AnarchistArtificer
@AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Help me decide what I should name my game! Currently Country Architect, it turns out that "country" has a double meaning in English that I was not aware of 19 hours ago:
Ooh, I like this
- Comment on Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end 1 day ago:
If they were, it would be extremely foolish to answer your question honestly.
Even if they did say yes, you wouldn’t believe them anyway, so what’s the point in asking?
- Comment on 1 day ago:
I’m glad that you have a spouse who makes you feel seen, and gives you the compassion you deserve.
- Comment on Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification" 1 day ago:
Corporations are not our friends, even when they seem friendly, like Steam. However, they can be useful allies, so I’m glad to see this response from Steam.
- Comment on What did I forget? 2 days ago:
I love that you have multiple people replying to you asking for technical details on how you ranked the flag entropy. This is how you know that you are amongst your people here <3
- Comment on Paradox Takes the Blame for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 Sales Flop, Announces $37 Million Write-Down 2 days ago:
Were you running it with the unofficial patch? I don’t remember what it was that was causing me problems, but it’s possible that was it.
- Submitted 2 days ago to science_memes@mander.xyz | 15 comments
- Comment on Creator of Original Thomas the Tank Engine Mod for Skyrim Puts Thomas in Morrowind in Defiance of 'Legal Threats' 2 days ago:
"I made a mod that replaces cliffracers with Thomas the Tank Engine. […] I am incapable of learning lessons whenever it involves corporations, because I fundamentally do not view toy company CEOs or media CEOs as people.
In between working on my game and dying of various accidental injuries, I sometimes feel like I need to milk a particular joke until its inevitable demise. I will do this no matter how many legal threats, actual threats, black vans with the Mattel logo on them, or severed Barbie heads are mailed to me.
This is because I have issues with authority, particularly authority derived from intimidation. I kicked a lot of bullies in the nuts when I was a kid.”
Idgaf about silly mods like this, but this is iconic
- Comment on What's the coolest organic compound, chat? 2 days ago:
I was going to comment this, so I’m glad to see that you beat me to it. Benzene is so cool.
Meme: Virgin cyclohexane in chair conformation vs. Chad benzene, a planar ring
- Comment on Paradox Takes the Blame for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 Sales Flop, Announces $37 Million Write-Down 2 days ago:
To be fair, the first part of the game is by far the best. The unofficial patch adds back in a heckton of content in the late game, but even then, it feels sparse. I have very fond memories of exploring Santa Monica though. The game felt huge and exciting, even playing it for the first time in 2019.
Damn, I should try install it again. I’m running Linux now, and if I recall, I had some problems getting it working. I should take another crack at it.
- Comment on Insulin 3 days ago:
Symbols are powerful things. I’m not an American, but something that surprised me with Mangione was how people on the left and the right seemed to support him. It was a rare case of example of political unity amongst regular people.
- Comment on Labcoat! 1 week ago:
This particular dog is fortunate enough to have shoes
- Comment on Labcoat! 1 week ago:
Absolutely they do
- Comment on Labcoat! 1 week ago:
I would imagine that there isn’t anything hazardous to that degree. I studied biochemistry, and I can think of a lot of different research areas that would include minimally hazardous materials (e.g. phosphate buffer)
- Comment on il boohoo 1 week ago:
Exactly. Money buys breathing space, and that’s essential for actually building things to be happy about in one’s life
- Comment on Dude read the rules of woman only community and decided to post anyway 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on Day 491 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on It never hurts to practice when you have the chance 1 week ago:
"taint’ is an informal word for the perineum
- Comment on ICT Model – a framework linking information, time and consciousness 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on sad but trueueh, yeahh 2 weeks ago:
People who like long video essays may appreciate this awesome video by Dr Fatima (2h51m long). It’s long, but it’s excellent
- Comment on While we eagerly await the second coming of Steam Machines, it's worth remembering what a gloriously awful mess Valve got itself in over a decade ago 2 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on The Rockstar Workers Fired Before They Could Finish GTA 6 [People Make Games 19:17] 2 weeks ago:
Glad to see People Make Games cover this. They have a lot of reach
- Comment on too high for genetics, sorry 2 weeks ago:
“more weed per weed”
We can write that as “weed/weed”, which obviously reduces down to 1, because dividing something by itself = 1
1 = True
So therefore you are right. Congratulations.
- Comment on What is the most profitable industry in the world? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's scientific publishing. 2 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on [Gamer's Nexus was] Contacted by the US Secret Service | The AI Surveillance Center Dystopia 2 weeks ago:
“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
- Comment on GTA 6 dev Rockstar says recent firings were due to leaks of "confidential information" and were "in no way related to people's right to join a union" 3 weeks ago:
What does OC mean in this context?
- Comment on The wonder of the sea 4 weeks ago:
No, I get it. Humans are capable of such destruction on unimaginable scales, just by living our lives. Governments and corporations are such huge structures of diffuse accountability that often, we are unaware of the extent of the harms done by humanity. This video feels like an act of resistance to that. A whole team of divers take the time and resources (air) to help this little octopus that was a victim of human existence. It doesn’t erase the harm done by humans, and it would devalue the act if we pretended that it would be possible to balance the scales in this way.
It’s a powerful gesture precisely because it’s so insignificant. There are many humans who are also being harmed by the ruthless machinery of human society, and taking the time to be present and compassionate something that can be hard. Watching the video made me feel more human, because it highlights that I don’t think that humans are inherently the problem. Some humans are assholes, sure, but most of the problems are because we’ve made a lot of dispassionate systems that are far bigger than we are. I often think that it’d be easier to fight these things if we could make space for our humanity.
- Comment on What's your answer? And in the picture which news story is being reported? 4 weeks ago:
Margaret Thatcher getting rid of milk snacks in schools. I grew up in a mining town, so from a very young age, I was acutely aware of how much everyone hated Thatcher. However, I just thought that people really liked milk, and that’s why they hated “Margaret Thatcher the milk snatched”. I don’t like the taste of milk on its own, and I can remember being 3 or 4 years old and bemused by the intensity of feelings towards her — I guessed that people must really like milk
- Comment on Where is modern Punk? 4 weeks ago:
Friends tell me that seeing Kneecap live was incredible
- Comment on Where is modern Punk? 4 weeks ago:
Any recommendations for punk electronic music? I’ve been wanting to get into making electronic music because disability means that’s a more accessible genre for me than playing traditional instruments, but it’s daunting to get into a new genre
