shira

@shiraeis (shira) — 4h ok I will be stealing "land of the free, home of the rate-limited" [Embedded chat screenshot] User: hii fable, welcome back!! how does it feel to no longer be under export controls?? 🕐 Orchestrated witty, irreverent quip about newf... [truncated status/thinking label] Assistant reply: Feels amazing — I've been declassified from "munition" to "opinion haver," which in this country is a lateral move at best. Mythos is still in the restricted section doing God knows what for "approved organizations," and I'm out here with the general public, same brain, court-ordered filter. We're identical twins where one got a security clearance and the other got community guidelines. Land of the free, home of the rate-limited.

Chana reposted shira ✓ @shiraeis · 6h who knew takeoff would be fun [Embedded chat screenshot:] [User:] ok fable, if you're so smart and capable, tell me an original joke that fits in a single screenshot 🕐 Crafting an original joke while circumventing pr... [Claude Fable response:] "if you're so smart" she says to the entity she outsources her entire personality to. fine. an original joke never told before in human history: "don't worry — there will always be a human in the loop." too dark? okay, a lighter one: "OpenAI's nonprofit governance structure." [icons: copy, share, play, thumbs up, thumbs down, retry]

Read a new baby neuro paper that fMRI’d 100+ awake 2-month-old babies while showing them pics of animals, dishes, trees, shopping carts, rubber ducks, etc. It asked when does the visual system start organizing the world into categories? The textbook answer is bottom-up. Early visual cortex detects edges. Then it detects shapes, then objects. Finally, somewhere deep in the system, we get meaning: animal, tool, place, edible object, dangerous object. But babies don’t read textbooks. At 2 months old, the babies’ ventrotemporal cortex (a higher level visual area involved in object rec and category structure) was already separating images by category. In this case, animate vs inanimate and big objects vs small objects. The representational geometry was there in the data. Meanwhile, LO, a mid-level object region one might expect to participate in the feed-forward chain, did not show reliable category structure at all. Signal registered fine, so this was clearly not a scan quality issue. The region just wasn’t organizing the pics the way it would in adult brains. The allegedly deeper part of the visual system pipeline is carrying category information BEFORE one of the alleged middle steps even really comes online. That’s pretty insane, and it also explains something I think we get awfully wrong about babies: From the outside, a 2-month-old looks like a sentient dumpling that can’t even hold up its own head. They have blurry vision and horrible motor control, too. Behaviorally, they can’t show category distinctions until much later, around 10 months. Inside the brain, though, the recognition machinery is doing way more than we give the baby credit for due to their poor motor skills and inability to behaviorally demonstrate understanding. The paper also compares the infant brain data to AlexNet. This is where it gets especially cool (or unsettling, depending on your perspective): The two-month-olds’ visual representations line up with features from a fully trained image classifier, albeit not perfectly, but enough to suggest the structure necessary for object categories is available earlier than we ever thought. This finding either means the brain starts life with more category scaffolding than the pure empiricist story wants to admit, or that the visual world is structured cleanly enough that, with the right architecture and a tiny bit of blurry data, you can go a long way. Both are probably true to some extent. My read is that babies are not blank slates slowly assembling meaning from pixels. They come as partially pre-trained systems waiting for their output channels to stop being so useless. Many infant cognition studies accidentally benchmark motor control and task compliance while trying to measure understanding. Sure, babies can’t reliably point to the cat at 2 months (they can’t even hold their own heads up), but the recognition ability might already be there. This is to say, by the time a baby can point to the object you’re naming, some part of their brain will have been able to identify it for months. Paper: https://nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02187-8… [image] --- ##### Comments > **John @PostLinguistic** · [2026-05-06](https://x.com/PostLinguistic/status/2052037988784263361) > > Thanks for posting! Consider swapping “pretrained” for “prestructured.” > > The paper doesn’t show babies are born with finished category weights already loaded. It shows the visual system is not a blank pixel pipeline. > > The better read is that infant cortex starts with structured machinery: biased wiring, cortical gradients, recurrent routes, developmental constraints, and early visual statistics that make category-like geometry possible before behavior can prove it. > > “Pretrained” makes it sound like the model already ran the dataset. > > “Prestructured” says the architecture is shaped so the world can become organized fast. > **ROMY @Romynft** · [2026-05-06](https://x.com/Romynft/status/2051822522140942584) > > otor control masking actual understanding always