Confused me for a second, because I just saw this about growing teeth, which is aiming for reaching market in 2030, which is relatively soon. So hopefully you’ll be able to see that before people start shoveling dirt at you.

While that’s true, this isn’t a specific engineering problem. You need to grab a single cell from each relevant subcluster of neurons in the spinal cord, spatially record the exact positioning, send it off to have RNA seq. done, sample all of the subclusters of the target area, spatially record exact positioning, send it off to have RNA seq done, resample based off of RNA seq data, begin axon regrowth of a single subcluster, and then repeat after every growth cycle to ensure the targeting is holding.

You can improve RNA sequencing machines to reduce runtime, improve spatial tracking to make it easier to keep track of the anatomy, but without sci-fi advances in implant technology you can’t get around the sheer amount of procedural time requiring MD-PhDs and post docs to be involved in every visit.

One of the issues with medical technology is that we know far more about how the human body operates than we can control, so compared to biological structures our manipulation of biology at the cell specific level is relatively crude. I’m not saying tech won’t catch up, but it’s going to be ruinously involved for a very long time.

The difference though is that this treatment would require hundreds of hours of ongoing work from medical professionals for each treatment. What they did was use single cell RNA sequencing to determine which subpopulations of cells are supposed to connect and where, before stimulating cell growth and guiding each RNA mapped subpopulation to where it’s roughly supposed to go. That’s one thing for anatomically complete sub-millimeter spinal cord injuries in mice, but a massive endeavor for human spinal cords.

If you’ve seen the bioengineered cancer treatments where researchers grow immune cells to target a single individual’s tumor, the amount of specialized work that goes into that pales to what current technology would require for this sort of spinal regeneration, and that’s for relatively simple small scale lesions. Multiple lesions or large scale cell death could result in attempting to selectively guide millions of microscopic axons in neat clusters for over a foot.

I wouldn’t be surprised if insurance companies refused to pay for cell regrowth, and instead went for implants that are comparatively much simpler to install and modify in brain-computer interfaces that skip over the damage. This is a great advancement and does open the door for recovering from spinal cord damage, but this is one of those treatments that people are going to get because they need to fill FDA trials and won’t charge, or because the patient is filthy rich.

Aren’t AI generated images pretty obvious to detect from noise analysis? I know there’s no effective detection for AI generated text, and not that there won’t be projects to train AI to generate perfectly realistic images, but it’ll be a while before it does fingers right, let alone invisible pixel artifacts.

As a counterpoint, won’t the prevalence of AI generated CSAM collapse the organized abuse groups, since they rely on the funding from pedos? If genuine abuse material is swamped out by AI generated imagery, that would effectively collapse an entire dark web market. Not that it would end abuse, but it would at least undercut the financial motive, which is progress.

That’s pretty good for 2023.

That’s alright, I was just a little unsure about the mixed tone. As far as public funding goes, I’d much rather NASA funding go to SpaceX than Boeing, especially since unlike the cost plus development contracts that Boeing and Lockheed-Martin have gotten as the United Launch Alliance, SpaceX’s payments are almost mostly contracted purchases. That package you linked pays for specific flights to the ISS, as well as paying for a propulsive lunar lander as part of Artemis Project.

I mean, I hate Elon as much as the next guy, but none of this money is going to him. Compared to pouring money into the telecoms or aerospace companies owned by less vocal billionaires, and then watching them go back for seconds without doing anything, I’d much rather see something productive come of public funding.

As an aside, Starlink has never received public funding, so this really isn’t the project to complain about that. It was tentatively approved for 900 million to be awarded after delivering gigabit speeds to 99.7% of rural America, but the money would only have been awarded after completion, and the funding was pulled a month after Viasat (another satellite internet company) pressured the FCC, a decision that the FCC Commissioner publicly declaimed, which was kinda funny.

The really annoying part of this is the author says:

“The crucial finding is that the number of violent video games you’re exposed to has an influence on your verbal aggression and hostility,”

Only to go on and say:

“It’s very important to stress that our findings are not causal,”

More than that, the study doesn’t even measure their “exposure” to violent games, it requests their three favorite games and then checks their PEGI rating.

Whew. Okay, so reading the actual research article here, and, this article is kind of trash. First off, the study group was recruited from ads posted on Reddit and Discord, notably from r/samplesize, r/narcissism and r/truegaming and Cluster B Circus, r/NPD Official and NPD Recovery 2.0 respectively. One is a place for polls, one is a gaming subreddit, and the rest are all communities for people with narcissism. So they’re skewing their sample population explicitly towards how people with narcissism that play violent games respond. Which, I think was the original intent of the study, and they bolted on the additional conclusions for a spicier publication, since the only way these numbers are meaningful is with a control group of people with NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) that do not play violent games, and even then, it only provides a correlation between people with NPD who play violent video games and increased verbal aggression (one of which was arguing if people disagree with you).

I’m beginning to feel regret for putting way too much effort into a comment, because this is a long ass article, but further in, the study states that respondents had “healthy” levels of narcissism, which goes unremarked despite their primary sample sourcing being targeted at narcissism instead of a population of gamers. I’m calling it a wrap here, but essentially this is a remarkably unreliable study to write that headline off of.

Part of it is the very mechanics of gaming, they’re all built on a core of goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. When telling a story, the four basic forms of conflict are man against man, man against nature, man against self, and man against society. Violence is an easy vehicle for three of those conflicts, and especially lends itself to active gameplay loops. Mind you, I’m referring to violence as acting to cause injury, because there are a lot of games that are built around fighting with zero gore or death.

