teft

teft , 2 months ago

I don’t think they mean profanity in the code. I think they mean profanity uttered by the programmers while writing code.

teft , 2 months ago

Welcome to the whacky world of derivatives, Squid. The Big Short movie explains shorting stock pretty well while also covering how the 2008 financial crisis happened. Pretty good movie imho.

teft , 2 months ago

Anything that falls inside the Roche limit of a large gravity well is turned to dust. It’s why we have rings around Saturn.

teft , 2 months ago

Jupiter being mostly gas and fluid would look especially cool since it would string out, not break apart as it approached the roche limit. I think the only way that could happen is an extrasolar body wandering into the solar system and perturbing jupiters orbit. That would fuck the rest of the planet’s orbits too but imagine how cool it would look.

teft , 2 months ago

Two problems with your theory, that added mass is ejected as a planetary nebula prior to becoming a white dwarf. A considerable amount of mass is lost this way. Secondly the earth, venus, mars, and mercury together don’t even have a percent of a percent of the solar mass. The sun is ~332,000x more massive than the earth. The mass from eating up those planets will be a rounding error.

teft , 2 months ago

This is a good place to post this:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

Fast fashion wants you to have clothes that don’t last and that you buy and throw away on a whim. Someone who has the same clothes that don’t wear out in ten years doesn’t make the company nearly as much money.

teft , 2 months ago

Link’s Awakening. I played the shit out of that on GameBoy. If you knew the screen skip glitch you could break that game wide open.

teft , 2 months ago

Kind of. The IPA doesn’t show weak forms so non-native speakers can be confused by them if they only ever learned the dictionary way of pronouncing a word.

teft , 2 months ago

Until recently, in all of human history, the number of true cyborgs stood at about 70. Ian Burkhart has kept a count because he was one of them—a person whose brain has been connected directly to a computer.

Burkhart had become quadriplegic in a swimming accident after a wave ran him into a sandbar and injured his spine. He was later able to receive an implant from a research study, which allowed him to temporarily regain some movement in one hand. For seven and a half years, he lived with this device—an electrode array nestled into his motor cortex that transmitted signals to a computer, which then activated electrodes wrapped around his arm. Burkhart now heads the BCI Pioneers Coalition, an organization for the small cohort of other disabled people who have volunteered their brain to push the boundaries of brain-computer-interface technology, or BCI.

Last month, Burkhart, along with perhaps millions of other people, watched the debut of the newest cyborg. In a video posted on X, the first human subject for Elon Musk’s BCI company, Neuralink, appeared to control a laptop via brain implant. Neuralink has not published its research and did not respond to a request for comment, but the device presumably works this way: The subject, a paralyzed 29-year-old named Noland Arbaugh, generates a pattern of neural activity by thinking about something specific, like moving the cursor on his computer screen or moving his hand. The implant then transmits that pattern of neural signals to the computer, where an AI algorithm interprets it as a command that moves the cursor. Because the implant purportedly allows a user to control a computer with their thoughts, more or less, Musk named the device Telepathy.

Read: Demon mode activated

Burkhart watched Arbaugh play hands-free computer chess with a mix of approval and frustration at how clearly the demo was created for investors and Musk fans, not for disabled people like him. It’s no secret that Musk’s real goal is to create a BCI device for general consumers, and not just so we can move a cursor around; he envisions a future in which humans can access knowledge directly from computers to “achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” That dream is ethically fraught—privacy, for instance, is tricky when your thoughts are augmented by proprietary algorithms—but it is also a long way from being realized. Researchers have sort of managed two-way information transfer with rats, but no one is sure how the rats felt about it, or whether it’s an experience they’d be willing to pay for at a mall kiosk.

Yet a more modest vision for a safe, workable neuro-prosthesis that would allow disabled people to use a computer with ease is realizable. The question is whether our social structures are ready to keep pace with our advanced science.

It’s taken decades for BCI tech to get to this point—decades of scientists building prototypes by hand and of volunteers who could neither move nor speak struggling to control them. The most basic challenge in mating a brain and a computer is an incompatibility of materials. Though computers are made of silicon and copper, brains are not. They have a consistency not unlike tapioca pudding; they wobble. The brain also constantly changes as it learns, and it tends to build scar tissue around intrusions. You can’t just stick a wire into it.

Different developers have tried different solutions to this problem. Neuralink is working on flexible filaments that thread inconspicuously—they hope—through the brain tissue. Precision Neuroscience, founded in part by former Neuralink scientists, is trying out a kind of electrode-covered Saran Wrap that clings to the surface of the brain or slips into its folds. Then there’s the Utah Array, a widely used model that looks a little like a hairbrush with its bristly pad of silicone spikes. That’s what Burkhart had in his head until 2021, when the study he was part of lost funding and he decided to have the implant taken out. He was worried surgeons might have to “remove some chunks of brain” along with it. Luckily, he told me, it came out “without too much of a fight.”

