and 3 years later they’ll end the support.
This was the original cyberpunk-transhumanist message. Not “cybernetics will destroy your soul” but “corporations own your body, or worse parts of your body”
That’s a new hell-on-eath I wasn’t aware of. Yikes.
A good argument for open source
I love my FLOSS penis
So, soft-ware?
Sometimes it’s hardware
Schrödinware
Occasionally just firmware.
Sometimes software, sometimes hardware… it’s the new semi-ware!
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Lol, flaccidware
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.
I’ve meditated about this a while now! Imagine the amount of electronic waste produced by planned obsolescence! You have a phone, TV, car and much more that could be diagnosed, repaired and reused for same or all different use cases.
All those phones that still are running LineageOS perfectly fine that could be used by the elderly who need not have much more than basic communication.
Terrifying. No government bailout for improving people’s life quality…
No, they’re far too busy using taxpayer money to bail out banks and businesses that are “too big to fail”.
Wow that made me so fucking uncomfortable, from the serious adverse affects requiring surgical intervention, the company trying to shout down negativity and just leaving these poor people to continue suffering….
It’s all so horrid, I can’t imagine the stress and impact
Thanks for sharing.
Well that’s fucking bleak, at least I got a good chuckle out of this
NPM’s novel implant for drug delivery.
So that’s how they keep JavaScript devs hooked!
3 years later they’ll end the support
I don’t think that’s a fair characterization - it sounds like they ran out of money and the company that bought all their assets didn’t maintain support. In that company’s defense, it’s really hard to maintain support for something when you’ve bought the IP but you don’t have any of the institutional knowledge.
Maybe it’s a hot take but if you are giving life-altering treatments, and your company goes under, you should open-source everything
Would that even be legal? The company has obligations to its creditors and shareholders; simply giving away potentially valuable intellectual property right before going under seems to violate those obligations. And it’s the sort of violation for which someone might be personally held liable.
I’m not claiming that a company can never open-source anything, but rather than they have to have a plausible business case for doing so. And I don’t see a plausible business (as opposed to humanitarian) case here… But I’m not a corporate lawyer, just someone interested in this sort of thing.
Edit: there’s also the FDA to consider. If you make medical devices and you want to release the source code, you probably need to demonstrate that it’s safe for users to reprogram their devices (and it’s not safe).
regardless of the the reason, people ended up with non-functional eye implants.
imagine physically embedding the fucking musk into your brain, VOLUNTARILY. i can’t imagine anything worse in the world
People are still driving Teslas right now. Pretty much the same in my book. You’re trusting your life to a proven moron.
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”
Don’t forget “The Tesla Model series will spell out SEXY” and “Oh, Ford already claimed Model E? Model 3 it is, 1337!”
The most important of decisions
The ongoing litigation against the company begs to differ. Also didn’t Musk step down as CEO of Twitter a while back? It seems his tangential bullshit has quite an impact. I’ll be honest I think the people actually working at Tesla do their best to try to moderate his unadulterated fuck ups. But they’re not safe from it and neither is anyone else who does business with them.
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You live near the Department of Motor Vehicles? /s
I have no clue where “the DMV area” is, even after Googling.
Why would I google when it’s much easier and much funnier to assume they meant the Department of Motor Vehicles?
Well the disabled people getting this implant probably don’t care about musk, it’s legitimately a cool technology and good competition for the medical space.
Musk is a cuck still, and I’m sure we’ll have to wait a couple generations before we get the dystopian stuff in Neurallink
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.
You have to drill or cut into the skull for plenty of medical procedures. I don’t think getting a dime sized piece of skull removed at the crown of your head means your head explodes when you hit it on something.
As for the charging thing, there are plenty of solutions. Wear some kind of headband for one.
How many people remain completely still the entire night and don’t move their heads at all?
Anybody with sleep apnea who has a CPAP has solved a harder version of this problem. It sucks and takes a while to get used to but it’s way better than waking up with a headache every day.
