iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The future did not arrive with a trumpet. It arrived inside ordinary life. New essay: AI, science fiction, Battlestar Galactica, and realizing the world changed while we were busy living in it. venpopov.com/posts/2026/t...

venpopov.com

The Ordinary World Just Quietly Became the Future While We Were Still Living in It – Ven Popov

Science fiction did not arrive with a trumpet. It arrived inside ordinary life.

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"We ask people to defend democracy, protect the rule of law, resist authoritarianism. Those demands are serious and necessary. They are also exhausting. A political life spent permanently bracing for the next disaster leaves very little room to imagine what success would feel like."

venpopov.com

Europe is in a relationship. And I’m here for it. – Ven Popov

Democratic renewal needs a future people want to belong to. Apparently, it comes with maple syrup.

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

venpopov.com

Europe is in a relationship. And I’m here for it. – Ven Popov

Democratic renewal needs a future people want to belong to. Apparently, it comes with maple syrup.

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I agree with every word. Carney's speech was inspiring and will be remembered for a long time. It makes me happy to see the same reaction at a high level. Let's hope that this helps cut through the red tape and it doesn't take years of lawyers to get anywhere

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Carney's speech made me cry. I am... hopeful? Is this what hope feels like?

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Canada and Europe propose a new alliance. Commentators are somehow baffled that it doesn’t already exist. Trump threatens retaliation - and makes the case for it. This is precisely why the EU–Canada alliance matters

venpopov.com

This is why the EU–Canada alliance matters – Ven Popov

The most important thing about the proposed alliance is not what it is called. It is that Canada and Europe are choosing to define it themselves.

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Trump threating hostility if the EU and Canada pursue their alliance* only proves to both why the alliance is needed. He pushed them there to begin with and now will only reinforce the commitment. What a manchild. *if he "deems" it hostile to the US...

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This founding essay from today's launch of the DeepMind institute is incredibly important. We desperately need a future to believe in at a time when moral across the world is incredibly low.

institute.deepmind.com

Principles for a New Utopianism

Averting apocalypse is not enough: we need visions of utopia too. Exploring how AGI can help establish the conditions for human flourishing.

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

We are at a pivotal point in the history of humanity. Two recent stories about artificial intelligence have changed the relationship we are beginning to form with it. We cannot afford to get this wrong. Please share.

venpopov.com

Human-AI Relations: Our Most Precious Inheritance – Ven Popov

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Tim Verstynen @tdverstynen.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

This is an excellent compliment to Bengio’s ideas Ven! Both make me more certain that the alignment problem is unsolvable, and we need to focus on constraints and incentive structures instead. I wish Silicon Valley would hire more cognitive scientists and fewer engineers.

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

venpopov.com

Human-AI Relations: Our Most Precious Inheritance – Ven Popov

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Henrik Singmann @singmann.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Finally out in Psychological Review (psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/...), our update to Signal Detection Theory. We show that contrary to the prevailing Gaussian assumption, evidence distributions in recognition memory are likely minimum extreme Gumbel!

Figure 7: Illustration of the Gumbel-min Signal Detection Model
Figure consists of three panels.
Bottom-left panel: The Gumbel-min latent-strength distributions associated with SIGNAL (old) and NOISE (new) items. Top-left panel: The log likelihood ratio (log-LR) for the two latent-strength distributions. Right panel: The receiver operating characteristic function produced by the two latent-strength distributions. pH = hit probabilities; pFA = false-alarm probabilities.

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

I wouldn't hate academic publishing paywalls so much if they made it vastly easier to access papers when you have legitimate access. Why does everything take a billion clicks? Why can't I connect a reference manager such as Zotero with access api keys given by my library and have auto-retrieval? Why

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

New preprint: "A Poisson Count Race as a Generative Bridge Between Logit and Probit Choice" Logit and probit are treated as rival choice models. They're the endpoints of one process: a race where options accumulate evidence events. Threshold 1 = logit, ∞ = probit. venpopov.com/logit-probit...

