iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Ted Chiang in 'Catching crumbs from the table' – from the year 2000. www.nature.com/articles/350...

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This banded local axonal arborization pattern is pretty wild.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Hand drawn diagrams ftw. Levitt et al (1993). Topography of pyramidal neuron intrinsic connections in macaque monkey prefrontal cortex (areas 9 and 46). doi.org/10.1002/cne....

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Reading a review on serotonin by Peter Dayan and Quentin J.M. Huys from 2009. It's an increasingly rare experience in this LLM-blighted era to read a paper with good prose.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Trying to learn a bit about the AAV (adeno-associated virus) technique. As is usually my experience, the complexity of intracellular processes boggles the mind.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

A forgotten machine future. What an album.

Front cover of the album 'Ralf & Florian' by Kraftwerk

Back cover of the album 'Ralf & Florian' by Kraftwerk

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

"As AI-augmented research proliferates, the scope of scientific inquiry is contracting." www.ft.com/content/0c63... [paywalled]

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

"This storm is what we call progress." - Walter Benjamin

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

As it turns out, it will also remove hyphens indiscriminately. What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches...

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

"One organism might peer out from another organism, but not live there." I'm in awe of VanDerMeer's ability to conjure the uncanny.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

I used to generate spiral patterns using center-surround networks just for fun... Never really thought of a use for them.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

A very different approach to "chill music to work to". :P #NowPlaying

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

Like a coven of witches playing post-punk. #music

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

"Oscar Wilde once defined fox hunting as the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable. Were he alive today he might describe the quest for artificial general intelligence as the unfathomable in pursuit of the indefinable."

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

Good god that Taylor Swift album is atrocious. Perhaps it will put the final nail in the coffin of nihilistic millennial poptimism.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

"Signs are produced and circulated at a growing speed but the human terminal of the system (the embodied mind) is put under growing pressure, and finally it cracks." This was written in 2009, so he had no idea that generative AI was just around the corner.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

Love this contrast between cyberspace and 'cybertime'.

Excerpt from 'Precarious Rhapsody' by Franco Berardi.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

Nice! Just published a closely related essay. yohanjohn.substack.com/p/to-model-b...

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

Haha. Just last night I added this footnote on "all models are wrong" to my latest substack essay. yohanjohn.substack.com/p/neuroscien...

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Today I learned that the manifold hypothesis might be traceable all the way back to Helmholtz. From 'Operationalizing Kant Manifolds, Models, and Mathematics in Helmholtz's Theories of Perception' doi.org/10.7551/mitp... #psychology #neuroscience #philosophy

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

I'm starting a series of essays that view neuroscience through the lens of Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality. Here's the first part: yohanjohn.substack.com/p/neuroscien... #neuroscience

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

Picked up this book after hearing about it in a video essay. Maybe this year will be the first time I attend a Ren Faire.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

arxiv.org/abs/2507.06952 This diagram is just ... 😂

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

" Both are attempts at post hoc stabilisation of a wholly synthetic cognitive artefact." 💯

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

Yup. Here's a footnote in Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/granular

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Recently came across this book (from 1962!), quite by fluke. It's where the term 'brown sahib' came from, apparently. I've only read a few pages, but it is savage! And cuts a bit close to home! archive.org/details/dli....

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Looking into Sterling & Eyer (1988), the paper that coined the term 'allostasis'. They're not mincing words! #neuroscience

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

Just finished 'Martyr!' by Kaveh Akbar. A wonderfully life-affirming book about death. (Or possibly vice versa.)

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

This is a cool paper, both in terms of results and in terms of methodology. The distinction between 'fractured entangled' and 'unified factored' reps is handy. 'Questioning Representational Optimism in Deep Learning: The Fractured Entangled Representation Hypothesis' arxiv.org/abs/2505.11581 #ML

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

"... those who stayed shifted their attentions away from original research and toward hermeneutics: interpreting the scientific work of metahumans." Ted Chiang wrote this in the year 2000 in a sci fi essay in Nature (!?). Reminds me of research on interpretability in ML. 😛

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

I've always liked the Haber spiral diagrams since they convey something about global organization. doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

I'm reading 'Martyr!' by Kaveh Akbar. Really good so far.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

Pet peeve: data/simulation plots with multiple lines in different colors, but the same line style and width. Not everyone can make out different colors! Also, perceptual redundancy is generally a good thing. Is there a review of the psychophysics of data visualization?

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

This is a subtle way of looking at instruction fine-tuning. "...models perform better when they are trained to distinguish their own language from that of an interlocutor."

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

What you say right at the end reminds me of this table from Longo & Bailly. LLMs seem to fold 2 into 1 rather than the reverse, if we interpret construction in an LLM as probabilistic token generation.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Primary areas are not connected directly to the PFC or to thalamic areas that project directly to the PFC. (Also when you say 'PFC' you mean specifically dlPFC?)

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

This was an interesting paper for me to wrap my head around. I came up with a little graphic that we didn't end up using, but I think some people might appreciate the visual analogy. (No points for guessing the inspiration. :P )

Schematic diagram comparing the DUNL framework to a prism splitting light.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

To mix metaphors a bit, the thalamus might be the drumstick hitting the cortical drumheads?

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

This looks cool. Not surprised that the midcingulate is involved in will/agency.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

A little LLM fun: I asked DeepSeek to draw analogies (resonances?😜) between 'analysis-by-synthesis', Kantian philosophy, and Grossberg's neuroscience. What it did was not too shabby, and aligns with what I was thinking before. (The last two rows are way off imho.)

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

I raised this possibility in an essay from a few years ago. 3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily...

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

John Daugman's essay 'Brain Metaphor and Brain Theory' was assigned reading in grad school. "Invariably, the explanatory metaphors of a given era incorporate the devices and spectacles of the day..." [pdf] www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jgd1000/met...

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

"We are interested in philosophy and think it is important for statistical practice—if nothing else, we believe that strictures derived from philosophy can inhibit research progress." 😂 Gelman & Shalizi (2011). Philosophy and the practice of Bayesian statistics doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.10…

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

I just read Ursula K. Le Guin's essay 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction'. A pithy little critique of the excessive focus on hero narratives. Recommended!

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