iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 24/09/2026

ChatGPT Images came up with a really interesting hallucination of a brain, sort of a chimera of axial and coronal slices

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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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Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg @theradr.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

O hey Reminder that in (homophobic) '94 as Dookie was blowing up, Green Day picked queercore Pansy Division to open for them + a lot of venues pressured them to drop them as openers -- Green Day told the venues they wouldn't play if PD didn't - and the venues (mostly? all?) backed down. huh.

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Wouter Kool @wouterkool.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I expect to recruit a PhD student this cycle! The Control and Decision Making Lab at WashU studies control, effort, and decision making, combining behavioral experiments with modeling and neuroimaging. If that sounds cool, check out our work: cdmlab.wustl.edu. How to apply: psych.washu.edu/apply

cdmlab.wustl.edu

Control and Decision Making Lab

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Terence Tao @teorth.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...

mathandai.org

Declaration — Math and AI

Read the declaration and add your name.

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 10/09/2026

Amazing talk @defcon.bsky.social by Bruce Schneier that nicely captures how the current situation goes far beyond AI systems hacking computers. youtu.be/eEBv0STiYhI?...

youtu.be

DEF CON 34 - Hacking AI - Bruce Schneier

YouTube video by DEFCONConference

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Gaël Varoquaux @gaelvaroquaux.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Nice post, as always. For parallelism in Python, I almost always use Joblib joblib.readthedocs.io/en/stable: not only does it tend to simplify code, but also it pulls many tricks for you (auto-batching, or reusing a process pool...)

joblib.readthedocs.io

Joblib documentation — joblib 1.6.0 documentation

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 08/09/2026

A brief introduction to parallelism and multithreading russpoldrack.substack.com/p/a-brief-in... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

russpoldrack.substack.com

A brief introduction to parallelism and multithreading

Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 10, Part 8

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Thomas Nichols @nichols.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I ♥ Quarto... whether for mathy notes, or writing models a collaborator needs in a Word doc, I find it to be such a handy way to combine prose and math. I've been using it since @russpoldrack.org introduced me to it, and happy to share my templates to help others use it github.com/nicholst/Ihe...

github.com

GitHub - nicholst/IheartQuarto: Templates to use Quarto for writing short technical documents

Templates to use Quarto for writing short technical documents - nicholst/IheartQuarto

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 01/09/2026

Using Einstein summation notation - a very cool tool for working with matrices russpoldrack.substack.com/p/using-eins... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

russpoldrack.substack.com

Using Einstein summation notation

Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 10, Part 7

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 29/08/2026

Sid and Nori would like to introduce themselves to all of you. And no, there was absolutely no mischief going on right before this photo was taken by @jenott.bsky.social

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 29/08/2026

*Sharing for our department’s trainees* 🧠 Looking for insight on applying to PhD programs in psychology? ✨ Apply by Sep 21st to Stanford Psychology's 10th annual Paths to a Psychology PhD info session/workshop to have all of your questions answered! 📝 Application: forms.gle/4nujgDd3W2tx...

forms.gle

Paths to a Psychology Ph.D.: An Information Session and Workshop

Join Stanford Psychology graduate students, research assistants, and faculty for a free one-day virtual information session and workshop on applying to research positions and Ph.D. programs in psychol...

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Ashley Juavinett, PhD @ashleyjuavinett.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

as promised, @grimalkina.bsky.social and i dig in deep here, as i defend dopamine from all of the haters open.spotify.com/episode/5eaA...

cover for change, technically podcast episode on dopamine. A cartoon image of Cat and Ashley discussing dopamine on a couch, reads “now with dopamine”

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 27/08/2026

Very well deserved for both!

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 26/08/2026

I am increasingly finding myself writing in the stiffest way possible, simply because I'm worried that otherwise my prose will sound like it was written by Claude.

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 25/08/2026

Interpreted versus compiled functions in Python russpoldrack.substack.com/p/interprete... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

russpoldrack.substack.com

Interpreted versus compiled functions in Python

Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 10, Part 6

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Caterina Gratton @caterinagratton.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

🚨Job Search announcement 🚨 @psychillinois.bsky.social is searching for an assistant prof in cognitive neuroscience. Come join us! Pls RT 🙏 Full ad: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #neuroimaging

illinois.csod.com

Assistant Professor- Psychology - College of LAS

Duties & Responsibilities

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 22/08/2026

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Psychiatry: Here is a drug that can cure your cup imbalance but we don’t know how and 66% of the time it can’t

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 21/08/2026

Bringing analytic rigor to agentic AI for science: The Brain Researcher platform for neuroimaging data analysis arxiv.org/abs/2608.19902 - our group's latest work, led by Zijiao Chen, on an agentic harness for neuroimaging analysis that aims to promote analytic rigor.

arxiv.org

Bringing analytic rigor to agentic AI for science: The Brain Researcher platform for neuroimaging data analysis

AI agents can execute scientific analyses, but an analytic output becomes a defensible claim only after alternatives are weighed and the claim is limited to what the evidence supports. Agents may repr...

