Russ Poldrack

Job scheduling on high-performance computing systems russpoldrack.substack.com/p/job-schedu... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

Better Code, Better Science is back! Latest post: Anatomy of a high-performance computing system russpoldrack.substack.com/p/anatomy-of...

I just came across this paper by Cesario et al. that has one of the greatest titles ever: " journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I recently received an interesting email that turned out to be an LLM-powered funneling scam. Here I describe the story and how LLMs also turned out to be a powerful forensic tool. russpoldrack.substack.com/p/digging-in...

After 12,000+ user interactions, we're releasing the first major update of Synthometricon (formerly SynthNet, with @anniria.bsky.social and @ruben.the100.ci ) 🧵 Try it here search.synth-science.org

Loudest show: Revolting Cocks @ Numbers in Houston, 1990. My hair cells are still feeling it.

We had a great presentation at our lab meeting this week about a coding error that cost a trainee a good bit of time. It was a post-mortem with lots of useful lessons learned, particularly about how reliance on AI agents can sometimes make it harder to find errors. Highly recommended activity!

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

"Future research on disease‐modifying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease should focus on other mechanisms of action." I'm sure that will totally happen. www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10....

Special Issue Call for Submissions: "Appraising the Foundations of Psychological Science" www.psychologicalscience.org/publications... Edited by @heatherurry.io @tombeckers.bsky.social

Congrats to @felipedebrigard.bsky.social on receiving a 2026 MacArthur Fellowship - very well deserved!

Did you know that your speed — in a simple task of quickly pressing a button every time you see a yellow square — is faster when you are exhaling or pausing then when you are inhaling? Dr. Erika Yamazaki figured this out, did all the work, and published on it this week www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Tuesday blues

ChatGPT Images came up with a really interesting hallucination of a brain, sort of a chimera of axial and coronal slices

The published version of my paper "Understanding, Prediction, and Compression" is now online at Synthese: rdcu.be/svRh41KcQyta

O hey Reminder that in (homophobic) '94 as Dookie was blowing up, Green Day picked queercore Pansy Division to open for them + a lot of venues pressured them to drop them as openers -- Green Day told the venues they wouldn't play if PD didn't - and the venues (mostly? all?) backed down. huh.

I expect to recruit a PhD student this cycle! The Control and Decision Making Lab at WashU studies control, effort, and decision making, combining behavioral experiments with modeling and neuroimaging. If that sounds cool, check out our work: cdmlab.wustl.edu. How to apply: psych.washu.edu/apply

A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...

Amazing talk @defcon.bsky.social by Bruce Schneier that nicely captures how the current situation goes far beyond AI systems hacking computers. youtu.be/eEBv0STiYhI?...

I am suddenly much less excited about all of these AI-powered breakthroughs in math. ai-frontiers.org/articles/ai-...

Nice post, as always. For parallelism in Python, I almost always use Joblib joblib.readthedocs.io/en/stable: not only does it tend to simplify code, but also it pulls many tricks for you (auto-batching, or reusing a process pool...)

A brief introduction to parallelism and multithreading russpoldrack.substack.com/p/a-brief-in... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

I ♥ Quarto... whether for mathy notes, or writing models a collaborator needs in a Word doc, I find it to be such a handy way to combine prose and math. I've been using it since @russpoldrack.org introduced me to it, and happy to share my templates to help others use it github.com/nicholst/Ihe...

We are searching for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position, with a research focus on developmental and/or social psychology. Please apply or forward to anyone who might be interested! facultypositions.stanford.edu/jobs/assista...

This is seriously one of the most bizarre PubPeer discussions I have ever seen. pubpeer.com/publications... h/t @deevybee.bsky.social

Using Einstein summation notation - a very cool tool for working with matrices russpoldrack.substack.com/p/using-eins... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

The sloppification of science is accelerating deevybee.blogspot.com/2026/08/acce... - by @deevybee.bsky.social

Sid and Nori would like to introduce themselves to all of you. And no, there was absolutely no mischief going on right before this photo was taken by @jenott.bsky.social

*Sharing for our department’s trainees* 🧠 Looking for insight on applying to PhD programs in psychology? ✨ Apply by Sep 21st to Stanford Psychology's 10th annual Paths to a Psychology PhD info session/workshop to have all of your questions answered! 📝 Application: forms.gle/4nujgDd3W2tx...

The first release of Terminal-Bench-Science is out! www.terminal-bench-science.ai/announcement

as promised, @grimalkina.bsky.social and i dig in deep here, as i defend dopamine from all of the haters open.spotify.com/episode/5eaA...

Very well deserved for both!

I am increasingly finding myself writing in the stiffest way possible, simply because I'm worried that otherwise my prose will sound like it was written by Claude.

Interpreted versus compiled functions in Python russpoldrack.substack.com/p/interprete... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

🚨Job Search announcement 🚨 @psychillinois.bsky.social is searching for an assistant prof in cognitive neuroscience. Come join us! Pls RT 🙏 Full ad: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #neuroimaging

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Psychiatry: Here is a drug that can cure your cup imbalance but we don’t know how and 66% of the time it can’t

Bringing analytic rigor to agentic AI for science: The Brain Researcher platform for neuroimaging data analysis arxiv.org/abs/2608.19902 - our group's latest work, led by Zijiao Chen, on an agentic harness for neuroimaging analysis that aims to promote analytic rigor.

I was at a conference recently and saw several talks using slides clearly generated by Claude (sometimes mixed in with their older non-Claude slides). In one case it seemed that the entire talk was AI-generated and the speaker was often just reading Claude output. Is that a thing now?

Nothing has changed about software engineering youtu.be/lxDRDORvFdE?... - great talk by Ben Eggers about how all the hard problems of software engineering still remain in the age of AI-assisted coding

Optimizing performance with large tabular data russpoldrack.substack.com/p/optimizing... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

This book by Wimsatt is a must-read

A simple guide to public engagement for professors: Good engagement > No engagement > AI slop If you are too busy to do it well, just don't do it! That's fine!

New position piece w/ @tylerbonnen.bsky.social out now in COBS! We suggest that data augmentation is a useful framework for understanding hippocampal contributions to generalization, and offers a path towards more precise modeling: 1/

This was a really fun interview with Russ Altman for the Future of Everything podcast. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLZQ...

Is your code running slowly? This post discusses common reasons for slow code execution. russpoldrack.substack.com/p/common-sou... - The latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

Code profiling russpoldrack.substack.com/p/code-profi... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

Great to hear @emilyjacobs.bsky.social talking about her lab's amazing work on precision neuroimaging of women's brains radiolab.org/podcast/this...