So, Neuralink got FDA approval for human trials, and a certain fanbase is VERY excited about that

I love my FLOSS penis

And even if open source doesn't fit their business model for any reason, there should be regulations that force these companies to open source everything in any situation that they stop offering support.

No, they're far too busy using taxpayer money to bail out banks and businesses that are "too big to fail".

Maybe it’s a hot take but if you are giving life-altering treatments, and your company goes under, you should open-source everything

regardless of the the reason, people ended up with non-functional eye implants.

Elongated Muskrat has very little to do with the inner works of the company now. Even in the heights of his involvement, by his own account, his input was tangential at best, like "we make expensive car now, use this money to make cheaper car" and "we call it x because x is the best name ever"

Yup. Gotta sell it as a medical miracle before you can sell it as a commercial product.

I still don’t get how it’s at all safe or practical to have what amounts to a smart watch embedded into your brain.

The surgery they want to do literally involves removing a piece of your skull. Falling and hitting your head without a piece of your skull removed is bad enough, this is going to seriously compromise the strength of people skulls. Which is especially bad when you consider it’s meant to solve problems like paralysis. I have a feeling that people who are just learning to walk again may be at a high risk of falling. Now they’re at a high risk of falling and cracking their skull open like an egg.

It’s also charged with a wireless charger, which would need to placed on the device every night when you sleep. How many people remain completely still the entire night and don’t move their heads at all?

This is a cool and valuable first step for brain augmentations that can probably help thousands of patients, but the implementation has so many glaring problems that it makes me wonder how well the actual product even functions.

Imagine living on Mars in a tiny hut that you can never leave while you slowly starve to death all while Musk is telling everyone on Earth how cool an successful his new colony is. New volunteers continue to arrive in waves while promises go unfulfilled and an endless line of corporate stooges tells you that you are lying about the conditions.

I'd encourage those people, less dumbasses on our planet.

Apparently at least the downvoters on that post, yes.

I have no idea what you are talking about because Lemmy, now all of a sudden, is refusing to show me context.

Hello Satan. I didn't realize you use Lemmy.

Sorry wrong thread

Pacemakers don't have software, they just have firmware. They don't get any updates and don't have to, so this is a non-issue with them.

Are you going to be that picky when they're fitting you with a pacemaker?

Yes.

I remember having to figure out why audio was not working on a new installation. That was once, probably 5 years ago and was fixed quickly once I found a solution online.

I’d vastly prefer my ears to stop working intermittently due to a FOSS driver issue over a corporate overlord installing bloat, spyware, demanding regular payment for the privilege of them not deleting my driver, just to drop support for them some years later anyway.

What's wrong? It's time to repair your brain's Pulseaudio configuration after an update!

All very good questions. The only one I think I can answer is that I think it was inductively charged but I forget what the pigs had on them. It may have been an external battery pack. The implant itself is definitely not external accessible.

We could probably look at existing BMI devices to get our answer, I'm sure it's even less pretty.

The brain science and neurology advancements that would be required to get to such a point would be absolute mind-blowing breakthroughs in medical science and would completely change the world as we know it. The mental/personality disorders we could now understand and solve would make me so hopeful for humanity and the upbringing of welfare for everyone. This would without question be a good thing.

By all appearances yes, it's an appreciable jump in the technology compared to current brain interfaces that are used for the immobile. They did a whole live tech demo with pigs as well as the people he's hired to work on it there. He has top level surgeons and neuroscientists all working on it who choose to be there. Oh and also it just passed FDA approval for testing in humans.

It would be hard to bullshit this passed all the people involved. I have the belief it's quite a different situation compared to the continuing failure of FSD.

I agree with your assessment except saying that SpaceX's advancements are "not that bad" is a massive understatement. They've completely disrupted and forever changed the space launch industry, with the help of government subsidies.

Everyone also forgets how Starlink is serving remote indigenous communities and scared the pants off shitty dominant ISPs that have been screwing rural communities over since forever.

I'll re-emphasize my point that I think the results of some large companies, which comprises the efforts of many many smart people, can have facets of it be considered overwhelmingly good.

Edit: some more words

Oh god, new horrors just dropped

I accidentally uninstalled the visual cortex drivers and now I can't use my eyes to reinstall, any help is appreciated

Trivia: I just learned two weeks ago that "firm"ware is in between "hard"ware and "soft"ware. It has nothing to do with a firm (a company).

I'm sure there will be upgradable firmware at some point in the future but having your brain be connected to any kind of cloud service is the worst idea I've ever heard of.

With Musk at the helm, I wouldn't be surprised if the worst ideas are the ones he wants the most.

Of course many comments in this threas are exaggerated; there won't be played any ads into your brain.

