iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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The schedule for @roguelike.club is up! We’ve got yet another stunning lineup with multiple people who are such a good fit I had assumed they’d spoken already 🤣 Time is fake and it’s just over two weeks until the con so check it out, buy a ticket, come hang out! www.roguelike.club/event2026.html

roguelike.club

Roguelike Celebration - Event 2026

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tal boger @talboger.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

We often say that humans struggle to produce random sequences… but what if that's not the whole story? In a new paper, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, @samiyousif.bsky.social & I show that context matters (a lot!). When playing strategic games, humans can produce near-random behavior osf.io/preprints/ps...

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 29/09/2026

I will soon be interviewing candidates for this ~2-year role (22-23 months, actually, for reasons of grant arithmetic) if you are interested in studying auditory perception and music in adults with mild cognitive impairment or mild-to-moderate dementias, all over new zealand, please apply!

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Amitai Shenhav @ashenhav.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

2 yrs ago, I briefly laid out a new theory of how motivation works (AGH). Here, I expand on the problems AGH was trying to solve, why they are hard to solve, what my solution looks like, and how this should change our understanding of thoughts & actions. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵A few highlights:

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Beau Sievers @beausievers.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Need a term for ideas that spread not because they are maximally resonant and meme-like, but because of their resemblance to Pokémon cards

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Roope Kaaronen @roopekaaronen.net · 27/09/2026

Did you know humans around the world have made string figures (cat's cradles)? And even stranger, the exact same figures to surprising degrees of complexity. In the thread below, we try to unravel this mystery:

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Beau Sievers @beausievers.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

You know, it's been a pretty incredible year for adult contemporary music

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 22/09/2026

The published version of my paper "Understanding, Prediction, and Compression" is now online at Synthese: rdcu.be/svRh41KcQyta

rdcu.be

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Beau Sievers @beausievers.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

No data, just vibes, but American social media seems way more conflict-prone close to elections

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Simon Schug @smonsays.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Human thought is thought to be systematic: Do reasoning models have systematicity of thought? With @brendenlake.bsky.social we study this question in our new preprint arxiv.org/abs/2609.13948 Thread 🧵

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Matt Sargent @mattsargent.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

Gonna tell my kids this was Karlheinz Stockhausen

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Marlene Cohen @marlenecohen.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Now out in Nature Neuroscience: fantastic work by @cxue.bsky.social, Sol Markman et al who discovered a neural reason that performance suffers under cognitive load: “Feature interference underlies a neuronal basis for the behavioral cost of task uncertainty”. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🧵1/

nature.com

Feature interference underlies a neuronal basis for the behavioral cost of task uncertainty - Nature Neuroscience

Using a combined approach of monkey electrophysiology, artificial neural networks and human psychophysics, Xue et al. show that neuronal interference from irrelevant information underlies behavioral e...

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 10/09/2026

today we're launching Tone Twist, a new listening game by Sorour Zekrati 🧠🧪👂🏻🔬 in English a tone is "high" or "low" but this is not true of all languages. eg, in Farsi it's "thin" or "thick" Tone Twist asks whether seeing visual metaphors like those interferes with auditory perception. try it here:

themusiclab.org

Tone Twist

Keep your eyes on the motion and your ears on the pitch. Can you track both at once?

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Charley Wu @thecharleywu.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

🚨New preprint with Fei Dai, @hanqizhou.bsky.social and @alisongopnik.bsky.social We extend empowerment (control over external states) by turning it inward. *Representational empowerment* asks which representations a learner should acquire and curate to solve future problems arxiv.org/abs/2609.02322

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Goodnews @goodnews.computer · 04/09/2026

Take a break from being depressed that everything you love is being destroyed by slop for a moment and let me tell you about the beautiful symbiotic relationship between graffiti writers, train yard workers, and model train enthusiasts.

A hand holding a model train with a replica of the same graffiti on the full scale train car behind it.

A model train with two graffiti pieces on opposite sides.

