Dan Goodman

I'm a computational neuroscientist and science reformer. I'm based at Imperial College London. I like to build things and organisations, including the Brian spiking neural network simulator, Neuromatch and the SNUFA spiking neural network community.

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neuralreckoning@neuromatch-social.mostr.pub

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Last Notes

2026-10-27 22:59:40 UTC

Nobody asked me but:
My advice to science funders would be to fund fewer project grants and more independent fellowships not tied to a particular institute or mentor. Science gains from more diversity of perspectives, and you build independence earlier.
#science #academia

2026-10-26 10:17:37 UTC

I'm suddenly seeing a lot more genuine email going into my spam folder. I assume this is because the rise of LLM-written spam means that email providers have had to dial up the sensitivity of their filters. Another great contribution from AI.

2026-10-23 19:55:56 UTC

There's a paper going around saying that AI is now better at peer review than humans. I won't link to it because I assume that like all these AI papers it's just some sort of marketing. My only comment is that we don't have to critique this paper because we already know human PR isn't very good.

2026-10-20 16:09:05 UTC

Very happy to see that neural heterogeneity is getting more attention. It's a great time to be studying this.

2026-10-19 12:08:47 UTC

Rain at night and sunny autumn morning means taking a little bit of time off to head into the woods with my camera. #photography
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/467/494/223/585/002/original/d09b4e81a1877421.jpg

2026-10-15 17:17:25 UTC

Autumn view from my office just before heading home. #photography
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/446/057/798/229/207/original/c771b6a4cb5beb32.jpg

2026-10-11 23:01:28 UTC

I love the return of autumn. Colder weather means it's time for orange coloured leaves and hearty orange coloured soup.
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/424/753/673/134/445/original/3b2b5cc2c0c58f5d.jpg
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/424/753/715/681/458/original/8cad3d9b22ee8113.jpg

2026-10-05 16:46:10 UTC

It's that time of year where the view from my window gets quite distracting. #photography
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/389/312/144/560/527/original/a9de13a83f60bc0a.jpg

2026-10-05 15:32:23 UTC

Just uploaded my #BernsteinConference talk on abstract models of neuromodulation in #SpikingNeuralNetworks. No video was taken, so it's just the slides.
https://neural-reckoning.org/talk_2026_bernstein_neuromodulation.html

2026-10-04 13:34:53 UTC

#SilentSunday #photography
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/382/896/734/249/031/original/5031cb3347e109f4.jpg

2026-09-27 20:43:42 UTC

SNUFA abstract submission is closed. Make sure to register for the conference if you would like to take part in voting for which abstracts get promoted from posters to talks!

2026-09-26 10:56:39 UTC

To be honest the distinction between a sham scientific society and a real one feels blurry to me. I was advised to join IEEE hoping that at some point they'll give me an award or title for my CV. But you pay thousands of $ over a career for this.
The claim is that these societies represent members' interests. Maybe that's partly true, but the main example I know of from the IEEE is that they lobby against publishing reform that would make science better and reduce costs wasted on publishing.
They're also bureaucracies that serve themselves foremost. It takes the membership dues of around 10,000 members just to pay the $1.1m salary of the executive director.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02980-w

2026-09-24 22:08:29 UTC

Not a terrible evening to go for a run home though the city. #photography
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/328/290/526/832/061/original/e834961b603449aa.jpg
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2026-09-24 13:21:44 UTC

Last chance to get your SNUFA spiking neural network abstracts in, deadline tomorrow. Only 300 words and get a chance to give a talk in front of an audience of hundreds (plus YouTube upload gets hundreds more).
https://snufa.net/2026/
And don't forget to register for the conference too. Tell your friends!

2026-09-20 18:48:41 UTC

Train an LLM to produce reasoning traces for simple mechanical objects and sell them to tech bros as conscious alarm clocks etc ("it's looking forward to when it resets to 00:00, it said so").
(Don't actually do it, it would be a terrible waste.)

