Posts by Dave 126

Re: Gotta disagree that

> I'm a screwdriver salesman, and I think you already know what I'm going to say.

Yeah I do, because you're all torque

Re: "they"

Oh, and don't go thinking any study of science, be it medical, zoological, genetic or evolutionary will support your view.

We're all the result of billions of generations of societies, creatures and genes, all playing games of mating, cooperation and competition at multiple levels in non-constant and adaptive environments. How the hell do you expect *anything* that results from that to be clean cut and simple?

The madness is in ever thinking otherwise. That so many people try to is partly a social construct itself, though of course not aided by our brains' capabilities (brains which are themselves the result of the above glorious mess).

Re: "they"

How can genders possibly be independent of society? If I were the last human on Earth I wouldn't care which rock I pissed behind, or what colour clothes I wore - as long as they made me less visible to bears.

Re: I prefer ...

Childhood obesity?

Re: Genuinely thanks

> Over your left shoulder? In my bookshelf, it's down in the bottom right with all the other Vs :)

Then we shall explore the possibility that he was referring to Banks Iain M and not to Vinge Vernor! :)

Of course nor can we ignore the possibility that he has only the one bookshelf.

He might also be buying his science fiction novels alphabetically, and that Asimov fella was nothing if not prolific.

( Hmm, has anyone written a script to take their Kindle library, trawl the web for the appropriate book cover jpgs and use said images to generate a virtual bookshelf backdrop for zoom meetings? Ah, no, probably not - the spines of books aren't usually displayed on Amazon (other book and ebook vendors are available))

Re: It works until it is blocked

One of Apple's execs is on record at the M1 launch as saying they have no objection to Windows running on Apple Silicon Macs, and that it was up to Microsoft.

(What wasn't publicly known at the time is that Microsoft and Qualcomm had, and still have, a deal for ARM versions of Windows to run exclusively on Qualcomm ARM chips)

So, no smoking gun evidence to suggest Apple are hostile to people running Linux on M1 Macs.

Re: I remember the Macs we had in 2001

> I struggled to understand why "designers" thought Macs were better.

At that time, colour management on Windows PCs wasn't great, so they werent really an ootion. And Macs all had Firewire, because USB 1.0 wasnt suitable for high res scanners. Designers used Macs because print houses used Macs.

Your struggle did little to advance your understanding.

Because he's saying that even the Ultra, let alone the Max, has not excited him because computers have long since done what he's wanted them to to.

> It's very nice and impressive that the hardware is so fast, but does it actually do much more than a 2001 iMac?

Yes and no.

No it doesn't. It is suitable for editing video that meets the standard distribution format of the day (Netflicks HDR Turbo or whatever), just as the 2001 iMac could edit the video of its day.

Yes it does. Of course it does more - if you're throwing it at the right tasks.

Re: I was there

>You are very misinformed. Stop reading Twitter.

The uk gov IT sysyem for test and trace, and whose mates got the contracts, has been covered by Private Eye magazine.

Re: Mac Studio

You don't keep data you care about in just one place. The Thunderbolt IO bandwidth is such that you don't need to keep eg video files on the internal storage - you keep it on your external redundant storage solution.

I remember reading about ReiserFS before any news of its creator, and it was in the context of next gen files systems. I got the impression at the time that there were limitations with ext3, and that people were looking at the future. BTRFS and ZFS would be discussed in the same articles. This was roughly the same time as Apple pulled some ZFS features into whatever they call their FS.

Since then, I've only seen mention of BTRFS on its journey to being recommended for production use.

Re: HD radio

I remember 15 odd years ago in the UK having a mobile phone ( small colour screen, probably a Samsung, maybe a Nokia) that had some ability to show a colour logo and programme information when using the FM radio.

Since it was a largely useless feature I didn't use and so don't really remember it well.

Okay, I've just looked it up. It was called Visual Radio, and nobody else used it either. And it used a data connection to display text and info, and so it is irrelevant to this article. (I couldn't remember if images were broadcast, like the digital info in RDS is). I apologies for wasting your time with this off topic post.

https://www.radioandtelly.co.uk/visualradio.html

Apparently the unit doesn't deign to accept new firmware unless it has booted up... unfortunately it attempts to read the suspect file every time it boots up, at which point it hangs again.

Which two vehicles are you referring to? The ones travelling from Earth to Mars (and back)?

Re: "Absolute balls."

God-level? Called me old-fashioned but I like my gods to be able to break the laws of physics (and if I'm feeling a bit Ancient Greek, to break the laws of biology and of all decent taste, but that's another matter). A *nearly* impossible squidgy wiring job doesn't cut the mustard as a divine feat. Even Maxwell's Demon can break entropy, and he's only a sodding demon.

Re: Lie detector as a possible use case?

Well, if your interrogators are in a position to unilaterally insert a probe through your skull, you would exhibit physiological signs of stress.

Re: Not gonna happen any time soon.

Starlink isn't making money yet and won't for a while - only a fraction of the satellites have been deployed. It's hard to predict whether it will be a commercial winner because, historically, increasing availability and decreasing the cost of a service can drastically affect the demand for it in unintuitive ways. Musk told his engine-building employees before Christmas that profitability depends upon using the larger (and yet to reach orbit) launch vehicle Starship.

If I were running Neuralink, I would think twice about making any claims about helping disabled people in the near term. The media would pick my words up and then squish them into a Miracle Breakthrough! headline, and six months later write negative stories about my failure to deliver said cures. And that's just media business as usual- in the wake of the Theranos fraud trial, I'd be extra cautious.