Once an implant is in place, the tiny signals of individual neurons—measurable in microvolts—have to be amplified, digitized, and transmitted, preferably by a unit that’s both wireless and inconspicuous. That’s problem number two. Problem three is decoding those signals. We have no real idea of how the brain talks to itself, so a machine-learning algorithm has to use a brute-force approach, finding patterns in neural activity and learning to correlate them with whatever the person with the implant is trying to make the computer do.

None of these problems is trivial, but they’ve been substantially tackled over the past 30 years of BCI research. At least six different companies are now testing applications such as desktop interfaces (like the one that helped Arbaugh play chess), drivers for robotic limbs and exoskeletons, and even speech prostheses that give voice to thought. Proof-of-concept devices exist for all of these by now.

But that only brings us to problem number four—which has nothing to do with engineering and might be harder to solve than all the others. This problem is what Ben Rapoport, the chief science officer at Precision, described to me as “the productization of science.” It’s where engineering successes run into political and economic obstacles. To roll out even a basic point-and-click medical BCI interface, developers would have to win approval not just from the FDA but also from “payers”: Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance companies. This is make-or-break: Medical devices, even ingenious ones, won’t get to consumers if insurance won’t cover them. Few people can afford such expenses out of pocket, which means too small a pool of potential consumers to make production profitable.

Read: I’m disabled. Please help me.

Other devices have cleared this hurdle—cochlear implants, deep-brain stimulation devices, pacemakers—and it’s not unlikely that BCI implants could join that list if insurers decide they’re worth the expense. On the one hand, insurance companies might argue that BCI devices aren’t strictly medically necessary—they’re “life-enhancing,” not “life-sustaining,” as Burkhart put it—but on the other hand, insurers are likely to see them as cost-efficient if their implementation can save money on other, more expensive kinds of support.

Even so, there’s a limit to what brain implants can do and what they can replace. The people who would benefit most from BCI devices, people with major motor impairments like Arbaugh and Burkhart, would still depend on human labor for many things, such as getting in and out of bed, bathing, dressing, and eating. That labor can easily cost as much as six figures a year and isn’t typically reimbursed by private health-insurance companies. For most people, the only insurer that covers this kind of care is Medicaid, which in most states comes with stringent restrictions on recipients’ income and assets.

In Ohio, where Burkhart lives, Medicaid recipients can’t keep more than $2,000 in assets or make more than $943 a month without losing coverage. (A waiver program raises the monthly income cap for some to $2,829.) The salary they’d have to make to cover both expenses and in-home care out of pocket, though, is much more than most jobs pay. “A lot of people don’t have the opportunity to make such a giant leap,” Burkhart said. “The system is set up to force you to live in poverty.”

In addition to his work with the BCI Pioneers Coalition, Burkhart also leads a nonprofit foundation that fundraises to help people with disabilities cover some of the expenses insurance won’t pay for. But these expenses would be “nowhere near the size that would pay to get a BCI or anything like that,” he told me. “We do a lot of shower chairs. Or hand controls for a vehicle.”

Starting in the late 20th century, simple switch devices began to enable people with severe motor disabilities to access computers. As a result, many people who would previously have been institutionalized—those who can’t speak, for example, or move most of their body—are able to communicate and use the internet. BCI has the potential to be much more powerful than switch access, which is slow and janky by comparison. Yet the people who receive the first generation of medical implants may find themselves in the same position as those who use switch technology now: functionally required to stay unemployed, poor, or even single as a condition of accessing the services keeping them alive.

Musk may be right that we’re quickly approaching a time when BCI tech is practical and even ubiquitous. But right now, we don’t have a social consensus on how to apportion resources such as health care, and many disabled people still lack the basic supports necessary to access society. Those are problems that technology alone will not—and cannot—solve.

S.I. Rosenbaum is a journalist based in Providence, Rhode Island, who plays the musical saw and has written for The New York Times and Slate.

teft , 2 months ago

Set up a shawarma shop. Make it a pick your own like at strawberry farms, but with goats. That’ll solve the problem.

teft , 2 months ago

That’s gonna be a hard no from me, dog.

It reminds me of the people who would turn off their websites at night way back when. Probably because their sites were hosted on personal PCs but still…

teft , 2 months ago

Pretty good episodes. I love that they brought Book back even though he was supposed to be in jail. He’s too good of a character to leave in jail for too long. I’m sad that Mr Saru is leaving. I hope he guest stars a bit. I wish we got to see more of the bridge crew like Owo and Detmer because I love them and want to meet the new people.