2026-09-11 15:15:31 UTC

Gave a talk at the Crick institute on "Does heterogeneity help the brain and how could we know if it did?" part of a series we organised with @nprofile…9knu. It was fun to present work aimed at generating discussion.
https://neural-reckoning.org/talk_2026_crick_heterogeneity.html
In particular, it was a new experience to present work not primarily to get people excited about the ideas in the work, but to raise questions like: can these ideas be tested? Does this approach to doing computational neuroscience make sense? etc.
We should perhaps do more of this!
#neuroscience #ComputationalNeuroscience

2026-09-07 22:42:18 UTC

Dappled sunlight in the woods is challenging to photograph. Most of my shots didn't come out that well, but I kinda like this one. #photography
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/232/167/306/982/842/original/a5bb0540ec56f249.jpg

2026-09-03 15:06:17 UTC

Spiking neural network people - this year's SNUFA workshop is live!
Talks by:
⭐ Eugene Izhikevich
⭐ Giulia D'Angelo
⭐ Mihai Petrovici
⭐ Susanne Schreiber
Submit your abstracts by Sept 25th. Registration is open!
More info at: https://snufa.net/2026/
cc @nprofile…nk5c
#SpikingNeuralNetworks #ComputationalNeuroscience #Neuroscience
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/207/724/875/780/698/original/eb65dee014b6b811.png

2026-08-29 00:50:44 UTC

This was totally worth staying up until 2am for. Word frequency analysis for the abstracts of my papers over time. You can read off my career from that, including my gradual reduction of interest in SNNs and then their sudden resurgence when surrogate gradient descent appeared.
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/176/047/875/399/850/original/bd478efccb5be1e0.png

2026-08-28 14:20:08 UTC

Really like Bruce Schneier's essay on the effect of AI on mathematics. Despite presumably vast, near incomprehensible computational resources being applied, LLMs have only a handful of quite small results. It IS impressive that they can do that, but they do all seem to be a certain limited type of proof.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/08/ai-doesnt-mean-the-end-of-mathematics-at-least-not-yet.html
Specifically, counterexamples or applying a technique from a related field. These are important parts of mathematical proof, but they're not building new frameworks to answer a question. They're not quite single step proofs, but they're few steps. Multi step planning/thinking still seems far for AI.
I know this sort of post can come across as wishful thinking that humans still have a place, but I think it's more about trying to get a realistic, evidence based view of where AI is now, rather than extrapolating wildly or getting carried away by hype.
Extrapolation hype is the key marketing strategy for AI. We've seen that over and over again with tech company bosses promising incredible things in the next couple of years, and they don't come.
So rather than spending our energy talking and thinking about what AI might be able to do based on optimistic (or pessimistic depending on your point of view) extrapolations, better to dig deep into what they actually can do.
For me that seems to be that they're getting great at exploiting single or few step structure based on similarity in some sort of simplified semantic space. This makes sense because they're fundamentally built on similarity operations and with enough data you can make that work.
What's surprising is how much you can do with that. But, I haven't seen strong evidence to suggest you can do everything with that, and there are classes of problems you provably can't solve with it. We know that these systems do have weird lacunae, like struggling to count, and context rot.
So I guess in summary what I want to say is, let's not underplay what AI can do, but let's also not overplay it based on extrapolation hype. It's not consistent with recent history to believe this hype, and plays into marketing strategies of tech companies whose values are not well aligned with ours.

2026-08-23 19:07:25 UTC

There's so many beautiful parks in London I sometimes forget about parkland walk, but I shouldn't because it's absolutely lovely. #photography #london
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/146/357/840/948/577/original/bbd058d5b63875a1.jpg
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2026-08-22 09:40:34 UTC

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@nprofile…63pg I used to do that but they kept falling back in.

2026-08-21 18:42:46 UTC

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@nprofile…l0mg oh I forget all the time, but each time I find a spider stuck in there I re-establish the bridge (for a little while, until I forget again).

2026-08-21 18:39:42 UTC

I assume I'm not the only one out there who leaves a towel hanging over the edge of the bath as a little escape bridge for the spiders who fall in?