The other thing is that violence is just very popular. If you stop to really consider it, how much entertainment is free of violence? How many shows and movies are completely nonviolent? How many books don’t have a single fight? There are genres that typically avoid violence, but even then you’ll still find members of the genre that contain physical conflict. Plenty of romance and dramas that are steeped in fighting and death.

At any rate, not that my perspective’s any more valuable than anyone else’s but I really haven’t seen a demand for violence that’s lower that the supply.

Yeah, although I think part of the missing nuance is that people already did that, the difference being that now anyone can, in theory, create what’s inside their head, regardless of their actual artistic talent. Now that creation is accessible though, everyone’s having another moral panic over what should be acceptable for people to create.

If anything, moving the more disturbing stuff from the real world to the digital seems like an absolute win. But I suppose there will always be the argument, much like video games making people violent, that digital content will become real.

You mean, waiting for news when it gets isekai’d after someone pushes it in front of a train lol.

*cries a lot in capitalism*

They didn’t even need to hide it or pretend they weren’t.

That’s the thing though, they did hide it and pretend they weren’t. Techies never trusted them, but the average user viewed google drive as a private cloud storage. Now, Bard is explicitly reading everything, training off of everything you have, and it’s being fronted as a step forward.

Most commercial security cameras don’t record sound, and most of the visible ones are dummy cameras just to make people wary. And again, there’s a difference between a single microphone twenty feet off the ground, and dozens perfectly recording every word every single person speaks in the cafe.

I’m not making the argument that noise cancellation tech is being made so that people can be recorded, I’m making the argument that if noise cancellation tech works, they will 100% use it to capture high quality recordings of every spoken word to sell as a side benefit.

I’m a little confused, the first article glowingly supports my comment, while the second is somewhat neutral. Pointing out that Starlink satellites show up on long exposure astronomy images, while also pointing out that they’ve already launched a new gen testing surface dimming. Given that Starlink satellites only have an orbital lifespan of five years, there’s a 0% chance of old Starlinks cluttering up the night sky. If they stop trying to improve the light reflection issue, that would be the time to be angry.

Also, boondoggles are a “wasteful or impractical project or activity often involving graft”. The Space Launch System is a boondoggle, Starlink is dozens of times cheaper than laying cable, especially in rural areas. The alternative is to install radio towers for 5G coverage, which is something that developing nations have done to skip the expense of rolling out a unified power and data grid, but there are a lot of advantages to not having ground based hardware beyond the receiver.

After living in fairly rural areas for quite a while, LEO internet coverage is much nicer than watching billions get funneled the telecom giants to lay cable, only for them to just… not lay cable.

Yeah, I agree with all of their points except for SpaceX, which has been an unequivocal success that doesn’t deserve to be painted with the same brush Elon is. They revolutionized space flight, broke into the national security launch industry that was entirely captured by the United Launch alliance, and stand to obsolete the (93 billion dollar!) Space Launch System the moment the Starship is approved for commercial launches.

Dozens of Falcon 9’s exploded while testing them and especially while attempting to land and reuse boosters, so the Starship failure was all but expected. I hate Elon Musk too, but SpaceX is arguably the most successful aerospace company at the moment. Were NASA allowed full control of their money, I think it’d be better, but as it is the viability of many of their future projects hinges on SpaceX.

I get what you’re saying, but what I was trying to get at was how a lot of these shiny cool things lately seem to be a way to easily package unwanted things. Google’s new AI integration openly reads and analyses everything you store and write in Google services, to assist you. People would be up in arms about slapping microphones around in public, but a public noise cancellation system that requires dozens of microphones constantly listening is just really cool.

There are easier ways, but the fact that it’s cool sidesteps almost all the resistance. Same way facial recognition cameras covering the UK is talked about as method to only catch criminals, not something that tracks everyone that steps outside their home.

I mean, in this case all they need to do is attach data storage, and suddenly they have a massive data set of natural human conversation to sell to whoever’s training AI.

I believe in you. You can do anything you set your mind to.

Copyright law has been such a disaster for so long, while clearly being wielded like a blunt weapon by corporations. I can see the existential threat that generative AI can pose to creators if it becomes good enough. And I also am aware that my dream of asking an AI to make a buddy cop adventure where Batman and Deadpool accidentally bust into the Disney universe, or remake the final season of Game of Thrones, is never gonna be allowed, but there’s honestly a huge amount of potential for people to get the entertainment they want.

At any rate, it seems likely that they’re going to try and neuter generative AI with restrictions, despite it really not being the issue at hand.

Right, but would that be pursued if a human did the same thing? Because there’s a vast amount of fanfiction churned out by human hands, and it’s safe as long as they don’t try to monetize it. Seems like most of the fear is the existential threat that it might suddenly begin writing good stories, and destabilize the entire writing industry as people can just ask for exactly the sort of story they want. For free. (But not actually, because corporations will own all the AI and data).

Yeah, in academia getting approval for primate research projects is a huge process where you need to clarify every aspect of the protocol, housing, care, and experimental operations to submit before the project can start. I’m less sure if it’s voluntary or required, but we had funding allocated for their retirement from the start. They’re smart enough and strong enough that I’d be terrified to work with unhappy and unwell primates.

Not that all research projects are have happy endings, but I don’t think corporate research has the same restrictions and oversight that academic research does, given that this even happened. I’m pretty accepting of the necessity of primate research models, but we should be doing everything we can to treat them as best we can. Withdrawing a subject from the experimental protocol should be preferred over letting an infection fester just because the implant is in the way. Just seems really poorly done on their part.