Also this new McGuffin seems pretty neat. I always wanted to know more about the Progenitors.

teft , 2 months ago

I wonder if she’s a judoka. Those throws are clean.

teft , 2 months ago

Case in point, obsidian.

teft , 2 months ago

games made specifically harder so that you’d have to rent them multiple times

Fucking BattleToads

teft , 2 months ago

It’s because Spanish sentence structure is different from English. In Spanish the sentences “Can I tell you? (¿Te lo puedo decir?) and “I can tell you.” (Te lo puedo decir.) are formed the same way. The initial punctuation lets the reader know that the sentence is a question or exclamation or not so they can parse the sentence properly from the start.

teft , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

English changes the order of the words of the sentence. Spanish uses punctuation marks. It’s just differences in languages. Personally I appreciate them since it helps me read Spanish quicker with fewer parsing errors.

teft , 2 months ago

Imagine being part of that experiment.

“Here’s your parachute. Hope you aren’t part of the control group!”

teft , 2 months ago

Uninstall and use a different PDF reader. I’m partial to sumatra PDF.

teft , 2 months ago

The part I don’t get is why they were willing to decriminalize it but they weren’t willing to regulate it and allow it in dispensaries.

Because they’re not just idiots, they’re puritanical idiots.

teft , 2 months ago

It’s a fairly common spanish name. She’s Colombian-American so it makes sense.

teft , 2 months ago

please don’t drink the swamp water.

You’re not the boss of me.

teft , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

We should be using KB, MB, GB, and TB. Also we should adopt the entire International System of Units and stop with the shit we use. The army uses metric. Why can’t the rest of the population?

teft , 2 months ago

Oh damn. Well then I rescind my statement. We should obviously use a Base-50 system. One bit for each state.

teft , 2 months ago

Why were they allowed to run unopposed?

teft , 2 months ago

Is there any soup with that bowl of croutons and cheese?

teft , 2 months ago

I’m sure the downvoters are people who can’t understand a joke or the awesomeness of cheese.

teft , 2 months ago

Cum in this case is a latin word that means “also functions as” or “along with being”.

So this sentence means they are a coffeeshop and taverna at the same time.

teft , 2 months ago

Sometimes the hormones from testes change the meat flavor so they just castrate them for monetary reasons. Boar taint is what it’s called in pigs.

teft , 2 months ago

I once exited vim without having to look up the commands.

teft , 2 months ago

Maybe there is a Dexter on the loose…

teft , 2 months ago

Lang Belta is a full language. This seems to just be some different sounding words and phrases. So, closer to the way those dirty Dusters speak.

teft , 2 months ago

I think you missed the most important part in the title.

Man arrested after allegedly taking, eating leg of pedestrian after hit by train in Wasco

teft , 2 months ago

I love The Hu. My two favorite songs are Yuve yuve yu and Sugaan Essena.

teft , 2 months ago

Oh, what have we here? Very well, let us both learn together.

teft , 2 months ago

Him and Alexander are two bright spots in an extremely dark world.

teft , 2 months ago

Not a hot dog.

teft , 2 months ago

Declare bankruptcy again*

teft , 2 months ago

Actually it was invented by Crassus, Rome’s richest man, who was one of the triumvirate with caesar and pompey.

teft , 2 months ago

Don’t tease me.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Viserys’ death at the hand of Khal Drogo was inspired by Crassus’ alleged method of execution.

teft , 2 months ago

Seeing as China and Russia have UN Security Council vetos I don’t see how this would pass.

teft , 2 months ago

a huge world and adventure is fun and exciting to him.

Me too, Miyazaki-sama. Me too…

teft , 2 months ago

Does it only work for rock albums?

I’ll see myself out.

teft , 2 months ago

the quality of British manufacturing

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/feb72cf0-eed7-4272-bc59-83b67cb01deb.jpeg

teft , 3 months ago

You know, there are some words I’ve known since I was a schoolboy: “With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.” Those words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie, as wisdom and warning. The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on, we’re all damaged.

teft , 3 months ago

Like a pin up?

teft , 3 months ago

Luna is ~1% the mass of earth so I assume it would contribute very little to orbital perturbations in the solar system.

teft , 3 months ago

Janice Rand’s yeoman role, which is one of the most senior NCO roles on a naval ship, into what seemed to be a personal secretary.

A yeoman is a person who does administrative and clerical work in the modern Navy. They run the gamut from E-4 to E-9. That’s low enlisted rank to the highest. Rand could be an E-9 Master Chief Petty Officer Yeoman for all we know. That would make her the appropriate rank to be the captain’s administrative assistant.