Matthew Sparks

@sparksm

BS Behavioral Neuroscience: addiction and addiction treatment armchair-expert with a past toxic relationship with opioids. Aspiring terminal degree holder. Lifelong musician, metalhead, tech nerd and PC gamer, and open-mic night standup comic. Accidentally blew up on YouTube for screaming in my car.

youtube.com

If you consider yourself a technologist, here’s your imperative: build things that are unabashedly, beautifully tangled into all else in life — people and relationships, politics, emotion and pain, understanding or the lack thereof, being alone, being together, homesickness, adventure, victory, loss. Build things that come alive, and drag everythin... See more
from Create things that come alive
Awesome Quotes and Impactful Writing, Lyrics, etc.
Technology can be art; an application can evoke and represent emotion; I can sound like a wanker waxing poetic about the JavaScript I’m writing right now
come. The resulting marriage penalty discourages marriage and rewards single parenthood. Combined marriage penalties across federal and state welfare programs can reach tens of thousands of dollars per year for a given family. One component of the marriage penalties comes from state-level free or subsidized preschool programs. In addition
from How Welfare Programs Discourage Marriage: The Case of Pre-K Education Subsidies by Benjamin Paris
Politics
This is absolute garbage. If you search “marriage penalties and federal welfare programs”—which is in their Project 2025, this trash is the first result.
I think productivity is really a race to the bottom um it's I think that the that a lot has been said about how humans uh or machines are trying to be more human but I think less has been said about how humans have for decades uh been trained to be machines

and we have a lot of unlearning to do because if we focus on efficiency and optimization and
... See more
from How I Build My Personal Knowledge Library W Sari Azout by Sublime
Productivity
Another important point about not just our cultural obsession with these vague notions of achieving great productivity and efficiency: these sorts of things move us further from our unique human nature and closer towards that of sorting machines.

This applies to PKMS design as well: If you are spending more time doing the robot part of the work instead of learning or applying, the application is not helping you. IT’S DISTRACTING YOU.
Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn are using a biophysical model to clarify how astrocytes interact with nerve cells to regulate rapid adaptation to new information.
from Astrocytes: The Unsung Heroes of Learning and Memory - Neuroscience News by Lorenzo Squadrani
Academic Papers and
This goes along with the suggestion from that Glutamate & MDD lecture I love on YouTube given to psychiatry med students where the lecturer/professor claims that glial cells are the real stars in much of the processes that are major areas of study right now in mental illness.

Astrocytes regulate synaptic plasticity, which is essential for learning and memory. Their dysfunction can lead to significant cognitive decline.

Also, the researchers referring to themselves as Computational Neuroscientists—just a heads up!
One thing I'd argue as a starting point is there is no "theory" or a "model" of addiction as a disease. The arguments associated with that claim are actually not that cohesive. A common position associated with addiction as a disease is that it is an essential category, which is an idea we can get our arms around a bit better and which I discuss ab... See more
from Toward a Unified Field Theory of Human Flourishing
Addiction
Knowing is not enough. Knowing too much can encourage us to procrastinate. There's a certain point when continuing to know at the expense of doing allows the mess to grow further
from How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert
Thought provoking
This is a mess I have both birthed and been consumed by, and now I am watching it consume others from the other side of the fence. They’re too defensive to be heard, but I keep the Faith that they will figure it out. Unfortunately, it’s just a matter of waiting.

from Create things that come alive

from How Welfare Programs Discourage Marriage: The Case of Pre-K Education Subsidies by Benjamin Paris

from How I Build My Personal Knowledge Library W Sari Azout by Sublime

from Astrocytes: The Unsung Heroes of Learning and Memory - Neuroscience News by Lorenzo Squadrani

from Toward a Unified Field Theory of Human Flourishing

from How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert