efaardvark

Thanks for sharing 

There's an app for that.

Well where were you for the Haiku contest? that was creative 

Not mine.. fortunately?  Unfortunately?   (  )

Snaps all sophisticated like.

Heck no.  That keyboard is probably 20 years old.  It isn't even USB!  LED backlighting is one of them newfangled inventions that hasn't yet been supplied to us yet.   

@Roxeg He is talking about a gaming PC.

A game box in this case is a computer to (mostly) play games.  On "his" old computer he mostly played minecraft, WoW, and Civilization.  Occasionally he'd get on his steam account and download something else to play for a while, but those are/were his main go-to games.  Something that could run those reasonably well, plus do stuff like email, web, etc.   His old system was an i3 with 4G ram and a Radeon RX460 w/2GB.

That makes a lot of sense. Don't know how I didn't think of it first.

Ah, another strange parts fan I see? The price is crazy though, 200 bucks for what in the end is not much more than a few coils.

I think a lot of the scene moved online nowadays, when it comes to purchasing as well as community building. It's crazy what potential today's electronics hold and how cheap a lot of things have become (such as small lasers which used to be really expensive, or even drones and 3D printers). I'd say the possible things you can do nowadays has skyrocketed but as you said it's quite difficult to find a community. Unless of course you work in a some kind of engineering field (which I did) but then it moves from doing it for enjoyment to doing it for work which can be a buzzkill.

And today I find this in my inbox from our illustrious leader.  2024?  Pretty ambitious if you ask me, given NASA's last few decades of inertia.  We'll see...
 

Nice share. The video was pretty interesting, but I feel like the guy could have made it longer. I so wanted to see an anti-tank round being used against an asteroid, because of what was said at the end.

If  the drones work as expected there will be video from the impact.  はやぶさ２ is an interesting mission.  Kind of Deep Impact, Rosetta, and Dawn all rolled into one, but on a budget.  It is a cool mission.

Turns out I'm actually in there in a few different places.  One place you can barely see the back of my head, but @ 33:33 you can actually see my face, and @ 34:25 there's even a few seconds with a full-body shot of me talking to one of the other guys I work with.  (I'm the guy in the green shirt.)  I might as well be one of those animatronic Disneyland dolls, but I'm in there.  Kinda cool..

Not good to hear about that stuff, but I am glad you guys are not screaming “Oh my gosh, we’re burning alive!”

Fingers crossed everything goes smoothly

Yeah, BT is a Good Thing.  For cellphones, well, I'm one of the 0.01% of the population that will actually turn off their cell connection when driving.  What calling I do is usually just 30-second "I'll be late" type notices when stuck in traffic.  Though I don't use it much, for those times hands-free calling is wonderful.  I also had a bluetooth gadget for wirelessly connecting my phone to my old car's "aux" audio input for spotify because I literally wore out my last phone's audio jack plugging/unplugging for the commute.  (I don't buy new phones very often either.)  I made sure this car had both hands-free phone and BT audio input built-in.

Most of the time, the apps stink, so it is a bad idea in that respect, but I still think they could be neat, especially if it could make the car invisible.

Nice looking car though.

I wasn't impressed with the apps I saw either.  The apps I want/need are already on my phone for the most part, and I don't need the distraction of dealing with any of the ones in my car while I'm driving.  The only apps I use with any regularity while actually driving are waze and spotify anyway.  I'll probably use the built-in GPS instead of waze because the car's display is bigger.  It would have been nice to have spotify built-in too, but with the BT connection that's not a big deal.  The car does have Sirius XM and Pandora.  XM I'll probably use for the 3 month trial and not miss it afterwards.  I have yet to try Pandora, even though I have a subscription.  That might be good enough to replace spotify when I'm in the car.  Other than that the rest is uninteresting at best, and distracting at worst.

Invisibility would be cool.  Dangerous, but cool. 

its a little after 4pm tue here ive been home a little over half n hr

after only a 9hr shift today

We need to build a brigade 

I think my two cents might actually be relevant here  My comment in one sentence would be that we are not even close to being ready to actually implement something like this in any reliable way.