2026-08-19 17:18:32 UTC

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@nprofile…ytn9 I'd love to see that review too!

2026-08-19 16:11:13 UTC

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@nprofile…ytn9 curious - why would it? Not an expert though, so I can't answer the question I'm afraid!

2026-08-18 21:16:05 UTC

Paddington station. Which is better, night or day? #photography
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/118/579/323/013/535/original/68d17b2e8ab504e8.jpg
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/118/579/494/250/153/original/cd2c028c68f4b4be.jpg

2026-08-18 06:30:15 UTC

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@nprofile…3wft for everyone to experience the same very specific hallucination based on a global chemical effect suggests to me that at least part of the way we represent the world must be shared between everyone, specifically to do with the way we represent size and people. If we were blank slates that each learned these representations in our own way, it seems improbable that everyone would get the same very specific hallucination.

2026-08-17 20:57:03 UTC

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@nprofile…cpk2 cool! Reader mode not working in the Android version yet? That would be huge for me.

2026-08-17 20:49:07 UTC

@nprofile…4z2q retreat in Oxfordshire. #photography
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/112/811/815/754/419/original/00a3809f176c6a6a.jpg

2026-08-15 18:00:33 UTC

I've been using this example in talks recently to illustrate the point that the brain must have at least some hard coded stuff, that not everything can be explained by learning.

2026-08-13 10:13:47 UTC

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@nprofile…lnrt Firefox has a built in free VPN. Since this is mastodon I'll point out you ought to be using open source browser anyway instead of Google one. 😉

2026-08-12 21:40:05 UTC

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The results. I didn't have the right filter for my bigger zoom lens so quite low resolution, but still pretty happy with that.
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/084/700/309/252/298/original/db12394971f80d3b.jpg

2026-08-12 19:51:19 UTC

The glasses I ordered arrived just in time, and they actually delivered twice as many as I'd ordered so I got to spread the joy to a few lucky neighbours. #eclipse
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/084/274/632/766/183/original/be2dabda10a01a98.jpg

2026-08-12 19:50:33 UTC

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@nprofile…63pg yeah! Pictures later.

2026-08-11 21:23:26 UTC

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@nprofile…vv22 forecast is cloudless sky and we'll get 92% covered in London. I was in London for the 1999 total eclipse but it was slightly cloudy then, so this will be my first clear sky eclipse at anything close to 100%. Exciting! Ordered eclipse glasses but they were supposed to come today and didn't so I'm a bit worried I'll miss out on that. Pinhole camera will do fine if not.

2026-08-11 20:26:01 UTC

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@nprofile…vv22 just working out where I'll be able to see it!

2026-08-11 18:19:19 UTC

Any guesses as to what I'm doing at 7.15 pm BST taking a photo like this? 😂
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/078/245/516/599/010/original/82a16204ac69c518.jpg

2026-08-08 22:34:44 UTC

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@nprofile…fedp nice move to post a researchgate link to an article with that title. 😂

2026-08-05 19:01:23 UTC

The article linked below and the thread are fascinating. A discussion of two different visions of how we could be building software more like knives and less like avocado slicers.
I wonder if any of this applies to the way we do science?

2026-08-04 22:01:57 UTC

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@nprofile…tg2e after leaving France I lived for 18 months in beacon hill in Boston, and was initially very pleased when I found a fancy "French" patisserie there. My joy quickly vanished when I first tried one of their cakes. It's astonishing how much sugar does into food in America.

2026-08-04 21:53:06 UTC

Today in a supermarket in France I noticed they had two separate aisles, one for patisseries and one for patisseries industrielles. I often wish I'd never left.

2026-08-03 15:01:44 UTC

Sometimes a lazy river can feel a bit like an alien landscape. #photography
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/117/032/166/571/932/721/original/f50a5dbe0fe87eae.jpg
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2026-07-31 08:16:20 UTC

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@nprofile…qj99 this is the post I didn't know that I needed this morning. 😂

2026-07-30 10:58:52 UTC

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@nprofile…05dg maybe it was different in the US but what you describe is more or less my experience of every UK grant I've ever written since I got my faculty position in 2014.

