat game mode a lot, and we made one hell of a team. It was a nice contrast to arguing all the time. I enjoyed when I was in the zone and reacting so quickly that salty people would accuse me of using aimbot. That’s the highest compliment one can receive in an online shooter.

"taint’ is an informal word for the perineum

Because they’re in solidarity with their own class interests. No doubt that there are a bunch of elected officials who would feature in the Epstein files if they were released in full, but even those that wouldn’t still have a vested interest in stabilising the current order. Doing this sets a precedent that even if consequences come for some, they will be protected.

Not every elected representative is a corrupt asshole, but I’d wager it’s the majority. Some of them probably even think they’re acting benevolent in acting to reinforce and protect their own power.

The system isn’t broken, it’s working exactly as intended.

“Hell, the same conservatives who would give me such a document would argue I’m committing some act of fraud for dressing and looking a way that doesn’t match my documents.”

I suspect that this is the primary goal. Many transphobes believe that being transgender is inherently fraudulent, especially if someone passes. It’s fucking disgusting

Did you know that plants can also tell the time via a special protein (photoreceptor) that responds to a wavelength of light only occurring at dusk — far red light is light that has a longer wavelength than regular red light, but shorter than infrared.

Far red light occurs at dusk because as the Earth rotates, it effectively stretches out the light waves (from the perspective of a place where the sun is setting). It’s basically the same phenomenon as how galaxies that are moving away from us appear to be red (red shift), but on a smaller more subtle scale.

Being able to detect far red light means that a plant can also use mechanisms involving this photoreceptor to perceive the changing of the seasons. For example, if on one day, the sun sets at 6:00pm, and the next day, it sets at 6:05pm, then 6:10pm etc., then the amount of time between each dusk is getting shorter, which means that it’s spring. This is so cool and it blows my mind.

Useful context: I am a biochemist with a passing interest in neuroscience (plus some friends who work in neuroscience research).

A brief minor point is that you should consider uploading the preprint as a pdf instead, as .docx can cause formatting errors if people aren’t using the same word processor as you. Personally, I saw some formatting issues related to this (though nothing too serious).

Onto the content of your work, something I think your paper would benefit from is linking to established research throughout. Academia’s insistence on good citations throughout can feel like it’s mostly just gatekeeping, but it’s pretty valuable for demonstrating that you’re aware of the existing research in the area. This is especially important for research in a topic like this tends to attract a lot of cranks (my friends tell me that they fairly frequently get slightly unhinged emails from people who are adamant that they have solved the theory of consciousness). Citations throughout the body of your research makes it clear what points are your own, and what is the established research.

Making it clear what you’re drawing on is especially important for interdisciplinary research like this, because it helps people who know one part of things really well, but don’t know much about the others. For example, although I am familiar with Friston’s paper, I don’t know what has happened in the field since then. I also know some information theory stuff, but not much. Citations are way of implicitly saying “if you’re not clear on where we’re getting this particular thing from, you can go read more here”.

For example, if you have a bit that’s made up of 2 statements:

• (1): Something that’s either explicitly stated in Friston’s paper, or is a straightforwardly clear consequence of something explicitly stated
• (2): Something that your analysis is adding to Friston’s as a novel insight or angle

Then you can make statement 2 go down far easier if that first statement. I use Friston in this example both because I am familiar with the work, but also because I know that that paper was somewhat controversial in some of its assumptions or conclusions. Making it clear what points are new ones you’re making vs. established stuff that’s already been thoroughly discussed in its field can act sort of like a firebreak against criticism, where you can have the best of both worlds of being able to build on top of existing research while also saying “hey, if you have beef with that original take, go take it up with them, not us”. It also makes it easier for someone to know what’s relevant to them: a neuroscientist studying consciousness who doesn’t vibe with Friston’s approach would not have much to gain from your paper, for instance.

It’s also useful to do some amount of summarising the research you’re building on, because this helps to situate your research. What’s neuroscience’s response to Friston’s paper? Has there been much research building upon it? I know there have been criticisms against it, and that can also be a valid angle to cover, especially if your work helps seal up some holes in that original research (or makes the theory more useful such that it’s easier to overlook the few holes). My understanding is that the neuroscientific answer to “what even is consciousness?” is that we still don’t know, and that there are many competing theories and frameworks. You don’t need to cover all of those, but you do need to justify why you’re building upon this particular approach.