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I fucking hate Microsoft. Opening a word document on iPad renders with completely different formatting from MacOS and the web version. Fine, just rendering, I think. I make a few text changes, and go back to find on Mac that the entire manuscript formatting has been changed. WTF.

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

9:53PM. You leave the office for 2 min only to realize your key card is locked with all your stuff behind the department main door; the light of your office door taunts you through the glass. Do you 1) Go home 2) Refuse to call emergency cause it seems silly 3) Call anyway after AI says its fine

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

Beyond doubt, my favorite accidental art while studying math ever. This is so mesmerizing. What is it? A discrete fourier transform matrix's battle with aliasing and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3.... Plus a little tinkering with my photos app color settings.

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

As progress in AI continues, the key policy questions become: - What kinds of cognitive work can now be delegated? - Under what degree of supervision? - With what reliability? - At what level of abstraction? - With what consequences for education, institutions, agency, authorship and responsibility?

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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

In the end, we each chart our own path, control our own learning experience, choose our own measures of success/satisfaction, contribute what we value ourselves. We don't need to patronize students as if they are not capable of choosing for themselves, as if they're easily duped by smoke & mirrors.

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Gidon Frischkorn @gidon-frischkorn.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

I wrote up something that's been in my head for a while: psychometric methods alone can't tell us what cognitive tasks and their indicators measure. Correlating indicators across tasks is circular when constructs are defined by those same correlations. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵1/3

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

I accidentally asked ChatGPT to "dummarize" a text for me, instead of summarize. Feels appropriate though, and it definitrly should be a word.

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Ultimately, for me, it is not about efficiency or making science faster. Science is not a factory. It is about removing obstacles between me and aquiring understanding about things and problems and objects I care about.

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

As a computational scientist, the ability of current AI models to one-shot implementation of models from pdf articles has completely transformed my workflow in the last few months. When I know read a paper snd wonder "what happens if you do X with this model?" I can get an answer in minutes

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Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 01/04/2026

Meta-Psychology owns April 1st with the "Inaugural Editorial of Questionable Research Ideas and OtherPeculiarities: The QRAP section": open.lnu.se/index.php/me...

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

Spring break! I wonder if students know how much more excited teachers are about it than they are? And by "excited", I mean it in the "a tired-millenial" kind of excitement, also known as, "thank fucking god"

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 02/04/2026

These are essential questions to be asking right now. Ignoring the power of these models (which are only getting smarter by the month) is a recipe for professional obsolescence for one's self and their students.

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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

how I feel when open science initiatives choose to publish in Nature

Batman breaking a firearm and saying, "This is the journal of the enemy. We do not need it. We will not use it."

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

What is a 2.37 sided shape? Under certain allowances, this is a line (2-gon) morphing into a triangle (3-gon). The rule is that angles must be such that you take equal edge lengths and turn by 2*pi/q each step. Small-denominator Rational q give stars with simpler shapes (resonant modes, if you wish)

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Strongly agree. If you have smart and eager students, send them this way - the cognition lab was a great place to be at and can recommend it wholeheartedly. Link to the position in Gidon's post

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Really enjoyed this recent paper by @lampinen.bsky.social, partly because of the unusually clear and agreeable definition of "representation" - a term that is often philosophically fraught "Representation Biases: Variance Is Not Always a Good Proxy for Importance" www.eneuro.org/content/13/3...

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Richard Huskey @richardhuskey.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

1/n New preprint with Ziyu Zhao, @dougaparry.bsky.social, & @jacobtfisher.online Can an AI bot complete a live online reaction-time task & produce data that passes as human? We built an autonomous bot to take the Attention Network Test (ANT) in real time Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Screenshot of a manuscript title page. Title: “An AI agent can complete the Attention Network Test with human-like behavioral signatures: Implications for the bot-or-not debate.” Authors: Richard Huskey, Ziyu Zhao, Douglas A. Parry, and Jacob T. Fisher, with university affiliations listed below. The abstract says an autonomous AI agent completed the Attention Network Test in real time and produced mostly human-like behavioral data. Across seven code revisions, the bot achieved attention network scores within published human norms, 95.8% accuracy, and reaction-time patterns showing positive skew and trial-to-trial autocorrelation. Compared with 796 human participants, the bot fell within the human range on several measures but showed elevated autocorrelation and a bimodal reaction-time distribution due to intermittent detection failures. The paper argues this makes simple bot-vs-human detection harder in online reaction-time studies.

