@russpoldrack.org
Professor at Stanford. Psychology/Neuroscience/Data Science/AI. Books include: The New Mind Readers, Handbook of fMRI Data Analysis, Hard to Break, Statistical Thinking, and Better Code, Better Science
@russpoldrack.orgLoudest show: Revolting Cocks @ Numbers in Houston, 1990. My hair cells are still feeling it.
@russpoldrack.orgactually this was a slightly different issue, relating to use of agents to debug a problem in human-generated code (which turned out to be hard-coded incorrect value). the agents wrote a bunch of extra code to try different things, without ever questioning whether the hard-coded value might be off
@russpoldrack.orgWe had a great presentation at our lab meeting this week about a coding error that cost a trainee a good bit of time. It was a post-mortem with lots of useful lessons learned, particularly about how reliance on AI agents can sometimes make it harder to find errors. Highly recommended activity!
@bnewbold.netReposted by @russpoldrack.orgah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton.
she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back.
@russpoldrack.org"Future research on disease‐modifying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease should focus on other mechanisms of action." I'm sure that will totally happen. www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10....
@russpoldrack.orgSpecial Issue Call for Submissions: "Appraising the Foundations of Psychological Science" www.psychologicalscience.org/publications... Edited by @heatherurry.io @tombeckers.bsky.social
@russpoldrack.orgCongrats to @felipedebrigard.bsky.social on receiving a 2026 MacArthur Fellowship - very well deserved!
@paller.bsky.socialReposted by @russpoldrack.orgDid you know that your speed — in a simple task of quickly pressing a button every time you see a yellow square — is faster when you are exhaling or pausing then when you are inhaling?
Dr. Erika Yamazaki figured this out, did all the work, and published on it this week
www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
@russpoldrack.orgTuesday blues
@russpoldrack.orgChatGPT Images came up with a really interesting hallucination of a brain, sort of a chimera of axial and coronal slices
@russpoldrack.orgyes, I discuss Solomonoff induction which is basically Bayesian inference with a description length prior over programs
@russpoldrack.orgThe published version of my paper "Understanding, Prediction, and Compression" is now online at Synthese: rdcu.be/svRh41KcQyta
@theradr.bsky.socialReposted by @russpoldrack.orgO 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.
@wouterkool.bsky.socialReposted by @russpoldrack.orgI 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
@teorth.bsky.socialReposted by @russpoldrack.orgA 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-...
@russpoldrack.orgAmazing talk @defcon.bsky.social by Bruce Schneier that nicely captures how the current situation goes far beyond AI systems hacking computers. youtu.be/eEBv0STiYhI?...
@russpoldrack.orgI am suddenly much less excited about all of these AI-powered breakthroughs in math. ai-frontiers.org/articles/ai-...
@russpoldrack.orgI definitely need to namedrop joblib in the book!
@gaelvaroquaux.bsky.socialReposted by @russpoldrack.orgNice 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...)
@russpoldrack.orgA brief introduction to parallelism and multithreading russpoldrack.substack.com/p/a-brief-in... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series
