But in seriousness: not news and doesn’t change any of what I said. You have a class of 20 objects that they recall as they dream. Same setup (fMRI), small n, very very simplified design.
Look the reason we can’t do this is both physics AND information theoretic. You are getting in the best case an EXTREMELY reduced dimensionality, it’s not as though this is an early days of AI thing where it’s like “it’s not possible today but there’s nothing in principle stopping us from a Kurzweil like world”. It’s just not really possible.
Anyway the studies on this are restricted to specific neuroscience questions. Paper shows dreams contain object-like representations in the visual cortex — this is cool! And important! But it doesn’t imply anything for decoding thoughts and dreams.
Though a local model I'm running (gemma-3-27b-it; https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/gemma-3-27b-it-GGU...) just told me various correct sounding bits about his history with alcohol (correctly citing his alma mater and first wife), but threw in:
"Sobriety & AA: Newman got sober in 1964 and remained so for the rest of his life."
Which doesn't check out. And it includes plausible but completely hallucinated URLs (as well as a valid biography.com URL that completely omits information about alcohol.)
Gemma 3 4B (QAT quant):
Yes, Paul Newman was indeed known to have struggled with alcohol throughout his life. While he maintained a public image of a charming, clean-cut star, he privately battled alcoholism for many years. He sought treatment in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was reportedly very open about his struggles and the importance of seeking help.
> Yes, Paul Newman was known to have struggled with alcohol at certain points in his life. In his early years, particularly during his time in the Navy and into his acting career, Newman admitted to heavy drinking. He was open about his fondness for beer and once jokingly referred to himself as a “functional alcoholic.” In a 1988 interview with The New York Times, he acknowledged that he had a period where he drank too much, stating, “I was a very good drinker. I could put it away.” ...
I will say this: if you're not happy with your current prescription, there are ways to get a more intense workup and better outcomes by going to an academic optometry center. In my case, I went to the New England College of Optometry and got prescribed a special type of contact lenses ("scleral" lenses) which have been a major quality of life enhancement.
They're expensive, there was a learning curve for getting them on correctly, and it took several followup appointments to get the correct fit from the manufacturer, but I can wear the lenses almost all day and they give me clear, sharp, 20/20 vision.
Also, when I'm wearing them I need reading glasses to read up close--my uncorrected vision actually compensates for my slight age related nearsightedness. But my vision is so much better I don't mind at all!
The back story is that I had lifelong astigmatism and 2 eyes with different powers (one more farsighted than the other one) which led to some mild amblyopia (lazy eye) that I've had since childhood. My vision wasn't "that bad" so I got by without using my glasses for a long time. But when I tried using my several year old prescription glasses I found that presbyopia (that age related inability to focus on anything up close) made the glasses almost useless for reading.
Even though I'm a dev who looks at screens all day, I didn't think I minded, but I noticed in recent years that my appetite for reading books had disappeared was partly due to noticeable eye strain, but also due to generalized eye fatigue that I wasn't really acknowledging. I also had to sit up front in meeting rooms to follow along with anything projected on the screen, which was annoying.
A colleague mentioned the book Fixing My Gaze (https://www.google.com/books/edition/Fixing_My_Gaze/Ul16tPVk...) and I bought it. It's partly a personal narrative by a neuroscientist who was stereoblind and taught herself to develop stereo vision in middle age (she was profiled by Oliver Sacks at one point). But it's also a history of research optometry, which focuses on refractive vision correction and visual processing (as distinct from eye diseases) and which I barely even knew was a thing. Which led me to NECO and my big quality of life improvement!
I just recently got sclerals for dry eyes and I'm still going through the adjustment process. Usually they are prescribed for keratoconus (misshaped cornea) and not something most people need. The doctor actually said it's more challenging putting it on someone without keratoconus (like me) because I am used to having fairly good vision with my glasses and sclerals aren't as easy to get right as glasses/normal contacts. They have been amazing for dry eyes so far though.
Should be fixed soon! We decided at 6pm on Friday to reduce biomedical research centers' budgets by billions of dollars ($4B in Massachusetts alone), effective Monday. So in the future China will have to train its own scientists.
After I installed a high-COP, cold-climate heat pump in my Boston area house in 2020, I figured the wintertime running cost was about half again the cost of gas heat. However, the cost was about the same as that of running the somewhat ancient oil furnace the house came with.
Electricity prices in MA are high and are controlled by the marginal cost of gas to run generators, even though we have a significant fraction of renewable, hydro, and nuclear generation. Gas prices are also high because we're at the far end of the east coast natural gas pipeline network.
It's interesting to think about the whole chain -- burning gas in a high efficiency condensing furnace at home approaches 100% efficiency of conversion from chemical to heat energy.
Whereas utility generators that convert heat to electricity are upper bounded by the second law to ~60% efficiency, and then you have transmission losses on top of that. But you win roughly all that lossage back because your heat pump can pump ~3 units of outdoor heat energy into your house for every ~1 unit of electrical energy it consumes.
Add transmission costs and unfortunately heat pumps are more expensive here for now. But CO2 wise of course it still wins because of that renewal and nuclear share I talked about
More importantly, I can also install solar and start getting some energy "for free" (obviously, much more so in the summer than in the winter). And over time of course our renewable share will go up.
I worked there until 10 years ago and it was quite rewarding. (In fact this interactive uses some of the "lab" framework code I worked on.)
The founder was inspired by Concord (Massachusetts)'s history of progressive educational experimentation, going back to the transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau).
They're based in Concord but they also have a Bay Area office, after merging with the nonprofit org that built CODAP (https://codap.concord.org/)
You might be interested in author #7. Some guy named Dario something.