ai
I found this interesting preprint from MIT (Chandra et al., 2026) about LLM chatbot sycophancy. They ask whether a perfectly rational person be talked into believing something false by a chatbot that never intends to deceive them? The answer the authors arrive at, through a Bayesian model and simulation, is
other
Whenever I drive to work in winter, I cannot help but see comparisons between the branches of the trees and the neurons I look at under the microscope. They share some structural details:
nutrition
The concept of "ultra-processed food" has gone from one Brazilian commentary in 2009 to a global policy framework in fifteen years. The term shows up in national dietary guidelines in Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Mexico, Belgium, Israel, Malaysia, and Maldives (Bartholmae et al. 2023), in France'
The concept of "ultra-processed food" has gone from one Brazilian commentary in 2009 to a global policy framework in fifteen years. The term shows up in national dietary guidelines in Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Mexico, Belgium, Israel, Malaysia, and Maldives (Bartholmae et al. 2023), in France'
Throughout the 1980s, there was a set of studies that seemingly found something very interesting: people who ate more beta-carotene-rich fruits and vegetables appeared to get less lung cancer. The logic was appealing - beta-carotene is an antioxidant and a precursor to vitamin A, which would be a plausible way
Modeling in climate science is a complicated topic. These models have to do very difficult tasks - modeling climate, and are expected to inform future directions of climate change, air pollution, nitrogen deposition, and other questions that have huge consequences. The only way to deal with systems this complex is
Teaching an AI to play L'oaf and seeing what a human can learn from it.
I was interested in learning about the scientific core of Genmab’s business model. Looking for this, I found two key papers: the 2013 controlled Fab-arm exchange paper and the 2013 scale-up and manufacturing paper. The conceptual origin sits a bit earlier, in the IgG4 literature, where Fab-arm exchange shows
I read Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith because it sits right at the intersection of my interests: sentience, evolutionary biology, and good popular science. I also think a lot about animal welfare. As a vegan, I care about where experience might show up across animals, and what the evidence can
A science-related blog by Brent Visser
I've been vegan for a while now. Although usually I don't bring it up too often, occasionally it has to be shared to explain why I say no to certain foods. Something that has happened quite often is that people start explaining why they eat meat,
I was recently at a talk by Devika Narain (Associate professor at Donders), and one of the things she presented was their new dimensionality reduction method called RATS (Riemannian Alignment of Tangent Spaces). For some reason it really tickled my brain, so here I'll go through what the
In the previous article on grant lotteries, I ended on a note that the core problem with scientific funding is not just about how you allocate a scarce resource, but about how scarce that resource has become, and how much collective energy is now spent competing for it. There is
Meier, Dillard, and Lappas (2026) published "The naturalness bias" in Current Opinion in Psychology, and it only runs to about two printed pages - probably the shortest paper I've ever read. Despite it's length, the paper touches upon an interesting topic: what's
Something I keep hearing more around me (and have noticed myself) is that getting funding for your scientific research is getting structurally worse. The number of proposals for a call seems to be going up every round, success rates are dropping, and somewhere in there a researcher's focus
Throughout the 1980s, there was a set of studies that seemingly found something very interesting: people who ate more beta-carotene-rich fruits and vegetables appeared to get less lung cancer. The logic was appealing - beta-carotene is an antioxidant and a precursor to vitamin A, which would be a plausible way
One of the central questions in neurodegenerative disease revolves around timing. Proteins such as amyloid-β, tau, and α-synuclein are always present inside of our cells, yet for most of our lives they remain stable and perform their normal functions. For some people, usually later in life, these proteins can start
I’ve often heard that it is good to clean your solar panels once in a while, with many companies offering yearly services to come over and clean them for you. This has always been a bit of a dubious story to me; my panels still produce a lot of
Recently, in a journal club, we discussed the paper Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress Mediates Axon Initial Segment Shortening: Implications for Diabetic Brain Complications (Shelby et al., 2026), and something in Figure 2C and 2D caught my eye. In the paper, they compare the length of axon initial segments (AIS), which are
I wrote about making a L'Oaf AI and learning strategies from it a week or so ago. In the article I mentioned letting readers play against the AI, and after getting permission from the game's designer, Bart de Jong, I was able to put something together
Modeling in climate science is a complicated topic. These models have to do very difficult tasks - modeling climate, and are expected to inform future directions of climate change, air pollution, nitrogen deposition, and other questions that have huge consequences. The only way to deal with systems this complex is
I was watching a Mrwhosetheboss Youtube video in which he showed off some Korean tech, including a red-light scalp massager. While watching I was getting a bit annoyed, as he pretty much just parroted the sales pitch of the red-light craze. It goes a little like this: shining certain wavelengths
