You can't trust your own camera anymore.

#technology

2/2:

There are functional and structural similarities between the J-space and theories of conscious access in humans, like the global workspace model.

Notable differences from human cognition: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.html#discuss-differences

Relationship to theories of consciousness:
https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.html#discuss-conscious

#philosophy

1/2
A global emergent workspace in language models (J-space) https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace

J-space wasn’t designed or programmed. It emerged on its own during training process. J-space has a number of unique properties:

- Claude can report on these representations. If you ask Claude what it's thinking about, it will tell you what’s in the J-space. Non-J-space representations are less reportable.

- It can also modulate them on request. If you ask Claude to think about something, or solve a problem silently in its head, it will light up the appropriate patterns in its J-space. By contrast, it has trouble modulating patterns not in the J-space.

- Claude uses its J-space for internal reasoning. If you ask Claude to solve a problem that requires multiple steps, the intermediate steps will light up in its J-space, even when it doesn’t say them out loud. These J-space patterns causally mediate its performance in such tasks, despite being smaller in magnitude than other representations.

- Representations in the J-space can be used flexibly for many tasks—for example, once “France” has lit up in Claude’s J-space, the model can recall its capital, or its national currency, or the continent it belongs to.

- However, despite its important role, the J-space is not involved in most of what a language model does—speaking fluently, recalling simple facts, using correct grammar, etc. In experiments where we prevented Claude from using its J-space, it still interacted normally, but lost its higher-order cognitive functions.

Full Paper:
https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.html

External commentary https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/files/4zrzovbb/website/cc4be2488d65e54a6ed06492f8968398ddc18ebe.pdf

#consiousness #cogneuro #LLM #AI #cogneuro #cognitive #cognitiveNeuroscience

Problem: Self-improving agents are only as strong as the evaluator scoring them, they eventually stall.

Red Queen hypothesis in evolutionary biology: species must constantly adapt, evolve against similarly ever-evolving opposing species (co-evolution).

The Red Queen Gödel Machine: Co-Evolving Agents and Their Evaluators https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26294

In Red Queen Gödel Machine (RQGM) the evaluator is part of the search, letting agents and the criteria that judge them co-evolve.

This is very preliminary work, but the idea seems interesting.

#ml #agentic_ai #ai

https://www.climate.us/ formerly Climate.gov, is a effectively a copy of climate.gov.

A group of former NOAA employers who had been fired by Elon Musk's DOGE started a new climate science website.

#climate #climateScience

A Philosophical Look at System Dynamics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL_lOoomRTA

Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, Spring of 1977. In this lecture, Donella Meadows takes on a more philosophical concept. How can we bring ourselves to be aware of the assumptions we make as systems thinkers? She asserts that models are a set of assumptions. Donella Meadows defines some of these system dynamics assumptions (such as causal relationships and feedback loops) in this video.

(causal linkages, feedback loops, rates and levels, and structural
behavioral relationships)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donella_Meadows

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_leverage_points

#systemdynamics

Sara Wickström awarded the Körber Prize 2026
https://koerber-stiftung.de/en/projects/koerber-european-science-prize/all-prizewinners/2026-sara-wickstroem/

Finnish physician and cell biologist Sara Wickström has been awarded the €1 million Körber European Science Prize for discovering how cells sense the physical world around them. Her research showed that cells can “feel” forces such as pressure and stretching and relay these signals all the way to their DNA. In doing so, physical forces can switch genes on or off, helping determine how cells develop and how tissues heal after injury. The discovery opened a new field of research and could eventually lead to new ways of treating cancer, organ fibrosis and other age-related diseases.

The article explaining it "The hidden senses of cells"
https://koerber-stiftung.de/en/projects/koerber-european-science-prize/all-prizewinners/2026-sara-wickstroem/#s54793

#mechanobiology #cellbiology #biology #medicine

Writing code versus shipping code: Productivity effects across generations of AI coding tools
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/writing-code-versus-shipping-code-productivity-effects-across-generations-ai-coding

"In software, AI's most advanced application domain, a 180% gain in coding activity becomes a 30% gain in shipped releases and, so far, no detectable gain in usage. Growth projections that apply task-level estimates without adjusting for downstream bottlenecks will therefore overstate AI's near-term impact."

... "Human bottlenecks in reviewing, integrating, testing, and releasing code, together with scarce consumer attention, help explain why large task-level gains have not yet produced a software output boom. "

#software #LLM #AI #economics #programming #coding

Humans are the only animals with chin. The chin isn’t just the lower part of your face: It’s a specific term for that little piece of bone extending from the jaw. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chin-stroking-mystery-why-are-humans-ony-animals-with-chins-180957997/

The most likely explanation is that chin is a a spandrel, a phenotypic trait that is a byproduct of the evolution of some other characteristic, rather than a direct product of adaptive selection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)

Chin spandrel is probably related to patterns of facial reduction in humans during the Pleistocene,

Alternative adaptive hypotheses relate chins to speech, mastication, and sexual selection.

