David Sterry @weex@c4.social

@Codeberg is down due to an upgrade :( Wishing them luck for a quick recovery. 🚑

The visual cortex has arrays of neurons (or neuronal columns?) which detect specific orientations of objects in the visual field.

Scientists could see this because they could push this electrode into the tissue while showing the live animal subject lines of various orientation. What's unclear in the lecture and in this image is whether what they're measuring was a single neuron or the spikes from a handful. Is each of these vertical slices a cortical column?

This pertains to feasibility of bio-based AI/ML modelling because there are many fewer cortical columns (150k) than neurons (20b) in the brain. Still more interested in developing a small component with feedback loops, etc but thought this was interesting.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePP0G7FJGPI

"In order to understand bird flight, we have to understand aerodynamics; only then does the structure of feathers and the different shapes of bird's wings make sense." -David Marr

A key principle of aerodynamics is Bernoulli's principle which relates speed of a fluid and pressure. This principle can be derived from conservation of energy but also directly from Newton's Second Law of Motion (F=ma).

Marr said the above quote in relation to studying the brain and how it works, which begs the question, what principles like conservation of energy are also in action in the brain? Conservation of energy is probably too broad since Bernoulli's principle breaks down if there's turbulence or thermal radiation and it's hard to imagine anything like laminar flow in the brain.

Working on a new AI/ML project partly to learn but also to see if something interesting will arise from "scratch."

A missing piece this morning is that of a reward system. I don't know how to tell this thing what's good and what's bad programmatically. Seems like the perfect time to "do things that don't scale" and execute the reward function myself. I figure I'll let it ask me after each step for 👍 or 👎. An app would be cool so it could just be taps but I'm a cli-guy so maybe I'll go with vim bindings.

There's nothing quite like finding and following your internal passion. It takes some doing to strip away the noise of life but it's so worth it.

Pieter Hintjens' successful ZeroMQ relicensing effort on HackerNews.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37819566#37822653

What do you think about this node vs. community dimension?

https://merveilles.town/@lrhodes/110555014534253768

Joined Nostr. I will be posting there regularly.

https://snort.social/p/npub17dmmwz9dcs6rehfwvr4yd35r7fg8na6hu5fqfnhrs80q7etjveyq24tduz

#nostr

Thinking about a greenfield project for Magic Stone. Has to do with Nostr, web-of-trust and the idea of a global town square.

I really need to learn how to write short updates and not get all epic. 😅

#MagicStone #nostr #weboftrust

https://davidsterry.com/blog/2023/09/the-global-town-square-is-for-everyone-not-just-blue-checks/

Hi Fediverse, it's been a while. How've you been?

Haven't been on social media much but I'm starting to feel a need to return, especially to help people flourish outside the purvey of the algorithm.

Hope you're well.