I assume that if the implant is helpful the overnight charging will be readily accepted by users.
(I’ve got a peripheral nerve implant myself so I am quite familiar with what lengths people will go to to relieve pain)
i can’t imagine anything worse in the world
I can… there are literally people who are willing to participate in Musk’s Mars colonization fantasies. They stand about as much chance of success (or survival) as those people who got imploded in that Titanic sub - except their deaths won’t be as quick and merciful.
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.
At least the new arrivals will have a fresh supply of meat - Mars is pretty cold, after all.
I’d encourage those people, less dumbasses on our planet.
I’m starting to get some real Golgafrincham vibes.
But some people if they get the chance they would even eat musk poop.
Apparently at least the downvoters on that post, yes.
Musk is doing more to make people realize how garbage capitalism is than Marx ever could.
Accelerationism in a nutshell
I have no idea what you are talking about because Lemmy, now all of a sudden, is refusing to show me context.
Your comment on Musk
Yeah… that’s not how accelerationsim works. Accelerationsim would require our active participation in order to make things worse… but we don’t actually have the power to do so.
Neuralink is an excellent advancement for brain science and it is greatly going to help disabled people and those with little function left over their bodies. It’s okay to celebrate this technology while also hating musk.
Like SpaceX, they’ve both been excellent ventures that he so far hasn’t ruined (probably thanks to the people he delegates to). Just because it’s fashionable to hate him for how he’s absolutely fucked over Twitter (which i’ll remind everyone we’ve always hated and agreed is bad, use Mastodon instead) doesn’t mean his other companies largely spearheaded by others, and their results, are also bad.
That’s not even to mention that the kind of dystopian technology people are imagining isn’t anywhere close to what the Neuralink device is actually capable of. What everyones fearmongering over is still just science fiction. It’s just barely able to interpret brain signals, it’s not as powerful as everyone makes it out to be.
2nd edit: forgot what instance I’m on, this comment probably ain’t going to do well lol
The big issue I have with brain chips is longevity. How long until the electrodes degrade? When will the chips fail? Once they fail, will it be fail safe or fail deadly? Also, what will be the power source? Will it use inductive power, or battery power? They are both awful options. What if the chip overheats? The implementation is the real question here, but neuralink refuse to give any answers because it proprietary.
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.
Does it work though?
I only ask this because Musk has been promising full self driving in Teslas “next year” for about a decade now, so any claims made should be taken with an enormous pinch of salt.
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.
It would be hard to bullshit this passed all the people involved.
Do you not understand people? It’s easier to BS 10 people than 1. You just BS 100 and the 10 weakest people tell you who they are. People who want to work on brain interfaces want it to work. Whether it actually works or not depends on the real world, not the number of people involved.
This comment doesn’t make it sound like you have much real world experience. Maybe read literally anything about Neuralink and BMIs, I’ve been following this for years.
I kind of agree. While I think they are not that bad as far as advancements go, most of it is shitstained by Musk, who has to be seen at all cost and have to be seen as the ultimate inventor of everything.
He wants to be seen, stay relevant, and be the boss of everything, that he usually makes dumb decisions, which is a stain on a company mostly relying on a foundation of very intelligent people.
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
These ventures succeeded despite him, not because of him.
I guess they may have come into existence without him. Unfortunately with the way capitalism has a death grip on the world… it seems like the only way risky ventures get off the ground is through the whims of megamaniacal filthy rich motherfuckers.
Truth.
Whenever I hear someone unironically use the term “disrupted” I just know I’m going to be hearing some capitalist parasite being glorified for doing something expensive that a government did much cheaper half a century ago.
Space launches were “much cheaper” a half a century ago? You don’t really follow any space news whatsoever do you? That’s patently false.
No, the entire space exploration attempt was much cheaper half a century ago - neither the US nor Soviet space programs wasted labor or resources enriching billionaire parasites. There is absolutely nothing that can be performed by parasites such as Musk or Bezos that cannot be done far better, more efficiently and more effectively through public means.