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Wouter Kool @wouterkool.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

🚨 WashU is hiring! 🚨 As part of WashU’s +AI Initiative, the search includes tenure-track opportunities in Psychological & Brain Sciences for people who place AI or machine learning at the center of their research. I'm on the committee, so feel free to reach out with questions. Please repost!

insideartsci.washu.edu

Rules of Life

Recruiting interdisciplinary expertise to explore fundamental questions regarding living systems and the physical world

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Out today! elifesciences.org/articles/111... @elife.bsky.social

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Sam Nastase @samnastase.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

We’re recruiting a full-time lab manager to join the Shared Minds Lab at USC! This will be a great opportunity for someone who wants to get hands-on experience with research before starting a PhD program in psychology or neuroscience. More below:

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Alexandre "Blublu" Bluet @blubludoesscience.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

New preprint! We investigate the role of language in the transmission of mental models in cultural evolution. Using a transmission chain design with over 2000 participants, we show that only language allows for the transmission and refinement of mental models. osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Plenty to reflect about re: the Arday affair, but I'm going to repeat this one thing. The playbook the right used here is effective even though it's not especially sophisticated, as it relies on the audience to do the dirty work. I've been calling it "Trojan horse propaganda", let's go with that. 1/

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Benjamin Pitt @benjaminpitt.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

New paper finally out in @NatureComms with E. Leib, D. O’Shaughnessy, C. Gallardo, @sferrigno.bsky.social, and @spiantado.bsky.social. 📝Children across cultures discover the latent algorithms that structure what they see, even without instruction, feedback, or formal schooling.🧵 tinyurl.com/4a238m2d

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Beau Sievers @beausievers.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Shearwater’s The New World is a contender for my rock album of the year. Slugs in the Marigolds is a basically perfect song. If you like precise songwriting, immaculately performed and recorded (and, to be fair, this is going to feel too clean for many listeners), check this one out.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Very excited to share this preprint from me, @emmatempleton.bsky.social, @lindseytepfer.bsky.social & @thaliawheatley.bsky.social! "Friends and strangers engage in distinct regimes of body motion synchrony during conversation" osf.io/preprints/ps...

Forms of body motion synchrony. A) Motion quantity synchrony – synchrony in the amount of motion (orange) people engage in over time. This form of synchrony is agnostic to the direction of this movement, may be positive or negative, occurs at varying time lags, and is not specific to matched body parts across members of the dyad. B) Pseudo-synchrony – motion quantity synchrony between people who are not actually interacting. That is, members of different conversations engaging in similar amounts of motion at similar points in the conversation relative to its initiation. And C) directional synchrony – people moving the same body parts in the same direction (or along the same axis in the opposite direction) at the same time (or at some specific time lag).

Mechanisms of synchrony. A) Turn-taking, which causes increases in motion around the time of speaker role exchanges, as participants gesture to hand over or take over the floor. B) Conservation of motion in which one participant moves less when the other moves more, holding the total motion quantity relatively constant over time (note that the total amount of motion across the dyad is similar in the two panels, because one person reduces their motion to balance out the increase in the other’s motion). C) Entrainment, in which mutual following of the same conversational script leads to synchronized movement among people who are not directly interacting (i.e. pseudo-synchrony). Greeting gestures such as the handshakes depicted are one acute manifestation of this entrainment. D) Station-keeping, which maintains proxemic distance and eye level between members of the dyad. This mechanism accounts for directional synchrony, particularly between strangers who feel uncomfortable within each other’s personal space.

Motion quantity synchrony among friends and strangers. A) Friends displayed significant positive synchrony in total motion quantity at short time lags (< 2.5 s) and B) this effect generalized across the majority of body part pairs (each line represents one pair). For example, one series of points might represent the synchrony between the amount of motion in one participant’s left hand and the other’s right foot. C) Strangers displayed significant positive synchrony in total motion quantity at short time lags (< 1 s) and significant negative total motion quantity synchrony at longer time lags (2.5 – 16.6 s). D) Again, this effect generalized to most body part pairs.

Directional synchrony among friends and strangers. A) Among friends, we observed statistically significant directional synchrony in only two body parts (nose and eye) and only in the vertical axis. B) Among strangers, we observed statistically significant directional synchrony in a large number of body parts in the horizontal, vertical, and depth axes.

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Henry Yuen @henryyuen.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Some initial thoughts, and a complicated mix of feelings. Wow. I mean, Erdos problems are cool (I genuinely mean that), I didn't know about the Jacobian conjecture before it got disproved. But this newest batch from OpenAI hits home in a way the previous announcements did not.

