Yohan J John
@dryohanjohn.bsky.social
🧠 computational neuroscientist 🤖 Research Staff Scientist, Neuroblox (views here are my own)
Super excited to announce that I've joined Neuroblox as a Research Staff Scientist! We're building a multi-scale comp neuro platform for mechanistic modeling of cognition, behavior and mood. www.neuroblox.ai
Neuroblox | In Silico Neural Circuit Modeling for Neurotherapeutic Design
Neuroblox provides the first multiscale and mechanistic neural circuit simulation platform built to elicit cognition, mood, and behavior for designing neurotherapeutics.
neuroblox.ai
I’m dimly aware that LLMs are now solving hard math problems and every announcement is like “🚨 Claude Fabulist 6.7 has now DISPROVEN Flunkelmann’s Conjecture about manifolds in tetrahedral slurps—the solution is soft in K-dimensional toroids!”
Now that we all can have a magic genie one-shot our ideas, there seems to be this thinking that we have elevated to a new level. This needs to be balanced by understanding that this leverage doesn’t guarantee the composability of these one-shotted ideas. x.com/psswordprote...
J (@psswordprotectd) on X
the power of "one-shot ideas", insights that become available in a moments notice, is that if sufficiently chunked can percolate into a much bigger abstraction, a whole that captures the essence of th...
x.com
"Writing may gradually edge toward performance. Maybe poets will resort to composing their verse in glass boxes in the public square, the way chess players are now forced to play in controlled environments." lareviewofbooks.org/article/fake...
Fakes of the Future | Los Angeles Review of Books
Literary credibility in the age of AI.
lareviewofbooks.org
Hubert Dreyfus on common sense knowledge circa 1992. I think it's held up well!
One of my favourite songs of the year. A true slow burn. youtu.be/Q2GncJdNsG0?...
Madra Salach - The Man Who Seeks Pleasure (Live From London)
YouTube video by Madra Salach
youtu.be
Not sure I can fully explain this, but it strikes me that the experience of using LLM-based AI somehow resonates with @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social's Southern Reach series... and also 'Scavengers Reign'.
We've had evidence to question the 'encoding' metaphor of the genome (at least for high level traits) for quite a while. Wrote a series about this a few years ago. Here's the conclusion: 3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily...
How informative is the concept of biological information? - 3 Quarks Daily
by Yohan J. John
3quarksdaily.com
Philip Ball@philipcball.bsky.social · 3w agoDoes this mean that bird genomes still encode an entire "dinosaur program" if given the right prompts? No; I think it means we should stop thinking about the genome as "encoding" a morphology at all. www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-huma...
Does this mean that bird genomes still encode an entire "dinosaur program" if given the right prompts? No; I think it means we should stop thinking about the genome as "encoding" a morphology at all. www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-huma...
Why the Human Genome’s Tangled Physicality May Confound AI | Quanta Magazine
Our genetic heritage is not a blueprint or an algorithm, as many biologists have imagined, but something else entirely.
quantamagazine.org
In contrast, I think we should #ReadMore. Time is (possibly) beginningless and it is often the case that what we think is a new idea has already been thought or said before. #books
Kevin J. Kircher@kevinjkircher.com · 4w agoWhen I was an undergrad researcher, a prof told me he considers someone a scientist only when they've "produced more science than they've consumed." At the time, I didn't realize this is an insane view, nigh unquantifiable, and (if quantified) almost surely a criterion that prof fails to this day.
An essay on sincerity and embarassment and cliché, inspired by a not-very-good documentary about the Counting Crows watched on a flight. jessicahullman.substack.com/p/embarrass-...
Embarrass the sky
What’s the value of sincerity?
jessicahullman.substack.com
A certain Japanese novelist once said, “Not understanding something is a valid response in itself, so it’s a shame not to read a book simply because you find its content difficult to grasp.” That came as a bolt from the blue to me. (1/4)
Tracing the participants' idiosyncratic trajectories, I could observe how imagistic and gestural representations were slowly supplanted by more verbal and abstract forms. Crucially, spontaneously produced metaphors precipitated many of these representational changes. 5/13
"Open models, and GLM 5.2 in particular, are now able to handle even the highest level of task difficulty." www.databricks.com/blog/benchma...
Benchmarking Coding Agents on Databricks’ Multi-Million Line Codebase
Databricks shares results from its internal coding benchmark, evaluating coding agents on a multi-million line codebase to optimize engineering cost and performance.
databricks.com
The only reason why this interview even happened was because I came across a Wikipedia 25 anniversary ad while scrolling on Instagram, and promptly flagged Dr. Hussain's work to our Managing Editor. Inspiration for stories can come from anywhere as long as you are curious about the world!
The Xylom@thexylom.com · 4w agoNEW: Dr. Netha Hussain wears many hats: born in India and currently based in Sweden, she is a medical doctor, researcher, and award-winning Wikimedian, contributing in Malayalam, English, Swedish, Kannada, and Hindi. www.thexylom.com/post/dr-neth...
When we consider children in cultural evolution, we tend to cast them as recipients of adult culture. In our BBS target article, @sheinalew.bsky.social & I argued there's more: through 'peer cultures', children actively drive cultural adaptation. Our final paper + a rich set of responses is out now!
Children as agents of cultural adaptation | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
Children as agents of cultural adaptation - Volume 49
cambridge.org
"... there is no small, stable, non-conflicting set of detectable signals of good science that will find the good stuff and reject the bad." statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/06/24/t...
Treating AI review like the contentious policy design problem it is | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
"With the evening sun melting away across the pitch extra time arrived like one of life’s inevitabilities, like New York traffic, aimless possession, tactical Paraguayan fouls, death." Good sports writing is underrated. www.theguardian.com/football/202...
Canale and Gill the heroes as Paraguay hand Germany first World Cup shootout defeat
Germany lost their first World Cup penalty shootout in dramatic fashion after a tense 1-1 draw after extra time
theguardian.com
lol, nicely pitched. NB This line of argument is already an axis of conflict, as there are emerging fights over leveraging AI in the world of Accommodations. This is one of several reasons why theories of AI that only see top-down imposition are missing how its diffusion is happening.
Opinion: I Was Not Allowed To Type Prompts Into ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk And This Is Discrimination
By Dr. Rachel Simmons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University
inpreparation.substack.com
"... the apparent convergence reported by global spectral measures largely disappears after calibration, while local neighborhood similarity, but not local distances, retains significant agreement across different modalities." arxiv.org/abs/2602.14486
Revisiting the Platonic Representation Hypothesis: An Aristotelian View
The Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that representations from neural networks are converging to a common statistical model of reality. We show that the existing metrics used to measure rep...
arxiv.org
"as AI gets better than knowledge workers at answering small questions...people are likely to focus on big ones. Large language models may commoditise expert knowledge. But that makes knowing how to think, which is the main skill drummed into philosophy students, all the more valuable." #philsky
Jeff Patterson@jeffpatterson11.bsky.social · last mo.
Would you include the Churchlands as *main characters* in the history of Cognitive Science? (I'm not asking whether their work is important –it is–, but if you deem their work as paradigm-shifting, or originating a bona-fide research program in Philosophy and/or Neuroscience)