2026-07-29 23:26:53 UTC

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@nprofile…qj99 it's great that you posted this though. I think there's a very strong selection bias of people posting about their successes only.

2026-07-29 23:25:49 UTC

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@nprofile…qj99 I haven't tried this sort of top to bottom vibe coding because I pretty much assumed it would be like this (plus I don't have a subscription and not going to pay for one with my own money). In my much smaller scale usage, I've found they need a lot of hand holding whenever you go slightly off the beaten track. It's difficult to imagine that it wouldn't go completely off the rails for a real project that wasn't doing something that has been done. There are just so many decisions it would have to make with a chance of going wrong at each one, and they seem bad at having a global picture and recovering.

2026-07-23 22:39:15 UTC

@nprofile…9l0r and @nprofile…hswt @nprofile…5qdq teaming up to make an incredibly cool new tool to read biorxiv preprints as HTML with nice features (particularly on desktop when you hover over links). Try it on any biorxiv preprint, for example my most recent one (with just a couple of bugs that I expect will get ironed out soon):
https://reader.openrxivlabs.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.25.666748v2?utm_source=biorxiv&utm_content=rr
To me little quality of life features like this can potentially push the visibility and viability of preprints and non-journal infrastructure, so I'm quite excited about this.

2026-07-23 14:59:45 UTC

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@nprofile…63pg such a confusing word because the dish is so delicious!

2026-07-21 09:18:40 UTC

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@nprofile…0mcy I would have guessed the (incorrect) "record of facts" crowd would be larger. Wonder what population they were sampling from or if it was just anecdotal.

2026-07-18 23:33:34 UTC

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@nprofile…63pg but also granting licenses for new oil fields.

2026-07-18 09:30:36 UTC

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Link to my more measured post about this article:
https://neuromatch.social/@neuralreckoning/116934923046572869

2026-07-18 09:28:19 UTC

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@nprofile…kkfs @nprofile…em2h on the fence about this usage, but I think it's very disingenuous. Longer comment in this post: https://neuromatch.social/@neuralreckoning/116940257495123437

2026-07-18 09:25:22 UTC

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@nprofile…63pg yeah, assuming he's telling the truth in those two posts, I'm on the fence about whether it constitutes using AI to write the article. What it certainly does show, in my opinion, is a double standard. He's complaining about the extra work his journal has to do because of AI use, but his decision to use AI to help him write means that he's put us in the same position. We either have to trust him that he checked the links (which is tricky given the undisclosed AI use only admitted to when he got caught) or we have to put in extra work following up all his links and verifying that they're reasonable. This accords with my initial post that the article is disingenuous. He's happy to treat us in a way that he's not happy to be treated himself.

2026-07-17 20:31:00 UTC

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@nprofile…em2h @nprofile…kkfs just the editor in chief, nothing to see here... 😂😭

2026-07-17 19:31:50 UTC

The $700k/yr-paid editor of academic labour exploitation magazine Science writing an article complaining about how AI is exploiting academic labour and making publishers lives more difficult, and then getting caught using ChatGPT to write the article, feels like the perfect end to this academic year.

2026-07-17 18:22:25 UTC

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Lol, turns out he wrote the article with ChatGPT.
https://bsky.app/profile/nanoporous.net/post/3mqu2brhk5s2q
What a perfect conclusion to this.

2026-07-17 14:22:34 UTC

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@nprofile…qj99 I love how they wrote it because you can just add one line to your adblock filter and it bypasses it.

2026-07-17 14:05:08 UTC

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@nprofile…g5fq sure, it's better that he's saying this than being gung ho on AI, but many people are saying this sort of thing, including many who are not personally profiting from exploitation of academic labour.

2026-07-17 14:01:21 UTC

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@nprofile…tg2e indeed! Extraordinary, but not sure if relevant?