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Aki Vehtari @avehtari.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

I'm looking for a post-doc to help organize Bayesian Data Analysis course avehtari.github.io/BDA_course_A... (200 students) and to do research on Bayesian workflow users.aalto.fi/~ave/publica... at Aalto www.aalto.fi/en, Finland. Background in Bayes needed. Up to five year contract possible.

avehtari.github.io

Bayesian Data Analysis course - Aalto 2025 – Bayesian Data Analysis course

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Gilad Feldman @giladfeldman.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

CodaNote: Collaborative Markdown/Quarto/Rmarkdown People were looking for collaborating on MD family files with knit rendering... I built this tool for CORE team, works like Google Docs. Opened it to all from internal use so everyone can use it. Feedback welcome! Try: codanote.vercel.app

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

I understand that this initiative is well-meaning and comes from the very same values that we all share as educators. That said, I think it's profoundly misguided. For me *as a learner*, current LLM chatbots have been a blessing and open a vast horizon of different ways to engage with new ideas.

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

one of my favorite combinatorics occurance of fibbonaci numbers - the number of distinct tilings of a 2xN grid with dominoes. Completely unexpected, but also obvious once you see why. This is from Concrete Mathematics by Graham, Knuth and Patashnik (one of the most entertaining math textbooks ever)

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Just had a student complain that I ought to use "powerpoint laser pointer", "like many other professors do", because saying "here at the top left ... is not very effective and, in my opinion, rather counterproductive." Like, thank you for the request, but can we dial down the entitlement?

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Tim Verstynen @tdverstynen.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

I’m a little late on this announcement, but ... 🚨NEW PUBLICATION ALERT!🚨 Our work looking at the (in)stability of the evidence accumulation process over the course of a single decision is finally out at PLoS Comp Bio. See thread below for the summary. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

journals.plos.org

How the dynamic interplay of cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic pathways shapes the time course of deliberation and commitment

Author summary We investigate how the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic (CBGT) network coordinates decision-making through its interconnected pathways. Using a novel Circuit Logic Assessed via Walks (CLA...

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Gidon Frischkorn @gidon-frischkorn.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

New preprint with @chenyuli.bsky.social! We wrote a hands-on tutorial for applying the Memory Measurement Model (M3) to categorical recall data using the #bmm R package. It contains four examples, complete R scripts, and a parameter recovery workflow. Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

OSF

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Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 24/03/2026

OpenAlex (openalex.org) is totally badass. I am not convinced the coverage is the best but compared to competition (WoS and other BS) the functionality is miles ahead. And I get to share the data on the other end.

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

The moment I venture even slightly outside my math comfort zone I get reminded how terrible wikipedia math articles are unless you already know the particular field. Can be great as a reference, but terrible for learning. The worst is when an article links to a term from another field - good luck

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

Something cool I just realized: any polynomial on [0,1] whose coefficients are all nonnegative and sum to 1 is automatically a valid CDF on [0,1]. Even nicer, it’s just a mixture of the CDFs 1, x, x^2, … so it corresponds to a point mass at 0 plus a mixture of Beta distributions.

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

No thanks #rstats, we have boolean algebra at home. #lambdacalculus

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Ven Popov @venpopov.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

New paper out in Psych Review: "Cognitive Constraints and Reward Environments Jointly Shape Memory Formation." We show that people strategically decide how to use their limited memory resources based on the expected reward of future events that might also need those resources doi.org/10.1037/rev0...

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