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Alana Darcher @alanadarcher.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

🎉 *extremely* excited to share our human single neuron + movie dataset is out in #ScientificData! 📄 Human neuron activity during an 83-minute movie from 2,286 neurons and 29 patients 🔗https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-026-07955-0 1st public dataset from @humansingleneuron.bsky.social!🧵

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E z r a @bruit.eurosky.social · 29/07/2026

I'm looking to interview anyone who has worked at an electronics assembly (components or systems) factory, anywhere in the world, before 1990. I can offer $100CAD / hour, though I don't think my questions will run the full hour. If you know anyone who is still able and willing to answer, plz lmk

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Beau Sievers @beausievers.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

[after tossing a balled up piece of paper at the bin and missing 48 times in a row]: Now this time with a moonshot mindset

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Beau Sievers @beausievers.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Charlie Werber's Krater project is like if Dead Can Dance were able to relax even a little Trance-inducing polyrhythms projected through the prism of funk and soul pocket, beautiful micro-timing and dynamics, and forgivable/charming new age ambience charliewerber.bandcamp.com/album/krater

charliewerber.bandcamp.com

Krater, by Charlie Werber

2 track album

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Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Want to do a PhD to work on models of opinion dynamics and the inequalities of information flow, with an emphasis on climate change and climate policy? Apply by October 15 to work with Ago Merico and myself, based at @leibniz-zmt.de in Bremen, Germany. www.leibniz-zmt.de/en/vacancies...

leibniz-zmt.de

Doctoral candidate (gn) - WG Systems Ecology

Das Leibniz-Zentrum für Marine Tropenforschung (ZMT) erforscht tropische und subtropische Küstenökosysteme und ihre Bedeutung für Natur und Menschen erforscht.

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Beau Sievers @beausievers.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Chiromancer's Guilty Pleasure tapping into deep Bay Area heavy prog rock energy. Beautifully performed and recorded. Great stuff. chiromancerofficial.bandcamp.com/album/guilty...

chiromancerofficial.bandcamp.com

Guilty Pleasure, by CHIROMANCER

6 track album

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 18/07/2026

I've posted a preprint of a philosophical paper I've written on the relationships between understanding, prediction, and compression, based on a talk I gave at SPAN 2025. Now in press at Synthese. philarchive.org/archive/POLUPA

philarchive.org

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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Now out in Noûs: A communication-first account of explanation, with Jacqueline Harding (jacquelineharding.github.io) and Thomas Icard (stanford.edu/~icard/). Paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2505.03732

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Benjamin Angerer @benniangerer.eurosky.social · 10/07/2026

3 years after publishing my book 'Representational Change and the Use of Metaphors in Problem Solving', this week it has finally become open access www.taylorfrancis.com/reader/downl... I had a thread about it on Tw*r, but I've long since deleted that account, so let me say a few words here: 1/13

Book cover: Representational Change and the Use of Metaphors in Problem Solving - The Winding Roots of Understanding (2023). Routledge.

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Alfred Twu @alfredtwu.com · 09/07/2026

Illustrated summary of the fourteen California Propositions on this year's ballot, which cover topics such as housing, elections, taxes, education, and healthcare! Individual slides at tinyurl.com/2026caprops and in the thread! 1/ 🧵✅

2026 California Propositions, Personified. Art & Summary by Alfred Twu. Election Day: November 3, 2026. Share this at tinyurl.com/2026caprops

Cartoons numbered 1-5 and 37-45.

1 is person with a few residential buildings
2 has bear with umbrella over state capitol and piggy bank
3 has chalkboard, teacher, apple, and book
4 has people next to a ballot box refusing a big bag of cash
5 has someone voting, and a 2nd person walking to an empty chair
37 has a construction worker in front of a house
38 is scientist with beaker, person holding heart and person holding a pill
39 is elephant with red hat stomping on ballots and intimidating a voter
40 is person standing behind school and hospital, holding hand out to a guy sitting on a bag labeled $1 Billion
41 is a guy carrying a huge bag of cash and holding up a red paper
42 is a person sitting on a huge bag of cash holding a weird looking puppet
43 is a person sitting on cash pile behind a roadblock, two people blocked hold a house and a bus
44 is a pie chart behind a patient and doctor
45 is a construction worker with shovel in front of a sign with a bridge, wind turbine, house, and train

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Natalia Vélez @natvelali.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

It feels strange to share good news, but: I’m moving to UCSD in July!! 🥳 I'm very grateful for my time at Princeton and SO excited for what comes next. We're building multiplayer games to study how teams are shaped by the problems they solve. If that sounds fun to you, I'm accepting grad students!

