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physPop

337 karma · joined August 26, 2014

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physPop··on Feynman's Hughes Lectures: 950 pages of notes
patently false, have you attended one of his lecture series in person?
physPop··on 40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity
re: your last point that is not true. we can measure arbitrarially quickly (Nottingham group does some 3d EVI at ~100ms TRs). You can also reduce volumes and just look at single slices etc, a lot of the fundamental research did this (wash U / Minnesota / etc in the 90s). Its just not all that useful because the SNR tanks and the underlying neurovascular response is inherently low-pass. There is a much faster 'initial-dip' where the bold signal swings the other way and crosses zero (from localized accumulation of DeoxyHg before the inrush of OxyHg from the vascular response). Its a lot better correlated with LFP / spiking measures but just very hard to measure on non-research scanners...
physPop··on 40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity
Unfortunately, for experts in the field, this is a "we know" article that probably shouldn't have been published, and belongs more in a textbook...
physPop··on 40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity
agree. especially the comments saying "just address it". Its a lot of technically complicated interactions between the physics, imaging parameters, and processing techniques. Unfortunately the end users (typically neuroscience/psych grad students in labs with minimal oversight) usually run studies that just "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" not realizing that is the antithesis of the scientific method. No one goes in to a resting state study saying "we're going to test if the resting state signal in the <region> is <changed somehow> becuase of <underlying physiology>". They instead measure a bunch of stuff find some regions that pass threshold in a group difference and publish it as "neural correlates of X". Its not science, and its why its not reproducible. People have build whole research programs on noise.
physPop··on 40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity
it doesn't measure the oxygen level directly either. the bold signal is correlated to dephasing induced by the oxy/deoxy hg ratio that isn't even necessarially localized to the voxel (flow or long range magnetic susceptibility perturbations from nearby accumulated deoxyhg (veins)).
physPop··on 40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity
no. you generally can't irradiate healthy volunteers for studies
physPop··on What .NET 10 GC changes mean for developers
+1 F# is criminally under-used
physPop··on What .NET 10 GC changes mean for developers
honestly this sounds like you've never really done it. FP is much better for ergonomics, developer productivity, correctness. All the important things when writing code.
physPop··on The current state of LLM-driven development
exactly. people delude themselves thinking this is productivity. Tweaking prompts is to get it "right" is very wasteful.
physPop··on The current state of LLM-driven development
it really doesn't take that long. Maybe if you're super junior and never coded before? In that case I'm glad its helping you get into the field. Also, if its taking you months there are whole new models that will get released and you need to learn those quirks again.
physPop··on Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
Because over the course of a billion years of history, evolutionary pressures essentially end after child-rearing ages.
physPop··on Show HN: Clippy – a better pbcopy for macOS that handles files properly
clippy is kind of taken (a very popular rust linter). Suggest considering a new name to differentiate yourself!
physPop··on Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update
Safari is also not adblocker friendly. Lots of other entrants to try though. Brave in particular is great!
physPop··on Dependency injection frameworks add confusion
Yes because injecting nowFn is trivial and not a case for DI. Consider a database handle, or network socket, or http response payload. Clearly each class shouldn't be making its own version of those.
physPop··on Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?
I disagree -- the funding isn't ROI based at all. Heck NIH doesn't even really audit how well the funds were spent, how could they? They don't even really assess if the research had impact, save for counting journal articles and impact factors, which are in themselves poor proxies for quality of work (and easily gamed).
physPop··on Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?
This isn't law, its journalism, and frankly the article is well written and asks a good question -- why are these (extremely wealthy) universities finances so brittle?
physPop··on The brain's waste clearing lymphatic system shown in people for first time
Its because we don’t normally inject Gad in CSF. Its kind of wild west to even do so, and these researchers were able to identify this unique dataset and ask some interesting questions.
physPop··on The brain's waste clearing lymphatic system shown in people for first time
Unfortunately no, that is not how the contrast agent gets around. Most Gd agents are huge and don’t leak out of the vasculature unless there is a disruption (tumour etc).
physPop··on The brain's waste clearing lymphatic system shown in people for first time
I work in this field —- You’re mis-construing the research a bit. Your reference talks about CSF flow on a more macroscopic scale (clearance out the fourth ventricle), which is fundamentally different than the glymphatic system referenced in the original story.
physPop··on Fraud, so much fraud
I would just like to point out the irony of claiming that people live in a way inconsistent with scientific rigour, based solely on personal experience.
physPop··on Compressing Images with Neural Networks
This is called super resolution (SR). 2x SR is pretty safe and easy (so every pixel in becomes 2x2 out, in your example 800x600->1600x1200). Higher scalings are a lot harder and prone to hallucination, weird texturing, etc.
physPop··on Class Action Against General Motors LLC, OnStar LLC, LexisNexis Risk Solutions [pdf]
Nissan Leaf?
physPop··on Show HN: Flox 1.0 – Open-source dev env as code with Nix
why not use nix shell and direnv?
physPop··on Show HN: Flox 1.0 – Open-source dev env as code with Nix
They're nice, but they lock you into vscode
physPop··on Tenstorrent unveils Grayskull, its RISC-V answer to GPUs
Outsider to the field and just curious: Does anyone know how these kinds of processors compare to the custom silicon by aws/google/tesla?
physPop··on A copy of a copy of a copy: FDA medical device clearances
The site is a little misleading, saying "Several of these devices even led to patient injuries including bleeding, organ puncture, and even cobalt poisoning." The majority of documentation in the 510k process is to mitigate harms to the patient. The catch phrase they use is "safety and efficacy". FDA doesn't really care if your device works as well / better / etc. The market will decide that. FDA cares that you don't injure people more than necessary / more than the predicate device does. (If that sounds strange, consider say a biopsy needle.)

The reason 510k is so popular is that introducing a completley new device is incredibly costly typically requriing a PMA (premarket authorization) requiring clinical trial data. If I'm making a new ultrasound machine I don't need to show that ultrasound works -- that's known. I need to show it works as well as one expectes an ultrasound to work, without danger to the patient. Same as if I'm releasing an updated version, re-trialing that doesn't make sense.

Honestly a lot of the documentation requirements are absurd -- you'd think "why would anyone do something so badly we need to document that we didn't do that"... but sadly most rules exist becuase of corners that were cut in the past...

physPop··on Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets
They can't "give up their nationality". Chinese government's position is that once Chinese always Chinese, and emmigrating doesn't affect that. They will still come after your family on mainland. Or use their "local police" forces stationed in most western countries to harass you in your new location.
physPop··on Fractal Scaling and the Aesthetics of Trees
classic paywall for publicly funded research
physPop··on Show HN: Hyperdiv – Reactive, immediate-mode web UI framework for Python
This looks nice. But glaring issue I have is documentation: Don't make people have to pull run code to get at the documentation. Host it somewhere on your website or readthedocs.
physPop··on Finance worker pays out $25M after video call call with deepfake CFO
Then they shouldn't be C-level execs. We should expect more proficiency from people we pay so highly.
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