iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 18h

No, it's the top of "the old man of coniston" in the lake district.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 19h

My contribution to the black and white photography in fog (well in this case, from inside a cloud).

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 19h

Sadly we still have to pay them, but at least their job is now much easier and cheaper so they can keep sending their kids to private schools.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 21h

Black and white photos in fog are the best. Love it!

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 23h

The management consultant model of chatbots? (Paying to be told there were good reasons for doing the thing you were going to do anyway.) This explains why university management loves AI so much!

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 29/09/2026

This is a great question! Good luck with the network.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 27/09/2026

SNUFA abstract submission is closed. Make sure to register for the conference if you would like to take part in voting for which abstracts get promoted from posters to talks!

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 27/09/2026

Also very weirdly short sighted by the journals. If AI can do all their functions then there's no need for them any more because we can just run our own AI.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 27/09/2026

Ooh I haven't tried that one. It seems I pass quite close to it when I run home from work. Looks a bit more affordable than the Mexican one.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 27/09/2026

Apparently there is only one in London too, and now I want to go there, but since the cheapest lunch menu is around $125 and academic salaries in the UK are not like in the US, I might have to skip it sadly.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 26/09/2026

We should also be able to turn up to interviews wearing pyjamas.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 26/09/2026

No YOU'RE the conservative! 😉🤣 OK yes, I agree it's not enough to complain about things that are bad and stop doing them, and it's important to think about collective governance. But I don't think it's wrong to complain about things that are bad and to stop doing them! This is probably step 1!

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 26/09/2026

I'm not engaging in whataboutism. I agree with you that the problems pre-date LLMs. But I don't think switching to preferring non profit journals will help, and it's bad strategy because the effort required to shift science to non profit journals only is insanely high. Get rid of journals instead.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 26/09/2026

I dunno. I think it's ok to say that bad stuff is bad and that we should stop doing it, even if we don't have a proven alternative way of doing it. That's the criticism that's been used against socialists my entire life, and it's inherently conservative.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 26/09/2026

They're also bureaucracies that serve themselves foremost. It takes the membership dues of around 10,000 members just to pay the $1.1m salary of the executive director.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 26/09/2026

The claim is that these societies represent members' interests. Maybe that's partly true, but the main example I know of from the IEEE is that they lobby against publishing reform that would make science better and reduce costs wasted on publishing.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 26/09/2026

To be honest the distinction between a sham scientific society and a real one feels blurry to me. I was advised to join IEEE hoping that at some point they'll give me an award or title for my CV. But you pay thousands of $ over a career for this. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

nature.com

Exclusive: Sham scientific societies are misleading star researchers

A Nature investigation reveals a network of organizations that have been building their ranks through deceptive practices.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 26/09/2026

I don't think this is necessarily true. Many scholarly societies use income from their journals to support their other activities (and huge salaries of directors). In this case I think they have almost identical interests to for-profit publishers. Indeed, they often lobby together against reform.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 26/09/2026

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 26/09/2026

I actually did get a coursework extension request this year from someone using OpenAI's Prism to write their thesis, and it went down a few days before the deadline.

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Alexandra Proca @aproca.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Submit your paper or extended abstract to UniReps 2026 in Paris! Deadline Oct. 4 AOE 🔵🔴

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 25/09/2026

Check out Abdal's talk on spiking neural network models of neuromodulation from last week's Neuromodulation of Neuronal Circuits workshop at the Paris Brain Institute. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF0H... And if you're at #BernsteinConference, come and meet Abdal at the poster session next week!

youtube.com

Abdal AlKilany - Rapid neuromodulation enables context-dependent sensory processing

YouTube video by Neural Reckoning

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 25/09/2026

Nicolas Dundov has poster 4-38 (first floor) on Wednesday (14:00-15:30) on "Blood and modularity: a brain-inspired approach to functional disentangled neural representations" neural-reckoning.org/nicolas_dund...

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 25/09/2026

Abdal AlKilany has poster 4-3 (ground floor) on Wednesday (14:00-15:30) on "Neuromodulation improves robust and efficient sensory processing in spiking neural networks" neural-reckoning.org/abdelqader_a... Preprint: neural-reckoning.org/pub_neuromod... Talk: neural-reckoning.org/talk_2026_ne...

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 25/09/2026

Yishu Zhang has poster P1-44 (first floor) on Tuesday (16:30-18:00) on "Do heterogeneous brains remember better?" neural-reckoning.org/yishu_zhang....

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 25/09/2026

Come and meet the Neural Reckoners at #BernsteinConference next week. I'll be talking about our recent work on neuromodulation at the satellite workshop below, and we have some posters.

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Maciej Kania @kaniamaciej.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Train your model on a task, or fit it to biological data? And once it's optimized, what does it tell us about the brain? 🧠 In our #BernsteinConference satellite workshop, we'll discuss these questions through the lenses of different optimization methods. Check it out in Room 3.104! 🤓😉

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 24/09/2026

And so it begins. The next stage in the UK's rapidly accelerating programme to shoot itself in the foot in every sector of life where it does better than average.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 24/09/2026

LLM favouritism. Disgusting. 😉

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 24/09/2026

Not a terrible evening to go for a run home though the city.

