In that case, the finished product would be of pretty mediocre quality, in my case. That’s because most of my projects are things that I actively want to learn, and I tend to be overambitious when setting aims. Despite this though, even when I completely botch it up, I struggle to think of a time where I have regret my endeavour. I like the learning

No. The main reason I do projects is for the learning. Any useful items I produce as part of the process are just happy side effects.

TBF, as someone who frequently wears high socks and stockings as part of my regular attire, I don’t think they’re particularly normal. In order to even be able to see that a person is wearing thigh highs as opposed to tights, it’s necessary to wear a fairly short skirt or shorts, which may not be appropriate in many contexts — and if they’re worn with an outfit where you can’t see that you’re wearing thigh highs, then wearing tights appears to be the more practical options.

Plus I have known a lot of people who wanted to be the kind of person who wore thigh-highs, but became impatient with them frequently rolling down. Wearing a suspender belt is a good solution for this, but it’s surprisingly hard to find ones with clips that are robust enough to be useful and not excessively fiddly — most people I have known who have experience with suspender belts know them only as an inconvenient but sexy piece of lingerie, rather than a pragmatic undergarment (which can also be sexy, but they actually exist to serve a function rather than their entire purpose being the sexiness)

So yeah, I would say that people who wear high socks aren’t normal. But I certainly don’t see that as a bad thing — in fact, seeing someone wearing thigh high socks immediately makes them more attractive to me (as a friend or otherwise)

I own a lot of stockings as part of my regular daily attire (they’re so awesome! They’re like tights, except you don’t have to do the weird tights-dance every time you go for a pee, and if one of them gets a hole, you can just throw away the one stocking instead of the entire pair of tights!). However, if I’m doing programming, I’m probably at home, and in lounge wear.

I always found the “programming socks” quite funny, so one day, I decided I wanted to be even more in on the joke, so I deliberately wore some of my fancy thigh highs when sitting down to write some code. I ended up having a tremendously productive session, and it made the socks feel like magic. It was likely just that I was just having a serendipitous day where my brain decided it wanted to get shit done, but still, the prospect that they had actually helped was pretty humorous to entertain.

Because of this, I wore them again the next time I wanted to have an extended, focussed session of coding. And then the time after that. And again and again until eventually, I had created a self-fulfilling prophecy of programming socks increasing my productivity — I came to associate them with the headspace of productive focus, and so now whenever I wear them while sitting at my desk, my brain goes “oh damn, we programming now — best lock in”.

I am extremely happy to have stumbled into this outcome, because it is both useful and hilarious

It’s a reference to the phenomenon of “programming socks”, which is the meme phenomenon of knee high socks being associated with programmers. I think the association stems from the disproportionately high number of trans women and gender non-conforming men (such as femboys) in programming.

This goes way before the Spotify thing. This is just a court ruling that took a long time to come through.

At a certain point, if your entire raison d’être is to do illegal things, you might as well fully commit

You’re right, it was the .se one I used and I misremembered when writing my comment. Though this mistake highlights why adding sites like this to your bookmarks is important. Opportunistic scams are always common when a big domain goes down, and mistakes are easy to make

They already had a big target on their back. Sure, scraping Spotify made that larger, but given that their aims are explicitly political, I think there’s a lot of value in not being overly cautious and using takedowns as a way to bolster the resiliency of your service.

Domain takedowns are inevitable, even if they’d just continued with their existing archival efforts. That’s why, when I found I wasn’t able to access the .org domain over the weekend, I just went to https://annas-archive.se/ instead.

Edit: wrote one of the old domains (.gs) because I just use what’s bookmarked and got mixed up. It was .se that I used

I use Fedora, but I frequent the Arch wiki often enough that I feel like an honorary Arch user.

I want this on a t-shirt

They’ve released torrents of the metadata, and they plan to release the music files, but they haven’t yet. They intend to start by offering the downloads as bulk torrents, but they’re open to considering implementing the ability to download single songs in the future.

So in short, yes, but you can’t download them yet

I replayed Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines (2004) recently

This reminds me of the surprisingly effective inflatable frog costume that was in the news recently during protests against ICE

I don’t use Arch, but I am eternally grateful for their excellent documentation.

I am also grateful to you for your comment, because this is a good idea

Having a development folder is such a good idea that I feel silly for not thinking of it sooner. Thanks for the idea.

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.

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.

“He blew the doors off of something we already knew was happening.”

Usually when an investigation blows the doors off of something, it’s because although many people were aware of what was happening inside, not enough did. Even if the primary gain is bringing awareness to an issue, investigative journalism like this is still important. After all, the doors were closed for a reason

Vim has long since won the war. I say that as an emacs user who is familiar with using vim because it’s installed by default on the vast majority of computers I interact with nowadays

For a while, I was subscribed as a patron to Elisabeth Bik’s Patroeon. She’s a microbiologist turned “Science Integrity Specialist” which means she investigates and exposes scientific fraud. Despite doing work that’s essential to science, she has struggled to get funding because there’s a weird stigma around what she does; It’s not uncommon to hear scientists speak of people like her negatively, because they perceive anti-fraud work as being harmful to public trust in science (which is obviously absurd, because surely recognising that auditing the integrity of research is necessary for building and maintaining trust in science).

Anyway, I mention this because it’s one of the most dystopian things I’ve directly experienced in recent years. A lot of scientists and other academics I know are struggling financially, even though they’re better funded than she is, so I can imagine that it’s even worse for her. How fucked up is it for scientific researchers to have to rely on patrons like me (especially when people like me are also struggling with rising living costs).