antlion

My takeaway from that article is mostly that primate research is a big emotional topic for some people, and maybe tech writers shouldn’t write about medical research. Do you think it would be so interesting if it was done on mice? The primate research center in Davis has been there since 1962, and it’s always been controversial. Do you think they’ve just been twiddling their thumbs for 55 years waiting for Neuralink to come along? No, that shit is routine for them. They keep doing it because primate research is still an important step before human trials.

There is no need to ethically green light a medical procedure that is voluntary, of sound mind, and of one’s own will. It’s not your body. It’s not your life. People implant beads and magnets into their bodies and tattoo their faces. People hang themselves from meat hooks for fun. People get circumcised, and pierced. It’s all none of your business.

I don’t think it’s obvious at all. This is a sample size of one, and it is still working after 3 months.

Globally, a staggering 310 million major surgeries are performed each year; around 40 to 50 million in USA and 20 million in Europe. It is estimated that 1–4% of these patients will die, up to 15% will have serious postoperative morbidity, and 5–15% will be readmitted within 30 days. An annual global mortality of around 8 million patients places major surgery comparable with the leading causes of death from cardiovascular disease and stroke, cancer and injury. If surgical complications were classified as a pandemic, like HIV/AIDS or coronavirus (COVID-19), developed countries would work together and devise an immediate action plan and allocate resources to address it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7388795/

Implants are rejected by the immune system. Stents fail. Hip and joint replacements fail. Does that mean we shouldn’t do them?

Are you suggesting that the FDA gave Neuralink special treatment in the approval process? Or are you suggesting that the government should specifically shut down anything Musk tries to do, like SpaceX?

Nobody is making you get a brain chip. Noland did the research, talked about it with his family, and wanted to proceed in spite of the fully disclosed risks. Bodily autonomy is a fundamental human right - if you want to do something or have something done to your body it's not the governments place to stop you. Safeguards are necessary, and they do exist. You don't need laws to make sure everybody has the same risk tolerance as you. I can't fully imagine what it would be like to have no use of my body and no hope of recovery. But I wouldn't want people like you or me who aren't in my shoes deciding what I can and can't do. Honestly if he wanted to have a lethal injection, I believe he should be allowed to make that decision, but he can't. I'm happy he was able to make some kind of decision, and regain some autonomy, if only temporarily, and not just be a vegetable head in a bed for the rest of his life.

No use of your body is a pretty desperate situation. Before the procedure he had to yell for his parents that he wanted to use the computer, they’d come sit him upright and put a joystick in his mouth, leaving him unable to speak. And he was often very uncomfortable in that position, so he couldn’t do it long. Now, he can use the computer fully laying down, without anyone’s help. The next logical step would be to have some robotic helper arms.

Anyway he can’t shoot himself. He can’t hold a gun or anything else. There’s little reason for this to be about Musk at all other than money. This is the culmination of decades of research from many medical professionals. It’s about a lot more than one person.

Well then the movie makers screwed up when they showed the hexadecimal ASCII lookups, because it’s all upper case.

Ah so it’s a position where they can read his messages. They does make more sense. However all caps still doesn’t. The messages should have used caps to delineate abbreviated words. Like their first message “HOW ALIVE?” Could have been HwAliv? Which of course could be interpreted as “how are you even alive?” Or “how alive are you?”

An app called Lamucal can make them for you, lyrics and all.

An older app (now defunct), can be found on archive.org, called Riffstation, can do the chords.

Once you have a version of your song you can put it in an app called JustChords. This app will store, display, and transpose your songs. It also has a search feature to pull tabs from other sources.

Another big plot hole in the Martian, also present in the book, is that messages are encoded in hexadecimal. But then why did he have a separate question mark card, when all punctuation can be encoded in ASCII/hex? Also ~~both him and~~NASA wrote in all caps. Again they have a full ascii set. Makes no sense.

I agree with your criticisms of BitTorrent vs older P2P sharing. The closest successor I know of might be Tribler. I haven’t used it so I don’t know how the uploads are - and it still has many drawbacks/inefficiencies relating to hashing/duplication because it’s torrent-based. But it does contain search, and the ability to share without a website indexing it. It’s kind of like eMule: torrent/tor edition?

It’s safe as long as nobody breaks the rules. If law enforcement or copyright holders really wanted a login they could probably get an invite from somebody. The weak link in security is always going to be a person.

Once they infiltrated a private tracker, they’d either have to hack them or download every torrent they want to and track down the seeders. 90% of the seeders would probably be in a different country so, is it really worth their effort? They’re not going to get the people ripping the shows and movies.

So yes, I think getting caught on a private tracker is possible. Perhaps not probable.

Salt is sodium chloride. Sodium is a metal, and it is right below Lithium on the periodic table (behaves and reacts similarly).