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).

I was talking about this recently with someone (read: ranting as they nodded sympathetically) and I finished up by saying “what’s the point of ‘smart’ tech if the humans who use it are steadily disempowered and ultimately, made less smart?”

I’ve recently been dabbling in HomeAssistant and learning how to set things up properly feels like it’s been making me more smart.

I have a random question, if you would indulge my curiosity: why do you use ‘þ’ in place of ‘th’? It’s rare that I see people using thorn in a modern context, and I was wondering why you would go to the effort?

(þis question brought to you by me reflecting on your use of þorn, and specifically how my initial instinctual response was to be irked because it makes þings harder to read (as someone who isn’t used to seeing ‘þ’). However, I quickly realised þat being challenged in þis way is one of þe þings I value about conversations on þis platform, and I decided þat being curious would be much more fun and interesting than being needlessly irritable (as it appears some oþers opt to be, given how I sometimes see unobjectionable comments of yours gaþer inexplicable downvotes. I have written þis postscriptum using “þ” because I þought it would be an amusing way to demonstrate þe good-faiþedness of my question, as I’m sure you get asked þis a lot))

Do you have a link? Because if you tell me you found it but don’t tell me where, then that may put you at risk of being in the same ring of hell as people who comment “nvm, solved it” to their tech forum posts.

A lot of them went into academia, the poor fuckers. My old university tutor comes to mind as the best of what they can hope for from that path. He did relatively well for himself as a scientist, but I reckon he was a far better scientist than what his level of prestige in that area would suggest.

There’s one paper he published that was met with little fanfare, but then a few years later, someone else published more or less the same research that massively blew up. This wasn’t a case of plagiarism (as far as I can tell), nor a conscious attempt to replicate my tutor’s research. The general research climate at the time is a plausible explanation (perhaps my tutor was ahead of the times by a few years), but this doesn’t feel sufficient to explain it. I think it’s mostly that the author of this new paper is someone who is extremely ambitious in a manner where they seem to place a lot of value on gaining respect and prestige. I’ve spoken to people who worked in that other scientists lab and apparently they can be quite vicious in how they act within their research community (though I am confident that there’s no personal beef between this researcher and my old tutor — they had presented at the same conference, but had had no interactions and seemed to be largely unaware of the other’s existence). Apparently this researcher does good science, but gives the vibe that they care more for climbing up the ranks than for doing good science; they can be quite nasty in how they respond to people whose work disrupts their own theories.

I suspect that it’s a case of priorities. My tutor also does good research, but part of why he left such an impact on me was that he has such earnest care in his teaching roles. He works at a pretty prestigious university, and there are plenty of tutors there who do the bare minimum teaching necessary to get access to perks like fancy formal dinners, and the prestige of being a tutor — tutors who seem to regard their students as inconvenient obstacles to what they really care about. It highlights to me a sad problem in what we tend to value in the sciences, and academia more generally: the people who add the most to the growth of human knowledge are often the people who the history books will not care to remember.

This isn’t useful to me at the moment, but nonetheless, I really appreciate when people like you take the time to share knowledge in this way.

There is a special place in heaven for the people who do this, just as there’s a special place in hell for people who reply to their own forum post about a complex technical problem.

(Side note: I tried the find the xkcd where he is yelling at his computer after finding a forum post from someone who has the exact same computer problem as he does, but the original poster hasn’t updated it. Alas, I couldn’t. If anyone knows which one I mean, I’d appreciate you pointing me to it, because it’ll drive me mad until I remember how to find it)

I don’t find the latency with Bluetooth headphones to be a problem if I’m just watching videos, but it’s super jarring if I’m doing something like gaming.

It’s interesting because my current headphones (Steel series Arctic Nova Pro Wireless) can connect via Bluetooth, or wirelessly to a little dock thing that’s plugged into my PC (just a more complex dongle that has few settings on it, and a battery charger). This means that I can easily compare the Bluetooth latency to the dock’s latency, and it’s interesting to see the difference. I haven’t compared wired latency to the dock-wireless, but certainly I haven’t noticed any problems with the dock-wireless

A weird thing about these headphones is that the Bluetooth and the dock-wireless seem to work on different channels, because I can be connected to my phone’s audio by Bluetooth, and to my PC’s audio via the dock. I discovered this randomly after like a year of owning the headphones.

They were quite expensive, but I rather like them, and would recommend them to someone who wants a “jack of all trades” pair of headphones. They were plug and play with Linux, which is a big part of why I got them.

Damn, I didn’t notice they were made out of lambdas. Guess I need to switch to NixOS

Mass surveillance was definitely okay with them though, as long as they could hide behind flimsy plausible deniability; I remember one of the early 972mag pieces about this that called bullshit on their claim that they have no knowledge that they are supporting mass surveillance — if military/intelligence services come to you and say “hey, we need servers to store terabytes of audio files”, then it’s bloody obvious what the point

Let yourself be cringe sometimes. Understand that learning how to be yourself is an active skill, as is learning how and when to wear a more socially appropriate mask (because “just be yourself” is overly idealistic advice that can end up being demoralising).

It’s okay to struggle. Adults will often tell teenagers that whatever they’re struggling with doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of it all, and that’s incredibly isolating to hear, even if it’s true. Certainly, the problems that I grapple with now are objectively far larger and weightier than what felt world-ending to me as a teenager, but what’s the point in emphasising objectivity when we experience everything through our own subjective experience?

My life is objectively more difficult than it was when I was younger, but despite this, I would never choose to go back and re-experience my teenage years. I was miserable back then, and as an adult, I relish the power that I have to make my own choices, even if that power comes with a whole host of responsibilities. I know it’s cheesy and trite to say “it gets better” (especially because that frames improvement as inevitable, which feels hollow), but for some people, it does get better — it did for me.

So let yourself be messy sometimes, and recognise that your struggles are valid, no matter what they are. It’s a lot of pressure to be your age — society seems to expect teenagers to know what they want from life, which is silly to me, given that many adults don’t know what they want. No matter how thoroughly you plan, there will be things you simply can’t plan for — some good, some bad. Give yourself space to grow, and you’ll make it easier for life’s surprises to be good ones.

And finally, the big secret about adulthood is that no-one really knows what they’re doing. Realising this is terrifying, but liberating. I might not always know how to best support you, and you might not know what help to ask for when you’re struggling, but we can figure that out together. Just try to hang in there — as a fellow human who feels overwhelmed by the world, I’m here with you.

I sort of like that on my ThinkPad though. It reminds me of the defiance shown in liberating the laptop from its grim past life.

I respect this.

Recently I joked to less techy friends that in the patch of the internet I most often lurk, there are two “genders”: anarchist, trans, cat girls, and libertarian techbros. This seems similar to the joke that was made about Arch.

I run arch btw. I am neither trans, nor a catgirl, but there is no question about where I belong — I have the programming socks, after all. Besides, anarchist trans catgirls throw the best parties

I remember way back when I was still intimidated by the command line, I was having issues with a video, and the only info I could find was on using ffmpeg to do some conversions directly. I laugh at the memory of me being nonplussed at trying to launch ffmpeg and expecting a GUI to pop up.

I am glad that I spent some time getting to know ffmpeg directly. There’s been a few times where knowing that it was ffmpeg under the hood helped me.

It’s because C sounds like “sea”. It’s a joke that’s more about the sea-faring kind of pirate than the online kind