Can you provide a source showing space exploration was “much cheaper” half a century ago than SpaceX’s current costs to getting payloads into orbit? It sounds like you’re just assuming it would be cheaper from your idealogical leanings than that actually being the case.
A half a century ago the US and USSR were devoting a significant fraction of their entre GDP in the space race to blast people into space on some of the largest rockets ever built, mostly for national security and military concerns And that’s not even to speak of the “safety standards” they had and ignored in order to win.
The later shuttle program itself was a massive MASSIVE expenditure and no one in their right mind would EVER say it was an efficient and cheaper per kg in LEO.
You’re just straight up wrong.
Yeah, hold on… let me compare the costs of enriching a billionaire parasite piggybacking off publicly-funded programs that developed all the technology said billionaire parasite is piggybacking off with said publicly-funded programs.
No, Clyde, it was cheaper - because we actually got results other than merely enriching a billionaire parasite.
Your brain has been so addled with “free market” fairy tales that you might just as well believe a glass slipper will magically turn you into royalty. There is absolutely nothing parasites like Musk can do that we couldn’t do far, far better, much more efficiently and far cheaper through public means - and that’s it.
I want to thank Facebook for making it blatantly obvious to us that we should never get any brain implants. They’ll definitely use them to read your thoughts and push ads straight into your consciousness. Oh, and you’ll probably have to pay a subscription.
Your tinnitus will get progressively louder until you pay your bill
Hello Satan. I didn’t realize you use Lemmy.
Sorry wrong thread
I’m not putting anything in me that’s not foss. I worry for the tech illiterate though when they eventually adopt this idea.
I agree, I love the idea of a brain chip, but not if someone can change licensing terms on something that’s INSTALLED in me.
Are you going to be that picky when they’re fitting you with a pacemaker?
I agree if it’s just something for fun though, although personally I’d err on the side of not putting anything in me at all thanks very much. I’m quite happy with my tech on the outside where it belongs.
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.
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Liberty or death
Dude, look at the current support for audio drivers. Do you really want to deal with that for your ears?
Just kidding I don’t know anything about audio drivers 😂
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.
If the audio doesn’t work, I want to be sure it is because of me, not some tech-suit trying to make me pay more for their rubbish services
What’s wrong? It’s time to repair your brain’s Pulseaudio configuration after an update!
There’e not enough knowledge and connectivity in the entire internet that could convince me to ever put a connection directly to my mind online.
I’m sure these implants will give much needed ease to patients who suffer frem tremors like parkinson and other neurological diseases. But the things I’m mostly concerned about are:
- Will health insurance pay for the implant in a one-time-payment? Will it be a subscription model? What happens when you can’t pay your subscription? Will it be shut off?
- Will the implant be operated through firmware (like a pacemaker) or software, which reqires frequent updates? If so, will there be - like computer software - “new features” implemented (“With version 2.0 you will be able to share your Neuralink experience with other Neuralink users. Your data may not be leaked, pinky promise.”
- What if a certain mentally unstable CEO throws a tantrum that will affect the performance of the Neuralink implant negatively? Will there be any legal protection from such thing?
The thought that frightens me even more (although I am not a neurologist) is that if this is installed in children, and the neural pathways for the child’s basic functions are formed to pass through that implant, removing the implant will render the child unable to think.
Oh god, new horrors just dropped
Positive thought: maybe thats the first step to become a godlike computer brain species
Negative thought: if that is how it works I doubt it is just kids that it would do that to. If that happens I would guess it could happen to anyone who has one “installed” long enough
I think you lose a lot of neuroplasticity once you become an adult though, which you would need to reroute the neural pathways. Although I guess that there have been cases of adults who lost half their brain matter in accidents and were able to develop normal cognitive functions again. Actually, even babies must already have the visual cortex all connected up if they can see so maybe some things just develop too soon.