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 20/08/2026

I was at a conference recently and saw several talks using slides clearly generated by Claude (sometimes mixed in with their older non-Claude slides). In one case it seemed that the entire talk was AI-generated and the speaker was often just reading Claude output. Is that a thing now?

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 20/08/2026

Nothing has changed about software engineering youtu.be/lxDRDORvFdE?... - great talk by Ben Eggers about how all the hard problems of software engineering still remain in the age of AI-assisted coding

youtu.be

Nothing has changed about software engineering | Ben Eggers | Bug Bash 2026

YouTube video by Antithesis

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 19/08/2026

Optimizing performance with large tabular data russpoldrack.substack.com/p/optimizing... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

russpoldrack.substack.com

Optimizing performance with large tabular data

Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 10, Part 5

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 19/08/2026

This book by Wimsatt is a must-read

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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

A simple guide to public engagement for professors: Good engagement > No engagement > AI slop If you are too busy to do it well, just don't do it! That's fine!

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Andrew Lampinen @lampinen.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

New position piece w/ @tylerbonnen.bsky.social out now in COBS! We suggest that data augmentation is a useful framework for understanding hippocampal contributions to generalization, and offers a path towards more precise modeling: 1/

Data augmentation as a framework for modeling hippocampal contributions to generalization

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 14/08/2026

This was a really fun interview with Russ Altman for the Future of Everything podcast. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLZQ...

youtube.com

The future of neuroimaging

YouTube video by Stanford University School of Engineering

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 11/08/2026

Many of you will have seen the recent post about changes at OSF. If you'd like to learn more about how to use other services (particularly Zenodo) to share data and code, see my book chapter on resource sharing. bettercode-book.org/book-sharing...

bettercode-book.org

12 Sharing Research Objects – Better Code, Better Science

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 11/08/2026

Is your code running slowly? This post discusses common reasons for slow code execution. russpoldrack.substack.com/p/common-sou... - The latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

russpoldrack.substack.com

Common sources of slow code execution

Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 10, Part 4

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 04/08/2026

Code profiling russpoldrack.substack.com/p/code-profi... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

russpoldrack.substack.com

Code profiling

Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 10, Part 3

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 03/08/2026

Great to hear @emilyjacobs.bsky.social talking about her lab's amazing work on precision neuroimaging of women's brains radiolab.org/podcast/this...

radiolab.org

This is Your Brain on Hormones - Transcript

We don’t have hormones, hormones have us.

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 02/08/2026

I love the fact that the solution to our incessant wifi router problems was simply to turn off the "Smart Connect" function.

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 29/07/2026

The consensus in our lab is that Claude 5.0 is significantly dumber than Claude 4.8. Just this morning I had it review my blog post and it came back with several criticisms that were incorrect, which it admitted as soon as I pushed it on them. I'm moving back to 4.8 for now.

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 26/07/2026

Next time you get excited about how your coding agent solved a really hard problem for you, splash a bit of this cold water on your face - the source (metr.org/blog/2026-05...) should be essential reading for anyone using coding agents.

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 21/07/2026

Performance optimization (and why you shouldn't optimize prematurely) russpoldrack.substack.com/p/optimizing... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series, featuring this great quote from my Stanford colleague Donald Knuth

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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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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 16/07/2026

Representing data in Python russpoldrack.substack.com/p/representi... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

russpoldrack.substack.com

Representing data in Python

Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 3, bonus section

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 15/07/2026

Managing Complexity: The Primary Concern of Software Engineering russpoldrack.substack.com/p/managing-c... - A recently added section to the software engineering chapter of Better Code, Better Science

russpoldrack.substack.com

Managing Complexity: The Primary Concern of Software Engineering

Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 3, bonus section

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 14/07/2026

Analytic variability and multiverse analysis - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series russpoldrack.substack.com/p/analytic-v...

russpoldrack.substack.com

Analytic variability and multiverse analysis

Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 9, Part 7

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 13/07/2026

This week I am posting some recently written bonus sections of Better Code, Better Science in honor of the Neurohackademy where I will be talking today and tomorrow. Today's post: Programming paradigms in Python russpoldrack.substack.com/p/programmin...

russpoldrack.substack.com

Programming paradigms in Python

Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 2, bonus section

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

Better Code, Better Science is back after a bit of travel. We also have a new web site (bettercode-book.org). Next week I will post a number of bonus articles based on sections added since the original posts - stay tuned! russpoldrack.substack.com/p/statistica...

russpoldrack.substack.com

Statistical calibration using randomization

Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 9, Part 6

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