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miscellaneous research

Nicolas Cravino edited this page Aug 30, 2026 · 2 revisions

id: miscellaneous-research title: Miscellaneous Research tags: [python, apple-silicon, video, cli, neuroscience, fmri] created: 2026-08-29 updated: 2026-08-29 freshness: fresh

Miscellaneous Research

Summary

The drawer for live research instruments that do not belong in security, OSCAL, agents, or local inference. One repository so far: videocortex — a local encoding instrument around Meta TRIBE v2. Drop a clip, see which cortical regions the model's average subject would fire. This is not a holding pen for unfinished tools; it is the place for work that is real and public and just not in the rest of the taxonomy.

Key claims

  • videocortex is the encoding direction: stimulus in, predicted fMRI out, for TRIBE v2's average subject. It is not a decoder and it is not a mind-reader. ^src:videocortex
  • The repo is the local instrument around an upstream model: Metal instead of a silent CPU fallback, a doctor preflight that fails in five seconds instead of twenty gigabytes in, and plates / PIP overlays you can put in a slide. ^src:videocortex
  • Upstream device="auto" never picks Metal. videocortex resolves CUDA → MPS → CPU, rewrites all four hard-coded device: cuda fields in the published checkpoint, and patches WhisperX float16-on-CPU plus Llama 3.2 GQA so Metal does not LLVM-abort. ^src:videocortex
  • The renderer is a separate install from the model. pip install -e . gives working draw / synthetic samples with nilearn only; .[predict] is the torch + tribev2 half. ^src:videocortex
  • Colour limits are computed once over the whole run. Per-frame restretch is treated as a lie — a quiet TR would render as vividly as a startling one — and a test fails if it creeps back in. ^src:videocortex
  • The wrapper is MIT. TRIBE v2 weights are CC-BY-NC-4.0; meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B is gated. ^src:videocortex
  • The command deck is stdlib HTTP on loopback :8730 — Host pin, non-loopback refuse — matching Cleanroom / Skillspector / STRIDE-Lite. Overlay from the deck does not touch the model. ^src:videocortex

Open questions

  • Does a second encoding (or decoding) instrument join this drawer, or does videocortex stay a singleton?
  • ScreenLens is video-in / captions-out. Is there a useful shared "video as stimulus" seam, or are they just both videos?
  • The loopback command-deck pattern now appears in four public repos. Does it become a shared primitive, or stay copy-pasted?

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