#biology #evolution #anatomy #anthropology

🧠 What can a single neuron compute?

A new #bioRxiv #preprint introduces #TwinProp, using a differentiable digital twin to optimize synaptic strengths and locations in a detailed layer 5 #pyramidal #CellModel. One #neuron classified images and speech and even solved 10-bit parity with 91% accuracy. The key: distributed #dendritic nonlinearities, especially #NMDA-dependent integration:

📄 https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.06.08.730984

#CompNeuro #Neuroscience #Dendrites #NeuroAI @albertcardona https://mathstodon.xyz/@albertcardona/116764629463190653

China is also spending money like there is no tomorrow, but executives are not running the show.

>Founder Yu Hao claimed in January he was building an ecosystem that would “become the first $100 trillion company in human history.” .... "Yu’s social media account on Weibo was also suspended, preventing the outspoken founder from making viral comments, according to state-linked media. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/12/a-chinese-start-ups-dilemma-exposes-cracks-in-beijings-tech-funding.html

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@maxpool/116645893197595988

Recommendation: In "How SpaceX Humiliated Wall Street" Patrick Boyle covers in 40 minutes all previously written, includes even more financial shenanigans, and puts them into both historical and quantitative context. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKXgeNwNRJ4

It's not "Elon bad" circlejerk, but how, why, how much, and how big effect.

#investing #finance #spacex #markets #stock #AI

Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T’s 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly
https://www.nber.org/papers/w35310

Backround: From the launch 2007
through Feb 2011, the iPhone was limited to AT&T subscribers in the US. Smarphone exposure was limited to AT&T’s cellular network making natural experiment possible

Treated counties are systematically more urban than controls. They address this imbalance through the
SDID estimator’s pre-treatment reweighting of controls and using a complementary entropy-balanced Poisson specification.

... Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint’s pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. .... National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.

#economics #demographics #socialMedia #socialScience

I've been running Follow the Crypto since 2024. Today I'm relaunching it as Tech Influence Watch, expanded to cover AI political spending alongside crypto. They’ve spent more than $400 million this election cycle, and now you can follow it in close to real time.

https://influence.citationneeded.news/

Here’s the full story behind the Tech Influence Watch launch, including what I found while building it and why it matters now: https://www.citationneeded.news/tech-influence-watch/

#crypto #cryptocurrency #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #USpol #USpolitics #CitationNeededNewsletter

UPDATE: S&P Dow Jones Indices does not change rules for MegaCap companies like Nasdaq Inc. and FTSE Russell indices do.

Consultation on Treatment of MegaCap Companies – Results
https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/indexnews/announcements/20260604-1483731/1483731_spdji-us-indices-megacaps-results-20260604.pdf

"no changes will be made to the eligibility criteria including financial viability screens, seasoning period, or minimum IWF, for the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400, or S&P SmallCap 600 ... Accordingly, there will be no changes to existing methodology for
this index family."

2/2 What is the right answer:

1/2

#math

The sound of a variable-frequency drive (VFD) motor creates these beautiful "spindles" in a time-frequency spectrogram.

You can get something similar by creating in the computer an SPWM waveform where a variable-frequency sine wave thresholds a 2 kHz sawtooth carrier. But the "shimmering" effect here might be due to some acoustic resonances?

From the “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme” departement:

The Kaiser and a "Mediocre Man" Theory of History --
A Case Study in the Historical Importance of Incompetence by Clausewitz scholar
Kiran Pfitzner
https://www.deadcarl.com/p/the-kaiser-and-a-mediocre-man-theory

Wilhelm wished to be “the stag at every hunt, the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral.”

"At the highest levels, nothing mattered more than his confidence and, indeed, friendship. Wilhelm ruled out candidates on the basis that they weren’t tall enough to cut an impressive figure."

"At times, he raged, declaring his desire to crush Germany’s enemies. During the Boxer rebellion, he ordered Beijing to be razed in revenge for murdered German dignitaries. He was convinced to rescind this order, which is illustrative of the manner in which he was given to flights of fancy and malicious rage. When he spoke to foreign representatives or even the foreign press, he expressed the most fervent desires for cooperation and cordial relations. But the moment he felt slighted, particularly by the English, he seethed, calling for a humbling war. "

#history #wwi #internationalRelations

HOW MUCH?

So you are a passive index fund investor, or your pension fund is, and you are being taken for a ride. How much?

Quick estimate: with a $1.75T valuation and float adjustment, SpaceX weighs in at:

0.7% of the S&P 500
1.1% of the NASDAQ 100

After a full 135-day tranche escalation:

1.9% of the S&P 500
3.1% of the NASDAQ 100