Redish Lab

An absolutely fascinating article on the self-destruction of the American Hegemony and the implications for software technology around the world.

Found from @pluralistic@mamot.fr 's recent blog post. (Which is always worth reading.)

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-old-world-of-tech-is-dying/

Computers didn't use to suck.

Now, everything is DRM and secured and simple things (like printing out a form!) take hours of trying things to convince the printer that it still has ink and to convince Adobe PDF that I have the right to print it (it's "secured") and then when things don't print, it's a f***ing nightmare to ensure that you haven't left an important document on some server's random f***ing hard drive. Ordering things now requires an app that wants your entire browsing history. Even getting to a website requires giving cloudflare access to your personal life.

I hate the f***ing modern computer ecosystem.

It didn't have to be this way.

RE: @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange

Oh man, I feel seen.

So, given that the scientific publishing model is a mess (chasing impact factor, predatory publishers, working down the sequence of journals rather than up) and that the grant model is a mess (writing effectively the same grant a half dozen times to pass the contest model rather than actually doing science), how do we do good science anyway?

Assuming that we can't actually change the infrastructure (I've tried!), how do we succeed, getting the resources we need, continuing our own and our students' success, doing the good work anyway?

To be honest, that's the question I want answered.

RE: @brembs@mastodon.social

Combined with the disaster that contest models are in the grant situation and we can see how badly the scientific infrastructure is screwed up.

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000065

This is why we can't have nice things.

😢

RE: @grimalkina@mastodon.social

We are approaching Lysenkoism level crises. Some parts of the US scientific apparatus are already there. (CDC, for example.) But the whole apparatus is teetering on the edge of disaster.

I'm waiting for the consequences to hit beyond the scientific community. And it will. (Probably with vaccines as the first crash, but there's more coming.) Really, we are the canary in the coal mine.

RE: @thetransmitter@mastodon.social

A very important essay. But the tag line from the publisher misses the whole point of the essay. Prediction without understanding doesn't generalize and misses the great contribution that science makes.

Prediction without understanding did NOT sustain physics for millenia - if you needed to launch your rock into an enemy's castle, you didn't talk to the physicists because they didn't *understand*. It wasn't until Galileo, Kepler, and Newton figured it out that you could use the insights from astrophysics to help you do practical things.

My university just changed the rules for the syllabus for our classes to include a "workload statement" so that the students can know how much time they'll have to spend working on the class.

Didn't the syllabus used to just be "what you should expect to learn in this class"? When did it change into a legal contract about what work you have to do? Does anyone else's uni do this?

PS. The old rules already required legal statements about how much homework was assigned, how many tests, essays, etc. This new rule is about how many hours/week they should expect to work on the class. I don't understand how this is supposed to take into account individual differences in study habits, etc. Nor do I understand how this is supposed to address the fundamental issue of "what you get from a class depends on what you put into it". 😕

#teaching #academia

@knutson_brain @Robotistry

Ah, but @Robotistry 's proposal includes UBI for ALL lab members, not just the PI. Literally, 95% of my budget is for salaries.* If I had the salaries (and benefits**) of my trainees and staff covered, I could probably pay for my lab expenses out of pocket.

• As measured quantitatively in my current accounting. Actual number = 96.3%.

** For all the fedi from civilized countries (i.e. not the US), I am also responsible for covering the health care insurance premiums and retirement benefits for my staff. #nationalizedHealthCare

When I think about the amount of science I could do if I wasn't wasting time writing grants and I wasn't panicking about lab stability... yeah, UBI would make a difference. #UBI changes the entire structure of what a civilization can do.

RE: @Catvalente@wandering.shop

💯

The worst part is that there is in fact a technical term for what the network is doing even under the hypothesis that it is a model (of some aspects) of neural function: pareidolia.

Hallucination is a different mechanism.

Question for #NeuroMethods. (And maybe @elduvelle_neuro@neuromatch.social 's zulip?)

Does anyone know if there is a way in Kilosort (preferably v<2.5) to tell KS to ignore stimulus artifact times (perhaps does it work to nan-out those times - I could write a function to remove those times)? We are finding that it is very hard to cut spikes on data with electrical stimulation.

thx!

@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social

I do think they have an appeal process, but it's not clear how that actually works.

#arXiv has (for a while) had a policy that they will only "preprint"* certain kinds of papers after they appear in a "peer reviewed journal". We ran into this buzzsaw on a theory/perspective paper last year. (No LLMs involved.) Our paper ended up preprinted on psyArxiv, which didn't have this weird rule.

• How is it a preprint if it's already been published?

I suppose there's a problem of how to navigate the flood of slop that's now in the system, but it definitely seems that arXiv is struggling with finding a good policy on this.

We're still doing science! New preprint dropped: *Hippocampal representations differentiate reactive and anticipatory responses during foraging under threat* (Damphousse et al. bioRxiv).

*** Fleeing from a predator is represented fundamentally differently than retreat from anxiety about that predator.

On our "run the gauntlet" version of the "robogator" task, the dorsal hippocampus represents the attack (behind it as it flees) more during retreat from an actual attack than when it retreats from an anxiety-related pause (no actual attack).

*** Note that this means representation during theta can be about the thing behind the rat that it is running from, not just goals ahead of it.

We also found that when rats pause (presumably out of anxious concern about being attacked), aborting the journey (mid-track aborts) represented the attack more than continuing the journey (mid-track continue on).

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.17.719234v1.full.pdf+html

#neuroscience #bioRxiv

@elduvelle @albertcardona @neuralreckoning

To me this question seems to be the issue of the #eLife journal hypothesis: they are providing reviews on preprints. They are basically post-preprint review (like #PubPeer), but unlike PubPeer, they still think (at least they talk of themselves as) a journal.

I think what #eLife and #PubPeer are doing is great. But they cannot be listed in one's CV as "refereed publications" in the way that other gatekept* journals are.

... which gets at the point @jonmsterling made about separating "preprints", "refereed publications" and "titles I'm thinking about writing" (in preparation) on one's CV.

It would be interesting to see how #eLife is still being treated as a "journal" on CVs and for grants and promotion.

BTW, in an earlier discussion, we agreed that one could list eLife papers in one's CV as long as one also included the eLife assessment on one's CV. Wanna bet these authors don't? 🤔

• Yes, I know eLife is gatekept by editors, but the door is opened based on "interesting", not based on "correct". (And, yes, there is evidence that the Glam journals do that as well, but they are at least ostensibly claiming to only publish papers that are "correct".)

#ScientificPublishing

RE: @CStamp@mastodon.social

An important PSA on surveillance pricing.

Also worth tagging to @pluralistic@mamot.fr

@Andrewpapale@fediscience.org @elduvelle_neuro@neuromatch.social

Yes, ADR would agree with @elduvelle_neuro@neuromatch.social 's position.

but I note that the paper DOES apply this to object locations, which is new.

The issue is that science is not an Age of Empires game. These major labs (particularly once you get a Nobel or get named to the National Academy or whatever) should be post-ambitious. They have already won the ambition game. This means that they have the freedom to take risks and just go play.

Give them credit though. They cite both the 2001 Redish et al. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11222672/ and the 2010 Dombeck/Tank https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20890294/papers. And, as I noted, they do look at CA1 representations of objects, which none of the previous work has done.

Generally, I think this paper is a good contribution to the literature.