But there are some implications for the usage of Neuralink that are worth thinking about it - especially when it comes to privacy:

Given that it "just" runs with firmware, so that the implant can function in a way most stable and reliably, and also given that there will be no subscription model involved into all of that, will the user (patient) be able to control the functionality of the implant (e.g. controlling the intensity of the eletric signal sent out from the implant to counteract the intensity of a tremor)?

And how will that happen? One thing I could think of is to control the implant with a smartphone app. How good will that smartphone app be? Will it be programmed sloppily like these apps we know from Internet-Of-Things-Apps and have a ton of bugs? Are those (medicinal!) apps secure in terms of privacy? What is with the product support? Will the implant be discontinued after a few years (and also the app)? What if your smartphone fails (no power or hardware failure, or after an update it doesn't work)?

A friend of mine has an app to monitor her blood sugar. She is not qute satified with the app. Luckily the provider of those diabetes sensors provided a separate device, so that the app is just an addition for measuring when you are travelling, for example. But in their last iteration they tried to omit the separate device, probably in order to save costs. My friend had to explicitly ask for it.

With that in mind I'm not keen on having control on such medicinal devices with a smartphone only. If the smartphone fails, there would be no backup. Will such similar things be the case regarding Neuralink?

Not your brain but rather a tiny little chip inside your brain, still would be a rather difficult task (that's an understatement) to unbrick or replace it though. Unless they put a debug Port accessible from the outside you would need surgery if you needed to JTAG to unbrick it (probably would need it anyway since if they go this route they probably won't let you access the pins you need to from the outside).

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as brain, is in fact, GNU/brain, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus brain. Brain is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many humans with the Neurolink chip run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “brain”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really are brains, and these people are using them, but it is just a part of the system they use. Brain is the kernel: the organ in the system that allocates the body's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Brain is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with brain added, or GNU/brain. All the so-called “brain” distributions are really distributions of GNU/brain.

mfw I try to install arch linux to my brain and fucking die after it bricks itself

Watch red hat make it to where your brain is more inclined to want to wear an actual red hat lol

I mean, are you going to trust proprietary hardware anywhere near your brain anyway?

I just downloaded my calculus patch.

Why should they hide it? They just sell it with ads and everyone who wants one has to endure them.

Here's an example that popped up in a feed for me just now. An article from a reputable British newspaper about an American organisation (that isn't mismanaged by a self-aggrandizing, lunatic, grifter) successfully implanting chips into a the brain of a man who was paralyzed from the chest down to restore movement and sensation to his limbs.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-brain-chip-paralysed-trial-b2386217.html

cause pain-on-demand by remote control

You can already do that. You could already do that over a hundred years ago. I think it isn't happening (except in the case of dogs and invisible fences) simply because it isn't very useful.

Another idea is that somebody found an exploit in the software and figured out how to use it for much more then interfacing with vending machines. So in essence the Borg is one giant botnet accept instead of ddosing or doing database leaching they assimilate people and make them part of the botnet.

But it’s Pepsi that’s the Choice of the New Generation! The line must drawn HEAH!!

gengis khan moment

Indeed, it would probably be mandated in the EULA to provide it for free.

Based.

But are you Good Ash or Bad Ash?

It does, but it's important to note that the theoretical basis for much of the rapid progress we're seeing now (e.g. machine learning) has actually existed for quite a long time. Training very large models wasn't feasible at the time they were theorised, but the basis for them did exist.

When it comes to brains, we don't even have a good understanding of how multisensory integration works yet, let alone how we could, even in theory, implant multisensory impressions like ads. It's much easier with things like movement disorders or paralysis because our understanding of those phenomena is much more advanced. Plus - we're only really dealing with one modality there - movement.

Deep brain stimulation for psychiatric conditions does exist, but it's poorly understood, to the point where there isn't even really a consensus on where you should place the stimulating electrodes for the best effects. At least that's what a colleague who worked on DBS described a while ago, and I doubt it would've changed dramatically in a year.

Don't take my predictions too seriously, but

10 years, it'll be possible to have a multisensory chip, but it'll be super expensive and niche 15 years, it'll start getting pretty affordable and popular 20 years, you'll be a social outcast for not having a chip. What are you, a weirdo?

You can still say that about AI. What people are calling "AI" now is closer to Cleverbot than true AGI.

I guess I'm becoming a hermit then

Or even to compete in the labor force, the productivity gains of mainlining the internet will be insane and ppl without it won't get hired. Ray Kurzweil talks about it a bit in his book "The Singularity is Near," his take is optimistic though.

Basically the same as needing to own a smartphone in today's society. You just can't do anything without one anymore.

Good bot. Feels nice to say that again.

As long as I get the wiggly windows I don't care what goes in my brain