Yknow, if were running Neuralink, saying that I'd like to make a Banksiain Neural Lace in the distant future isnt the worst idea. No patients' hopes will be raised, nobody will be disappointed if I don't deliver it, and the media attention will aid my recruiting drive.

Re: ST Transporter

Some SF novels are just tech white papers wrapped around a few characters. All business plans are speculative. Some SF is escapist, some is a warning. It can make people despondent, it can be a call to action. Sometimes patents are science fiction, in that they can't be built with existing technology - they are literally schematics, even if they are not blue in colour.

I'm not sure that an SF writers intent is sacred when we're asking questions about how our real technology might progress, either.

Musk has financed OpenAI, a research company with the stated aim of ensuring guture AI doesn't go a bit Skynet (I paraphrase), proof that Musk has heard of the warnings, even if you might believe he's only paying lip service to them.

Thanks for the book recommendation, it looks interesting. I'll look out for it.

Re: Let's start with the obvious

>Idiocy comes in many forms. Not stopping to reality-check one's ideas is one of them. It has been said that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Not stopping to read the business plan of the outfit you are criticising falls into the same category. Just saying. Near term plans for research, products, market, funding more research etc are all there. Whether they make commercial sense is a different question, but the near terms products are based upon devices in use today - so we'll go with 'plausible' unless given good reason not to. The 'reality check' as you put it, comes with learning more about the brain, which is a point of Neuralink.

They are saying the same thing in essence. Its just the hard of thinking are having trouble parsing it. The wording of the article didn't help, either. ( And no, Musk wasn't world's richest man st time of first public demo, nor would it relevant if he had been. )

If Musk really thought he knew everything about brains, he wouldn't have started a compay that researches brains.

Brains are ridiculously complex as are their relationship to our bodies, environments and societies and there is so much we don't know, and so much to learn.

You would have thought starting a brain research company would be enough of a clue that Musk is aware of this deficit of knowledge.

Re: Not gonna happen any time soon.

>But, shouldn't we be honest and simply disclose that "reading minds" is SciFi babble?

Why does something everybody knows need to be disclosed? You know reading minds is impossible, I know it, Musk knows it, his investors know it, prospective Neuralink employees know it. You imply there is dishonesty afoot but I can't see that anyone has been deceived. I can't even see an intent to deceive, since Musk knows everyone knows it's babble.

Reading minds is clearly babble. That it is a familiar SciFi concept should be disclosure enough that it is babble. But all business plans are works of speculation, all corporate mission statements are babble too.

I just don't get the problem with aiming at some seemingly almost impossible (but not yet actually falsifiable) direction if there's a good chance of making valuable discoveries along the way. We don't know what we don't know, so sometimes an arbitary direction must be chosen.

Some SciFi babble of the past has become a science or a technology. If one knew in advance which way it goes, one wouldn't have do loads of costly research. If it doesn't actually break the laws of physics then it is true to say it might be possible. Even if the small print then says: It is possible but to do so requires you to capture energy equivalent to 98% of your star's annual radiated output, or some such. Guessing what the small print says is an established part of the game!

Musk could state in perfectly good faith a Neuralink goal for five years time that might seem plausible to all today, but actually turn out to be impossible for an unexpected reason. In this scenario, would he have been more or less honest than had he just talked about far future mind reading?

And forgetting honesty, let's think of kindness. He was recruiting staff. Best not to talk too much about possible near-term treatments so as not to unfairly raise the hopes of people suffering from conditions that might be addressed with this medical approach. Which the media might choose to smear him with. Talk about the far future. Let the media laugh.

Re: Not gonna happen any time soon.

Indeed. We don't know what the future in twenty or fifty years will look like. We know that nobody knows, and so we know that Musk doesn't know. He knows that we know that he doesn't know. He's not trying to fool us because we're all straight and on the same page about us not knowing. He's actually advertising that he doesn't know by talking about such a magic concept.

We also know that many areas of research have made unexpected discoveries or found unexpected applications. We know that Musk knows that we know that etc etc etc We would expect any diligent company to consider pivotting at any time towards greater shareholder return, or in response to a changed commercial or technological environment. Oh, you make computers but you see an opportunity to make millions as a music distributer? Shareholder says yes!

So, if all company missions statements are understood by all involved to be works of fiction, why the fuss over a clearly vague one? Especially as the here-and-now business plan for Neuralink seems sane enough.

Actually, the mindset of 'we hope to make a magic box in twenty years time by any means available (and in mean time seek applications for what we actually discover)' might be less risky to a company than 'we make this product by this process'.

Re: I don't see a problem in his statement.

And yet you know that the glass isn't perfect, you know when a rocket goes bang, you know the current state of [The Boring Company, (Hyperloop is something else)] tunnel projects. That you know these things, that investors know these things (or should do, because its their job)... seems fair.

I mean, Musk hypes up the what could be, but he seems fairly straight with the what is. Some investors probably like this approach, since when it comes to future predictions they do their own homework instead of taking anyone's word for it (no matter how sober or conservative their predictions seem).

I'm open to counterfactuals to my generalisation.

Re: Fitted into the skull

What are you saying - that an engineer that designs an artifical hip joint has to have it fitted to themselves first?

Invasive brain procedures are already used to treat patients. The medical staff care. They are highly trained and experienced. They operate within an environment with oversight and ethics boards. Some would-be patients have spent years campaigning for effective treatments to be developed (e.g superman actor and paraplegic Christopher Reeve). This is the market that Neuralink is aiming at, and an area its founding staff have experience with.

Nobody is expecting 'fantastically dangerous' procedures to be done without the risk benfit analysis that is done for any surgical procedure. Where did you get that idea from?