Paragliders hover between the cliffs and sea in Torrey Pines Gliderport, La Jolla, CA, USA. Photo credit Micah Fluhart for Unsplash.

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Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

I spent the last month obsessed with finding colors that can't be displayed on a conventional screen. This is what I found. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/w...

moultano.wordpress.com

Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Show You

An atlas of the vibrance of the real world

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Amabel Holland @amabel.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Today's the day! Swords Against - Beginner's Box (1979 Replica Edition) is a complete reproduction of a specific, incomplete, unplayable copy of an 1979 RPG starter set purchased at an estate sale, including some of the deceased owner's personal effects. hollandspiele.com/products/swo...

hollandspiele.com

Swords Against - Beginner's Box (1979 Replica Edition)

Hex Number: 94MSRP: $35.00 From the back of the box: The reverse of the original box was blank, so I hope you don't mind me filling up the space with some context. In 2016, a few days after we had sta...

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Beau Sievers @beausievers.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Tigran Hamasyan's Manifeste: I'm repeatedly slapped by thousands of hands, each with a prime number of fingers, compressed so one can't judge distance from size, wearing little costumes that testify a tragic history. Enjoyed it! But not going into heavy rotation. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Highlights: Dardahan, Ultradance

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Santa Fe Institute @sfiscience.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

In this SFI Seminar, Eric Goles of the University of Adolfo Ibáñez explores fungal automata, a cellular automaton model in which information flows only horizontally or vertically. He shows that despite these constraints, it can simulate arbitrary Boolean circuits and are computationally universal.

youtube.com

Computational Universality of Fungal Sandpile Automata

YouTube video by Santa Fe Institute

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Josh Shepperd @joshshepperd.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

"Academics who Listen to Free Jazz" starter pack. By popular demand for attunement to challenging music. If you "like" this post I will add you to the list over the next couple days. Share widely!

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Beau Sievers @beausievers.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

An inverted-U risk curve for jargon: low risk if everyone understands it or only experts understand it, but widespread paranoia and public distrust if people sort of understand it, or if it sounds like one thing but means something else (defund, degrowth, deconstruction)

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Emma Templeton @emmatempleton.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Check out this 4-part series on a really rewarding collaboration with filmmakers @theskindeep.bsky.social We’ve been conducting research on their videos, and they created videos about our research! Excited to see what unfolds as we continue digging deeper together. www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

youtube.com

The Science of Human Connection - YouTube

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Brandon Stewart @bstewart.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

1/ New @Nature! We study how powerful institutions shape the information environment for LLMs. Commercial LLM training is opaque, so we trace a path from state-coordinated media -> training data -> model responses.

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Drew Schreiner @schreinerdrew.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Where, exactly, does learning happen in the brain? Out today in @nature.com, we identify a synaptic locus of birdsong learning and show that the circuit can be tuned to make birds learn faster - but at a cost. Read on👇 #neuroskyence 🧪 #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics Shareable link: rdcu.be/fiyrS

nature.com

A synaptic locus of song learning - Nature

Combining a computational framework and optogenetic and chemogenetic manipulations within and downstream of the cortico-basal ganglia circuit identifies the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapse...

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Sam McDougle @actlab.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Thrilled to have this preprint out, from the amazing Zekun Sun! "Motor abstraction training generalizes to the refinement of specific movement patterns" In brief, across 8 experiments we found evidence of a causal role for abstract representations in motor learning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 08/05/2026

new preprint led by Sebastian Waz, reporting a gamified study of music perception in 85,000 participants: osf.io/7nzh5 it's a super quirky result: the ability to identify harmonies in music is strongly bimodal — people are generally really good at this, or really bad here's the task

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