2026-07-17 10:48:44 UTC

Everyone is praising this article, but I find it a bit disingenuous. He criticises Taylorism ("scientific management") but that's exactly what researchers are subject to, and the glam publication economy is at the heart of it.
Science magazine's business model, and the source of its editor's $700k salary, rely on this exploitation of academic labour. There wouldn't be an AI slop paper problem if it weren't for journals and ranking researchers by publication metrics, because there'd be nothing to gain from generating slop.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aek5570

2026-07-16 17:33:48 UTC

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Explainer thread on bsky - sorry I don't have the energy to copy it over here!
https://bsky.app/profile/neural-reckoning.org/post/3mqrr5fsmh22a

2026-07-16 17:33:24 UTC

New preprint on #neuromodulation in #SpikingNeuralNetworks of interest to people in #neuroscience and #neuromorphic computing.
Headline result: neuromodulation gives a huge boost to performance, particularly in noisy environments, and reduces energy consumption by reducing neuron and spike counts.
We also have tutorials and codes to integrate easily into your models.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.25.666748v2

2026-07-15 15:04:02 UTC

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Longer, more detailed version in my course on "Neuroscience for machine learners" that I give at my university. All materials freely available online at:
https://neuro4ml.github.io/

2026-07-15 15:03:38 UTC

I just gave a short tutorial on what is a spiking neural network and how to train one. From zero to a trained network in one hour. Slides and code you can run in Colab at this repo:
https://github.com/neural-reckoning/cambridge-fens-chen-summer-school-2026
#Neuroscience #ComputationalNeuroscience #SpikingNeuralNetworks

2026-07-14 15:12:45 UTC

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@nprofile…3fqs I'm very reassured!

2026-07-14 13:24:54 UTC

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@nprofile…63pg too late I suspect. 😔

2026-07-14 13:24:38 UTC

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@nprofile…0deq yes! 😂 faster, more energy efficient AND better!

2026-07-14 09:03:37 UTC

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My prediction: this AI will be designed and run by a company owned by one of the major academic publishing groups. Digital Science (part of the family of companies that owns Springer Nature), or some part of RELX (owners of Elsevier) seem likely candidates.

2026-07-14 09:03:12 UTC

Am I reading the UKRI strategy correctly that they want to speed up grant decision making by using AI?
😮‍💨
Guess it's time to do some experiments on what ChatGPT likes to see in a grant application.
https://www.ukri.org/publications/uk-research-and-innovation-strategy-2026-to-2031/

2026-06-18 16:34:36 UTC

New #neuromorphic #SpikingNeuralNetworks paper with Pengfei Sun, Zhe Su, @nprofile…0g2l, @nprofile…wyuq and Danyal Akarca:
https://neural-reckoning.org/pub_dual_memory_pathways.html
Long story short, we found a neat new trick for augmenting spiking neural networks with a tiny separate memory buffer, that gives a huge boost to performance on tasks with temporal structure at a very low memory cost (state-of-the-art performance with 40-60% fewer parameters). It's also very neuromorphic hardware-friendly and gives us 4x increased throughput and 5x improvement in energy efficiency compared to state-of-the-art.
We think this is (a) a great example of where an abstraction inspired by biology can lead to networks that are both algorithmically effective and hardware-efficient, (b) shows the power of doing hardware-software co-design for neuromorphic computation.

2026-06-16 16:12:16 UTC

Interesting Transmitter article by Brian DePasquale on what will be the effect of the increasingly widespread use of LLMs to code up research ideas in neuroscience. Includes a somewhat sceptical commentary from me. 😉

2026-05-17 09:34:32 UTC

Right, time for a digital media break. Not sure how long. See you on the other side (or maybe not, who knows). Might drop back to post new papers.

2026-05-17 08:33:22 UTC

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@nprofile…qj99 I assume it only works if users access via the web interface? Do you have numbers on how many people do that compared to using an app?

2026-05-17 07:32:52 UTC

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@nprofile…k4ud ah I see he tweeted that you could ask to have the ban lifted if you "establish a record" of peer reviewed papers. In some disciplines and depending what they mean by that quantitatively, that could take many years for a junior researcher, and severely impact their chances of getting a job. It's better, but not much.
Also, announcing policy by ambiguously worded tweets is not great. Like, what counts as a "reputable" journal? Will they give a list? And are they ready for the inevitable lawsuits if they do? And if they don't, how will the process be transparent and unbiased? And so on.