In this case specifically, I suspect that the reason for building upon Friston is because part of the appeal of his work is that it allows for this kind of mathsy approach to things. Because of this, I would expect to see at least some discussion of some of the critiques of the free energy principle as applied to neuroscience, namely that:

• The “Bayesian brain” has been argued as being an oversimplification
• Some argue that the application of physical principles to biological systems in this manner is unjustified (this is linked to the oversimplification charge)
• Maths based models like this are hard to empirically test.

Linked to the empirical testing, when I read the phrase “yielding testable implications for cognitive neuroscience”, I skipped ahead because I was intrigued to see what testable things you were suggesting, but I was disappointed to not see something more concrete on the neuroscience side. Although you state

“The values of dI/dT can be empirically correlated with neuro-metabolic and cognitive markers — for example, the rate of neural integration, changes in neural network entropy, or the energetic cost of predictive error.”

that wasn’t much to go on for learning about current methods used to measure these things. Like I say, I’m very much not a neuroscientist, just someone with an interest in the topic, which is why I was interested to see how you proposed to link this to empirical data.

I know you go more into depth on some parts of this in section 8, but I had my concerns there too. For instance, in section 8.1, I am doubtful of whether varying the temporal rate of novelty as you describe would be able to cause metabolic changes that would be detectable using the experimental methods you propose. Aren’t the energy changes we’re talking about super small? I’d also expect that for a simple visual input, there wouldn’t necessarily be much metabolic impact if the brain were able to make use of prior learning involving visual processing.

I hope this feedback is useful, and hopefully not too demoralising. I think your work looks super interesting and the last thing I want to do is gatekeep people from participating in research. I know a few independent researchers, and indeed, it looks like I might end up on that path myself, so God knows I need to believe that doing independent research that’s taken seriously is possible. Unfortunately, to make one’s research acceptable to the academic community requires jumping through a bunch of hoops like following good citation practice. Some of these requirements are a bit bullshit and gatekeepy, but a lot of them are an essential part of how the research community has learned to interface with the impossible deluge of new work they’re expected to keep up to date on. Interdisciplinary research makes it especially difficult to situate one’s work in the wider context of things. I like your idea though, and think it’s worth developing.

We can acknowledge that mean people and trolls on the internet are inevitable, whilst also denouncing unacceptable behaviour. If we don’t call out stuff, then that’s a great way for the window of what is considered to be acceptable to slide ever further into hostility.

I think it’s important to try to hold the line, where possible. I’m someone who is pretty good at only engaging in online discussions in a manner that’s productive and/or wholesome, but even I sometimes find that online discussions can make it so easy to slip into needless hostility. I think the anonymous format is a big part of it, as is the lack of context we have for most comments, which can cause people to misinterpret the tone of a discussion and engage in a more argumentative manner than they might do otherwise.

I tend to post positive stuff because I made an active choice to resist that pull of toxicity that many of us feel on the internet. I found that doing my best to disengage from the toxic stuff helped me to be more resistant towards accidentally slipping into vitriolic arguments. Calling out trolls for acting inappropriately probably isn’t going to shame them into treating their fellow online humans with respect, but that kind of denunciation is more for the benefit of the spectators than the trolls — especially if we want to prevent a community from producing even more trolls.

TL;DR:

“You will encounter mean people and trolls, learn how to deal with them (block/report)”

Good advice

“stop crying”

Not good advice. We can encourage people to block nasty people, whilst still retaining a sense of compassion for the people who are being shat on by trolls.

Sorry, I’m not clear on who your “fuck you” is directed towards

And apparently the evidence for this is that she competed in beauty pageants? I swear, I’ll never understand these people

I liked that although Knights of Guinevere was clearly ragging on Disney, it felt like it wasn’t just a cathartic trauma dump from Dana Terrace and crew — it was actually being used to say something meaningful. It’s a good sign when the pilot episode of a show has such a strong sense of themes.

I’d heard a lot of hype when the pilot was released, but didn’t get around to watching it until I randomly thought “I wonder what Dana Terrace is up to nowadays? Hopefully she’s working somewhere better than Disney, because surely there must be someone with power out there who recognised how Disney was squandering her potential”. When I saw that it was her and some of the Owl House team who made Knights of Guinevere, that caused me to immediately go watch it. The only disappointment was that we don’t know when new episodes will be available, but hopefully things will be regular once we do start getting episodes.

Exactly this. I don’t own any Steam hardware, nor do I expect to any time soon. However, I don’t know if I’d be running Linux as my main daily driver if not for how straightforward it is to game on Linux nowadays, thanks largely to Valve’s efforts in this area.

