Hacker News: tbenst

New comment by tbenst in "Alzheimer’s disease can be reversed in animal models? Study"

tbenst — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 19:22:53 +0000

A key challenge with Alzheimer’s is there is no good mouse model for the disease. While some approximate the phenotype, it’s not clear that the disease model as commonly studied in mice matches well with mechanisms of the human disease. There’s some thinking in the field that this could be a key reason why so many treatments have appeared very promising in mice and haven’t panned out in humans.

New comment by tbenst in "A Pixel Parable"

tbenst — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 23:11:44 +0000

Beautifully written and worth the read. And the screensaver nerd snipe is epic.

New comment by tbenst in "Does current AI represent a dead end?"

tbenst — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 15:00:34 +0000

As a neuroscientist, my biggest disagreement with the piece is the author’s argument for compositionality over emergence. The former makes me think of Prolog and lisp, while the later is a much better description for a brain. I think ermergence is a much more promising direction for AGI than compositionality.

New comment by tbenst in "Scientists decipher two-photon vision"

tbenst — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 17:03:44 +0000

You’re right, I meant class 4

New comment by tbenst in "Scientists decipher two-photon vision"

tbenst — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 05:48:15 +0000

This is a well known phenomenon. It accounts for example in the flash perceived when someone inadvertently looks at an infrared class 5 laser and is blinded

New comment by tbenst in "Functional ultrasound through the skull"

tbenst — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 02:17:34 +0000

This is fun, and the modeling is cool for sure, but it's well known that ultrasound can be used with surgical precision in the human brain.

Focused ultrasound is already used for non-invasive neuromodulation. Raag Airan's lab at Stanford does this for example using ultrasound uncaging.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/1...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731...

Also see the work by Urvi Vyas, eg

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27587047/

I don't mean to discount the cool imaging-related reconstruction of a point spread function, but rather to say that ultrasound attenuation through the skull an soft tissue has already been well characterized and it's not a surprise that it is viable to pass through.

New comment by tbenst in "Hell Freezes Over as AMD and Intel Come Together for x86"

tbenst — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 15:07:42 +0000

The Nvidia GH200/GB200 “superchips” are all ARM processors. Seems likely that some of the next generation of foundation models will be trained on ARM

New comment by tbenst in "Hack Your Way to Scientific Glory (2016)"

tbenst — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 20:13:03 +0000

I know the exercise was to p-hack, but instead I decided to one-shot my attempt at the most reasonable model from first principals:

- given that we are looking at a national scale, use only national politicians

- use the components from Macroeconomics 101: exclude inflation as that’s on the Fed, exclude stocks as too conflated with FX and international investing alternatives

- don’t needlessly withhold data

Tried one hypothesis, so p-value of 0.04 is accurate. Still OK to explore if you Bonferroni correct the p-Val afterwards

New comment by tbenst in "Next gen 3D metal printing"

tbenst — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 15:25:42 +0000

Any references for 99.9% density with SLM copper? My understanding is that pure copper SLM printing is less frequently done as doesn’t work well with the infrared lasers on most machines, requires high heat & speed, and has more porosity than other alloys. It’s also hard to print so that it’s strong, conductive and heat stable.

I think there’s still quite active research in the area, though, and no doubt there’s a lot going on that I don’t know! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026412752...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10861549/

New comment by tbenst in "Next gen 3D metal printing"

tbenst — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 06:19:05 +0000

The high thermal conductivity of copper makes it difficult to maintain needed temperatures during SLM. Also, copper is prone to oxidation at high temperatures, further complicating (thermal based) laser melting 3D printing techniques. It’s more typical to print copper alloys than pure copper.

New comment by tbenst in "Next gen 3D metal printing"

tbenst — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 01:09:27 +0000

Fabric8Labs can print 100% density, whereas Desktop Metal is highly porous. Also Fabric8Labs can directly print pure copper, which has historically been very difficult. The process is also more energy efficient and better suited for small complex parts. Desktop Metal serves a different market in terms of material and size.

disclaimer: I'm a GP at Asimov Ventures and invested in Fabric8labs' pre-seed round.

New comment by tbenst in "EEG channels with low-cost PiEEG device"

tbenst — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 04:54:31 +0000

Our preprint does exactly that :). https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05583

New comment by tbenst in "Speaking without vocal cords, thanks to a new AI-assisted wearable device"

tbenst — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 18:09:04 +0000

x1798DE captured my intent well. For example, tonal languages like Mandarin or Cantonese may be more difficult to decode if vocal cords aren’t vibrating, and languages with more phonemes that have both a voiced and unvoiced version might be more difficult. I still think decoding will be possible for general language, but that’s a hypothesis whereas I know it’s true for English.

New comment by tbenst in "Speaking without vocal cords, thanks to a new AI-assisted wearable device"

tbenst — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 07:58:30 +0000

This is a super cool device. Note that the decoding is highly limited: they decode into one of five different sentences. This is easier than five words for example as there is more information to distinguish.

Unfortunately the media is blowing this way of out proportion as the larynx alone does not contain sufficient information to decode silent speech.

If you also sense the lips, tongue articulators, and jaw, then general English decoding becomes possible with high accuracy (eg see our recent work here: https://x.com/tbenst/status/1767952614157848859). It’s not in the preprint but I’ve done experiments with only the larynx recorded and performance is pretty abysmal on even a 10 word vocabulary—-hence why they did a five sentence task.

New comment by tbenst in "Fine tune a 70B language model at home"

tbenst — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 07:59:56 +0000

Very interesting but hard to interpret until the performance numbers / benchmarks are available. I can already fine-tune a 70B language model at home using CPU + RAM, but it would be so slow as to be almost totally impractical (~20x slower than GPU). It would be great to see a comparison to eg 8 x A100 (available for $32/hr on AWS on-demand) and also CPU + RAM. Presumably it’s somewhere in between, but hard to predict where!

New comment by tbenst in "The largest US dam-removal effort to date has begun"

tbenst — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 01:16:32 +0000

There’s an amazing effort by a nonprofit to sponsor the first Kayak descent of this river by children from indigenous peoples of the region. This is a seriously intense adventure with anticipated class VI rapids.

https://www.riostorivers.org/

New comment by tbenst in "Why are Apple Silicon VMs so different?"

tbenst — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 11:02:17 +0000

Does anyone know the state of running Windows / Linux x86-64 virtualization on Apple Silicon? This article is super interesting but dances around the most important application for VMs on Mac.

New comment by tbenst in "Apple iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max"

tbenst — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:58:01 +0000

It’s more about the difference in magnitude of the lenses. This also gives you depth information when combined.

New comment by tbenst in "The Story of “How About Never” (2014)"

tbenst — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 05:32:58 +0000

Not sure he can claim the phrase. On cursory glance, can find the phrase in multiple books prior to the publication of the cartoon, using the same phrase. Seems it was already in the vernacular.

1986: "How about the afternoon?" "How about never?”

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Wild_Nights/IaAA0LV0zWk...

1981:

there had to be someone else in the whole school he could talk to besides her. "How about never?" She turned back to her notes and didn't even notice when Harry left the room.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_New_Voice/4pQSCfcy4...

New comment by tbenst in "deVStudio – Runs VS Code on Android"

tbenst — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 23:09:26 +0000

Thanks for the response! So does vscode.dev, but it doesn’t support “Remote - SSH.” Could you confirm if this specific extension is functional?

To expand, for Remote - SSH to fully function it must read a ~/.ssh/config file as well.