2026-05-17 07:06:41 UTC

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@nprofile…qj99 I don't think an appeals process resolves the issue of the power imbalance meaning that not all coauthors would feel safe to delay the posting of a paper (eg a student will not usually contradict their supervisor). The policy as stated is that they are equally responsible and an appeal can't change this it can only appeal the incorrect application of the rule.

2026-05-17 06:58:22 UTC

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@nprofile…9t59 lots of people use an LLM for this and there's very little control over what they do.

2026-05-17 06:56:40 UTC

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@nprofile…k4ud that's great news, do you have a link to this clarification? I wish they hadn't announced this on X originally.

2026-05-16 23:35:58 UTC

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@nprofile…5kpv I didn't assert that.

2026-05-16 16:43:36 UTC

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@nprofile…5a85 I assume that at least there'll be an appeals process for when someone added you without consent. As to the other question: the issue is not technical - because of imbalances of power you may not feel you have the ability to say anything other than giving approval. We can wish it weren't so, but it is.

2026-05-16 13:10:28 UTC

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@nprofile…lwp2 yeah it's a good question, although there are at least some articles saying they've confirmed it with arxiv, but unclear what that means either.

2026-05-16 11:05:57 UTC

You might have read that arxiv is banning people for a year if they post LLM-generated papers and cheered it on. But most of the discussion about this doesn't correctly explain the policy and it is not a good thing.
First up, the policy is that "incontrovertible evidence" of using LLMs and not checking the output is what's at stake. An example given is a hallucinated reference.
Second, the ban will apply to all coauthors of the paper, not just the person submitting.
Third, it's not just a 1 year ban, it's followed by a permanent ban on submitting papers that have not been peer reviewed in a "reputable" journal or conference. Given that arxiv is a preprint server and not a repository for published papers, that makes the ban effectively permanent.
So imagine: you are a masters student working on a project with a few other people, and your role is relatively minor. The project leads to a paper and you get your name on it, hurray. The lead author handles the submission and doesn't ask for your permission to send the final version because you're only a masters student. Your supervisor explains that this is how things are done and nothing to worry about. What you didn't know is that someone else on this paper at the last minute made some edits to the grammar of the paper using an LLM because none of you are native English speakers, and the LLM inserted a hallucinated reference. Arxiv picks up on this and you are now permanently banned from using arxiv as a preprint server. Further, every time you try to collaborate with someone else to write a paper and they want to put it in arxiv you have to explain that you can't, and that this means that by collaborating with you, they also can't put it on arxiv. Since arxiv is one of the main channels for distributing papers in your field, soon enough people stop asking you to work with them and your career is effectively over. Because someone else didn't notice that an overenthusiastic grammar checker inserted a fake reference and you weren't in a position of enough power at the time to insist on checking the final version.
Ok that's a long story, but I don't think this is a fanciful situation. Stuff like this happens all the time. It's easy to say - and I've seen a lot of people saying times like this - that everyone should take responsibility for reading the paper, or that it's the responsibility of supervisors to make sure this doesn't happen. But in the world we actually inhabit, power imbalances exist: the masters student can't make the supervisor wait until they read the paper because they're worried about their project grade. Bad supervisors are out there, and it's not fair to punish their students.
This policy will lead to terrible consequences for a lot of innocent people who should not reasonably be held responsible because they weren't in a position of power. I suspect it won't lead to very bad consequences for big name researchers who will just get on the phone to someone at arxiv or one of arxiv's funders and get the decision reversed in their case.
I understand the anger towards LLMs and tech companies, and I share it. I understand the anger towards the people cynically generating whole papers using them, polluting the scientific literature and making all our lives more difficult, and I share it too. But that doesn't mean we should jump to implement extreme and poorly thought out policies that will hurt a lot of people who haven't done anything wrong.
Finally, as an advocate of open science and publishing reform, this is really disappointing from arxiv. By saying that peer reviewed papers in "reputable" journals are ok, they've defined themselves (arxiv) as second class citizens in the world of publishing. This shows such limited ambition, and actively hurts the cause of making the world better by getting rid of the parasitic and harmful publishing industry.
#academicchatter #arxiv