I did dual boot with Windows for a while, but I found that the inertia of rebooting made me more likely to just use Windows. When I discovered that basically all of my games were runnable through Proton, I got rid of Windows entirely.

I feel a lot of gratitude for the Steam Deck existing, because it makes things way easier. It’s not down to Valve’s efforts alone, but providing the solid starting point has lead to the coagulation of a lot of community efforts and resources. For instance, there have been a couple of times where I’ve had issues running games, but found the solution in adjusting the launch options, according to what helpful people on protondb suggest. I also remember struggling for a while to figure out how to mod Baldur’s Gate 3, until I found a super useful guide that was written by and for Steam Deck users. The informational infrastructure around gaming on Linux is so much better than it used to be.

I hate that I know the words hebephile and ephebophile. I only know them because of people who do weird mental gymnastics to justify their creepy behaviour. “Um actually, he’s an ephebophile, not a pedophile” is a huge red flag whenever I see it

Something that I’m disproportionately proud of is that my contributions to open source software are a few minor documentation improvements. One of those times, the docs were wrong and it took me ages to figure out how to do the thing I was trying to do. After I solved it, I was annoyed at the documentation being wrong, and fixed it before submitting a pull request.

I’ve not yet made any code contributions to open source, but there have been a few people on Lemmy who helped me to realise I shouldn’t diminish my contribution because good documentation is essential, but often neglected.

Yeah, exactly, that’s what I was trying to convey. I’m not good under pressure, so I’ve spent most of the game opting to dodge, given it’s much safer. What I like is that the “perfect dodge” notice is a subtle, helpful prompt that’s basically saying “hey, if you’d tried to parry this attack rather than dodge, you’d have succeeded. Back yourself, bro.”

The one bit of credit that I can give him is that he’s good at making people feel seen. At his rallies, he’ll ramble on about how awful things are, and then he’ll say something like “I see you, I see that you’re hurting. I’m going to fix it”. It’s hardly the peak of rhetoric, but it’s super effective when so many people are struggling but the system is constantly gaslighting them because “the economy is doing great 👍”.

I find it sad, because the people most likely to latch onto this are people who are most being fucked over by the system. Often hatred starts as a seed of fear for one’s circumstances. I wish they would see that Trump is just exploiting them all the more.

Glad to see People Make Games cover this. They have a lot of reach

So many people outside of academia are gobsmacked to learn the extent to which academic publishing relies on free labour, and how much they charge.

To publish a paper open access in Nature, it costs almost $7000. And for what? What the fuck do they actually do? If you want to make the data or code you used in your analysis available, you’re the one who has to figure out how to host it. They don’t provide copyediting services or anything of the like. I’d call them parasites, but that would be an insult to all the parasitic organisms that play important roles within their respective ecosystems.

Perhaps once, they served an essential role in facilitating research, back when physical journals were the only way to get your research out there, but that age has long since passed and they’ve managed to use that change to profit even more.

Sure, the individual researchers are rarely paying this fee themselves, but that’s still a problem. For one, it gatekeeps independent researchers, or researchers from less well funded academic institutions (such as in the global South or emerging economies). Plus even if the individual researchers aren’t paying directly, that money still comes out of the overall funding for the project. For the cost of 4 papers published in Nature, that’s an entire year’s stipend for a PhD student in my country. I’m using Nature as an example here because they are one of the more expensive ones, but even smaller papers charge exorbitant amounts (and don’t get me started on how people who justify the large fees charged by more prestigious journals don’t acknowledge how this just perpetuates the prestige machine that creates the toxic “publish or perish” pressure of research)

he most offensive bit though is that if you are doing government funded research, then you have to pay an extra fee to make that research available to the taxpayers who funded it. It’s our fucking research, you assholes! How dare you profit off of coerced free labour and then charge us to even be able to access what is rightfully ours. France has the right idea here — they have legislation that mandates that all government funded research must be open access. That doesn’t solve the root problem of needing to eradicate the blight of the academic publishing industry as it currently exists, but it’s a start.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but once I started writing, my rage overcame me and it was cathartic to scream it out from my soapbox.

This isn’t exactly what you asked for, but I really enjoyed this long piece from The Guardian that looks at the history of how scientific publishing became the massively profitable behemoth it is today. Reading it as a scientist (i.e. someone who has spent a while marinading in a broth of “man, fuck the academic publishing industry” rhetoric in my community) was mind-blowing.