Golden purple sunset over one of the lakes in Hyde park.

Golden purple sunset over the Royal Albert Hall

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 24/09/2026

Oh that's cool will definitely check those out. We'll be there too. I should do a post too!

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BWJones @bwjones.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

This is an important point. AI is not going rogue. It is behaving as it was designed to behave. The ones going rogue are the companies themselves who have violated norms, and are committing crimes daily from stealing IP to cybercrime. It did not have to be this way, but... Techbros.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 24/09/2026

Last chance to get your SNUFA spiking neural network abstracts in, deadline tomorrow. Only 300 words and get a chance to give a talk in front of an audience of hundreds (plus YouTube upload gets hundreds more). snufa.net/2026/ And don't forget to register for the conference too. Tell your friends!

snufa.net

SNUFA 2026

Spiking Neural Networks As Universal Function Approximators

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 23/09/2026

This is an absolutely great metaphor for explaining why experimentally figuring out what the brain is doing is hard. I may have to steal this.

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megan peters 🧠 @meganakpeters.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Neuromatch Impact Scholars are smart, dedicated, motivated, and have also gone thru at least one of our courses! Mentoring them can lead to publications and other important outputs! Apply to mentor today -- fantastic opportunity!

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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

'“While 77 per cent of respondents either somewhat or strongly supported the use of taxpayer money to fund research generally, such support dropped to 42 per cent for research that involved scientists’ use of AI at some stage of the scientific process,” the paper says.'

sciencedirect.com

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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Two tenure track positions are open in Computer Science @mcgill.ca ! Secure Software mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/McGill... Quantum Computing mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/McGill... Come join our department, and live in the coolest city in North America! (Yeah, I stand by that.)

mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com

Tenure-Track Faculty Position in Computer Science: Secure Software and Computer Systems

Please refer to the How to Apply for a Job (for External Candidates) job aid for instructions on how to apply. If you are an active McGill employee (ie: currently in an active contract or position at ...

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 22/09/2026

Keep fighting Tim, you'll wear it down eventually.

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Romain Brette @romainbrette.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

New preprint! “Active control of surface immobilization in the foraging behavior of Paramecium”. More about the elementary cognition of these little critters! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

biorxiv.org

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Tim Vogels @tpvogels.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Playing Pong with spikes, dancing rate networks, composite engrams & #ihngrams4engrams. The labs most recent work-in-progress, now on biorxiv.com. Stay tuned for more Pong doi.org/10.64898/202... Dale doi.org/10.64898/202... Composite engrams doi.org/10.64898/202... Ihngrams doi.org/10.64898/202...

Small sub panel of the "Dale" paper's Fig. 1 ,depicting a humanoid dancing with joy. The paper is about how motor cortex can orchestrate a rich and flexible repertoire of network dynamics for rhythmic and goal-directed movements. Computational studies have begun to illuminate the mechanistic origins of this repertoire, but a comprehensive model that can explain the emergence of both transient and self-sustained dynamics is still missing. Condruz et al. show that three simple ingredients: Dalean connectivity, stability, and nonlinear neural responses, suffice to reverse-engineer networks that produce transient, steady-state, and self-sustained periodic activity. A single dynamical principle underlies this repertoire: the interaction of non-normal amplification, inherent to Dalean networks, with neuronal nonlinearity, so to ignite and sustain multi-stable, controllable dynamics. The approach yields entire families of connectivity matrices that require no hand-tuning or learning of weights. Without fitting them to data, these networks reproduce the population-level signatures of motor cortex, implying that the richness of cortical dynamics need not be sculpted by learning, but may emerge from simple biological ingredients. But really, we just feel like dancing with JOY!!

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 22/09/2026

Awesome stuff! Don't forget to submit something to SNUFA Tim! Deadline on Friday. 😉

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Hardik Rajpal @h-rajpal.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Glad that this is put now in @cp-cellrepphyssci.bsky.social A higher order interaction with Alberto Liardi, @rhizoqualia.bsky.social, @frosas.bsky.social and Pedro Mediano.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 21/09/2026

I also find the pile ons unhelpful and damaging to mental health for people on the receiving end. But that's just a feature of social media. It was exactly like that on Twitter, and it got worse when the platform started algorithmically boosting far right opinions.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 21/09/2026

The postscript is actually a footnote to a sentence where he says the problem is not specific to Bsky. That's true. AI boosterism is profoundly unpopular in academia. For reasons that are understandable and valid. Bsky has a lot of academics on it, so of course it'll be unpopular here.

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Bart Penders @penders.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Back of the envelope calculations: 3600 years of research time went into the collective application process. The research will fund 3200 years of research. We are 400 research years poorer as a result of this. 1/2

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 21/09/2026

But it's not just semantic because the system without the person operating and designing it, in my hypothetical case, achieves nothing. You can't understand the capacities of the system without the intellectual input of the operator.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 20/09/2026

Who is doing the reasoning in that case? It seems clear to me that it's the person asking the question along with the designer of the system. Is it important whether or not the search is heuristic or exhaustive?

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