As it happens I both studied and now work in a closely-related field (although my focus has changed from empirical to theoretical/philosophical). I was quite enthusiastic in the beginning, but I can say with quite a high level of confidence afters spending some years in that field that we don't understand the brain. We have accumulated a lot of both empirical data and models, and we do know a lot more then just 100 or even 10 years ago. But we are far from knowing how the brain works when it comes to any function that is a bit more complex than simple neural networks or even action potentials (even those are very tricky if they deviate from the prototypical neurons usually studied).
When it comes to BMI specifically, there is some interesting stuff going on right now. One of the research groups at my university is working in a particular field regarding BMI which got me interested in it, and we even established a new research group dealing with philosophical problems related to it (although I would not say that I have much expertise when it comes to the technical aspect of BMI). What Neurolink is showing here is promising in achieving the goal of activating certain sets of neurons but their possible application (at least as presented here) a bit oversimplifying how certain functions are represented in the brain (especially when it comes to localization). The basic idea is not new, but how they are implementing ('wireless chips') is something that has been notoriously difficult (but has been researched for quite a few years).

When you take these aspects together, I think even if we successfully implanted even much more complex devices, we are still far from knowing how to use them in order to achieve something we want ("to tap into those representations") in any reliable way (meaning without serious dysfunction or non-functions). This can be used for research which might one day enable a much more successful implementation of course, but we should be realistic as to the actual mid-term achievements we can expect from it, given the current state of knowledge. This is disregarding the huge ethical issues concerning malfunctions and risks.

So yeah, interesting stuff but as it often is with publications or innovations, the actual immediate usefulness is still quite 'hypothetical'.

I totally agree that we don't understand the brain.  It has had literally hundreds of millions of years to evolve, and genetic algorithms are notorious for producing idiosyncratic designs.  I'm reminded of one research project that used a large chip with an array of identical circuits that was used to develop some software using a "genetic" process to evolve the software.  Each bit of software was slightly modified/mutated and assigned one of the array elements to use, then evaluated against the software design criteria.  Evolve, repeat.  It worked extremely well, with the best software being roughly 5x as good as the software developed using more conventional means.  Then they tried to figure out why.  Turns out that the "evolved" software had figured out that the supposedly identical and independent hardware cells were NOT compeletly independent and was actually using the undocumented interaction between cells to achieve its results. 

So yeah, there have been and will be moments of confusion and misunderstanding on a science and engineering level.  Politics and public sentiment will no doubt also play a big role beyond that.  (Though both will be decades behind in actual understanding that's never really mattered before.)  That said, there is progress being made as well.  I view this as basic research.  There are goals, and the researchers know enough to think and expect those goals are attainable.  I tend to agree, but there's a HUGE grey area (no pun intended) that they need to navigate through before they get where they want to go, and plenty of opportunity for things like frustration, serendipity, and even tragedy along the way.  It will not be easy or quick.  It will definitely be interesting, and very likely extremely useful, though perhaps not exactly in the way(s) expected at this point. 

I do think that the gross motor areas they are targeting now is a good first step.  They're not trying to put anything INTO the brain, just read the motor signals that the brain is outputting.  That's ambitious enough, but also limited enough, that they can make progress towards their goals in a reasonable time frame, and if they reach those then they'll be in a good position to move on from there.  Clearly though Musk is thinking beyond that however.  "Having the option to merge with AI is important."    

the grey area pun was hilarious 

I totally agree. And I think targeting something like the motor cortex is a pretty reasonable starting point since it at least seems to be less complex than, say, the hippocampus (or at least the parts they are investigating).
This reminds me of people who lack substantial parts of their brain but show little to no impairment. A senior neuroscientists in our department told us of a case from someone who literally lacked most of what we consider to be a full brain but showed almost no symptoms. Such cases make brain science quite difficult because of the huge flexibility it portrays. But this is not to disregard the huge advancements, both in research and treatment, made in the last decades.

Merging with AI, at least what people would usually understand, is however something I don't think will happen in our lifetime. Would be extremely interesting though to see what kind of effects it would have.

Weeds are often more resilient than flowers.

So being called a weed could be a compliment.

That was... something. Love the dramatic music as well.