OPEN SOURCE IMPLANTS
I accidentally uninstalled the visual cortex drivers and now I can’t use my eyes to reinstall, any help is appreciated
gonna have to reboot yourself and try again in the next life.
Thank you, trying that now
Laughs in windows helpdesk support
Sorry, but that’s what you get for buying NVidia eyes
Far be it from me to suggest that tech bros won’t ruin a good thing, I really don’t think these will have a subscription model because they probably won’t have any kind of internet connectivity. They’ll be like pacemakers, purpose built for a specific function (prevent tremors, reverse paralysis, etc) and designed to only do that function for as long as possible.
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.
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?
The last talks they gave mentioned it is controlled via Bluetooth. So any Bluetooth capable device would be able to connect with it.
Current focus is to use the device as an input device for computers/phones.
and also given that there will be no subscription model involved into all of that,
oh you sweet, sweet summer child.
Firmware is just software that we try to update less often.
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).
Laughs in nordic
I have a (peripheral) nerve stimulator implanted.
Insurance paid for the trial implant, then the permanent one. They also paid for a couple of meetings with a rep from the mfgr who showed me how to use it best.
I have the device, the control, and a transdermal charger. No subscriptions, no remote access, I don’t think it keeps logging data.
Drink verification can to continue.
Fox Viewers: ‘Don’t get vaccinated because there are brain controlling microchips hidden in the jab.’ Also Fox Viewers: ‘I can’t wait to get one of Elon’s brain chips to own the libs!’
Wow, who did Elon have to fuck to get FDA approval for a brain chip that’s killed numerous test subjects.
Edit: Just a friendly reminder that ublock, sponsorblock, newpipe x sponsorblock, libretube, youtube piped exist
I’ve not yet seen any indication as to what exactly they have approval to test. My guess is it’s literally just something like testing an electrode gel that goes on your skin as part of the process or at most the external parts that interface with the implant. There’s an endless world of things the FDA could have given them approval to test as part of their project that doesn’t involve actually cracking anyone’s skull open and jamming stuff in there to watch them die like the monkeys did. After you get the approval to test your application sponge on real human subject, you launch a press release stating “Neuralink gets FDA approval to move to human testing!” and await that sweet delivious investor money.
A long time ago I read some cyberpunk novel, and one of the characters had an ocular implant that got infected with malware that flashed spam ads for Indian brothels in his vision 24/7, even with his eyes closed, until he went completely postal.
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They touched on this concept in the black mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits”. Very minor spoilers, read on if you dare
Not with a brain implant per se. But had to pay merits or else watch porn ads. And if you don’t have any merits, guess what they’re unskippable.
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
Edit: oh heck. It might have been The Diamond Age.
Edit 2: search yielded
“Bud knew a guy like that who’d somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself.” --Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
There comes the time you have to root your own brain and install CyanogenMod 23.0 “BrainIac” on it, maybe “TorView” and “OpenMath” too. I recommend “FreeTaste 2.0” as an addon.
Imagine how high stakes it is to avoid bricking your brain.
Sure, you can root your brain and install a custom firmware on it, but your eyes won’t work unless you install the proprietary Google-Netflix-Microsoft-MPAA DRM blobs.
CyanogenMod
That would be LineageOS now. but yes, definitely root the hell out of your brain implant!
Edit: spelling.
FreeTaste 2.0
Imagine someone infecting a user’s implant with a script that makes everything you eat/drink taste like leftover Jägermeister in a cup from a week ago
On one hand I’m excited for what the tech can do for medical purposes and future applications… On the other hand I’m terrified on what governments and corporations have in mind for it, cause I guarantee it will not be good
Looking forward to the eventual open source/Linux version of this lol.
My brain runs Arch BTW
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.
this is glorious. thank you.
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.
You mean the FDA approved of lobotomizing a select few of desperate people to satiate the narcissistic impulses of its founder. Anyone else wanna take a ride in this plastic submarine???
Uh, it’s a “submersible” and it’s not plastic, it’s throwaway expired carbon fiber from Boeing…