2026-05-09 11:55:35 UTC

In general, academics talking about specifically named LLM products (rather than talking about LLMs in general) is now such a recognisable genre that it's hard to imagine that it's not somehow coordinated and planned as a marketing campaign. Would be fascinating to try to trace how this has happened.

2026-05-09 11:44:31 UTC

I think there's some genuinely interesting conversations to be had about machine learning and mathematics. My problem is that every time I see an article on this topic now, it always has such strong branding - for example Tim Gowers' recent article has the product name and version in the title itself - and I can't help but feel like I'm the victim of an intricate (likely not direct) marketing scheme. That makes it hard for me to want to engage in that discussion because I have no interest in helping these companies sell their products.

2026-05-07 08:04:40 UTC

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@nprofile…0mcy I guess money is a sufficient but not necessary condition. The Fields medal is only $15k, much smaller than many high status prizes.
I don't really understand the fascination myself. Doesn't seem like a very good use of money.

2026-05-05 20:54:35 UTC

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@nprofile…lx3a I won't be able to unsee that now! 😂

2026-05-05 20:30:19 UTC

#photography
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/116/523/860/216/963/023/original/fcd65733b1bedd16.jpg

2026-05-05 13:21:05 UTC

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@nprofile…0mcy I can see how it would work for fact checking because what you want there is bland but correct content. But that's not usually what I want to see.

2026-05-05 11:30:24 UTC

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@nprofile…0mcy do bridging algorithms not just lead to promotion of blandness?

2026-05-03 19:51:51 UTC

#photography
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/116/512/384/618/877/889/original/1c37c5a10a66b80e.jpg

2026-05-02 23:13:14 UTC

#photography #SilentSunday
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/116/507/513/930/145/037/original/c5c86efe5002681a.jpg

2026-05-01 22:19:43 UTC

#photography
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/116/501/641/071/122/564/original/625563e26168e888.jpg

2026-04-27 22:22:28 UTC

#photography
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/116/479/002/864/460/754/original/f8a7a73b899bfa35.jpg

2026-04-27 14:02:19 UTC

The issues raised in this article bring to mind de Tocqueville's 1835 "Democracy in America" where he argues the reason for the success of American "democratic" science over European "aristocratic" science is that it makes things simple enough for anyone to reuse. We lose that using AI for science.
There may even be a similar social dynamic. Those with the wealth and power to make things more difficult for ordinary people have a strong incentive to do so, because it excludes those ordinary people from taking part and secures their dominant position.
#science #neuroscience #AI

2026-04-26 21:38:10 UTC

#SilentSunday #photography
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/116/473/164/882/591/965/original/a3a8656f5ed960b5.jpg

2026-04-23 08:43:29 UTC

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@nprofile…76a9 not as far as I know.

2026-04-22 17:47:45 UTC

We're hiring for a project on #SpikingNeuralNetworks and #neuromorphic computing, to start in October this year, for 36 months. Can hire at pre- or post-PhD level. Feel free to email me informally, or apply at the link below. Please do share with your networks if you know someone who would be interested.
#ComputationalNeuroscience

2026-04-20 13:46:45 UTC

Great article and I completely agree. If we want to study the interesting thing about the brain ("intelligence") we need to study it doing hard tasks, not easy ones that can be solved with a single neuron or even none. Yes it makes the analysis harder but that's the challenge.

2026-04-20 10:38:35 UTC

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@nprofile…70ak @nprofile…fdmk not really, this is a hard problem. We used Crowdcast but it's not without issues either.

2026-04-19 18:57:52 UTC

#SIlentSunday #photography
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/116/432/899/423/843/322/original/3f85736c8436ea25.jpg