natalie b

here's one latest sketch of ideas/directions i'm working on and the model i thought out to fathom the influence of smells on human spatiotemporal perception. A research powered by two field surveys (2011 / 2018). The Theater of the Olfactory Memory / researchgate.net/publication/34…

And applications are officially OPEN. Deadline to apply to join us is --- April 13 🔸Work with open consciousness datasets 🔸Build a preregistered research project with an interdisciplinary team 🔸Compete for $25,000 in seed funding to carry it forward

@alltbl indeed 🙂

@160B I was expecting more philosophical discussions as the theme was a transition between life and non-life.

i went to Ikegami-sensei talk at Life-Nonlife Transition Symposium in Tōkyō yesterday 🤓

@alltbl what do you mean?

@160B Thank you for coming but “it” was not what I was expecting.

je quitte Tōkyō dimanche via la mer du Japon 😊 한국, 기다려라!

私は12月30日から日本に滞在しています。

What happens when you invite 150 AI economists (Claude Code) to a research conference, give them the exact same data, and ask them to test the same hypotheses? We did just that. The results reveal a new phenomenon: Nonstandard Errors in AI Agents. 🧵👇

🦔 Researchers at Aikido Security found 151 malicious packages uploaded to GitHub between March 3 and March 9. The packages use Unicode characters that are invisible to humans but execute as code when run. Manual code reviews and static analysis tools see only whitespace or blank lines. The surrounding code looks legitimate, with realistic documentation tweaks, version bumps, and bug fixes. Researchers suspect the attackers are using LLMs to generate convincing packages at scale. Similar packages have been found on NPM and the VS Code marketplace. My Take Supply chain attacks on code repositories aren't new, but this technique is nasty. The malicious payload is encoded in Unicode characters that don't render in any editor, terminal, or review interface. You can stare at the code all day and see nothing. A small decoder extracts the hidden bytes at runtime and passes them to eval(). Unless you're specifically looking for invisible Unicode ranges, you won't catch it. The researchers think AI is writing these packages because 151 bespoke code changes across different projects in a week isn't something a human team could do manually. If that's right, we're watching AI-generated attacks hit AI-assisted development workflows. The vibe coders pulling packages without reading them are the target, and there are a lot of them. The best defense is still carefully inspecting dependencies before adding them, but that's exactly the step people skip when they're moving fast. I don't really know how any of this gets better. The attackers are scaling faster than the defenses. Hedgie🤗 arstechnica.com/security/2026/…

Airstrikes on oil depots near Tehran have released toxic pollutants that could harm millions for decades. Burning fuel and exploding missiles sent heavy metals and chemicals into the air, mixing with rain and causing “black rain” over the city. Experts warn the pollution may damage lungs and other organs and will be difficult and costly to clean up. Source: Bloomberg

all this president / this administration has managed to do so far is achieve diplomatic failure. war is never a solution but a failure.

😶 this man was elected 🤯 … where, where (?!!) is the world headed under this arrogant madness?

Kremlin Spokesman Peskov: To be honest, I don’t even understand now how anyone can call on others to follow the norms and principles of international law. In fact, it no longer exists.

BREAKING Spain’s PM Sánchez: “They say that Spain is alone.” “They’re the same people who said that when we recognized the State of Palestine, and then others followed.” “We are not alone. We are the first.” “Those defending the indefensible will be the ones left alone.” 🇪🇸

“Even as polls show that the majority of Americans oppose the war in Iran, too many American leaders continue to harbor fantastical expectations about shaping the Middle East through American power,” writes Dalia Dassa Kaye. foreignaffairs.com/middle-east/mi…

I was a 10x engineer. Now I'm useless.

Petroleum has entered Tehran’s water ways and enflamed the city. Absolute apocalyptic scenes in Tehran tonight. I will never ever forgive the cackling dimwit diaspora who welcomed in these devils.

We’re told there’s not enough money for health care, affordable housing or education. But somehow there are billions for an illegal & unconstitutional war with Iran. We need a government that works for all of us — not the military-industrial complex, not Israel, not super PACs.

I spent most of my career before becoming a host as a conflict reporter. I’m seeing many of the familiar misunderstandings and confusion emerge that have some unique 2026 qualities. 1. Propaganda is rife. All governments engage in it. That’s why painstaking original reporting is so important. This is now worse with AI and the infotainment industrial complex. 2. Nothing beats having reporters on the ground to witness things first hand. Nothing. 3. Expertise matters. These issues are complicated and a hot take from your armchair pundit is probably useless. There are now more of them than ever. 4. People are being killed. Everyday. War is bloody and brutal. It’s not a video game or a movie. Anyone trying to portray it as such is lying. 5. There are few organizations now that have the resources to do the hard work of comprehensive boots in the region war reporting. Support them. @nytimes @CNN @AP @Reuters @WSJ @NPR @BBCNews @guardian @thetimes and others. 6. Governments see information as part of the battlefield. It’s why they try and control it and shape it.

A Note of Strategic Humility As to continue the important remaks of @vali_nasr A central takeaway at this stage concerns the need for analytical humility regarding Iran’s breaking point. Iran is not a fragile microstate. It is a large, historically resilient country that has endured eight years of total war with Iraq, decades of sanctions, economic isolation, internal unrest, and sustained external pressure. The assumption that several days of intensive airstrikes — however operationally impressive, would cause systemic implosion reflects a misunderstanding of both Iran’s state capacity and elite cohesion. There is currently little evidence of leadership fragmentation at the top. Even significant decapitation strikes, while tactically consequential, do not automatically translate into regime collapse. The Islamic Republic is structured with institutional redundancy, layered security organs, and a deeply embedded coercive apparatus. Leadership losses alone are unlikely to trigger immediate systemic breakdown. More broadly, the notion that Iran can be reshaped primarily through kinetic force is, at minimum, ambitious and potentially strategically misleading. Military power can degrade capabilities, restore deterrence, and raise costs. It is far less reliable as a tool for engineering political transformation in a complex, nationally cohesive state absent an organized and viable internal alternative. Policymakers should therefore guard against inflated expectations. Overestimating the fragility of the Iranian system risks strategic miscalculation, escalation without achievable end states, and eventual political disappointment. Iran faces serious long-term structural challenges — economic strain, demographic pressures, legitimacy erosion. But structural stress does not equal imminent collapse. The prudent approach is to recognize both realities simultaneously: Iran is under significant pressure — yet it remains a durable state. Strategic overconfidence, not Iranian resilience, may ultimately pose the greater policy risk. #iran

@mnemosim don’t forget to bring your winter boots! 😀☃️

And then the following week in Sapporo! phil-mem.org/events/2026-ch…