DanielleMolloy

The brand name I know is BrainPort, which gives you a 20x20 matrix with three intensity values (on, mid, off) on your tongue:

https://www.wicab.com/brainport-vision-pro

I found a few others while digging to find this again.

I can't say how well the translation of the picture into these matrices works, but expect these devices will also benefit from the research into the phosphene stimulation matrices, which (to the best of my current knowledge) have the same pixel matrix resolutions and thus the same problems to solve. A substantial part of the research aims at extracting meaningful pixel matrices from regular cluttered visual scenes through deep learning.

I trust Musks ability to attract stupid money and hype towards highly beneficial technology and research goals.

I see the necessity good intentions behind it, but also believe this singling out can lead to developing this sense of shame the user mentioned.

Thank you for sharing. I'm in research that is somewhat attached to the technology side and find 2) particularly interesting.

Did you ever look into electrotactile tongue display units? What is your opinion?

I'm curious about what neuralink will present soon. Musk mentioned "atari graphics" recently, so they probably will for now only focus on generating phosphene-based crude bitmaps in the primary visual cortex (which has been demonstrated to work years ago). I can't know what they are up to and believe / expect they are internally more ambitious about stimulating the higher visual system. But if it boils down to the phosphene bitmaps I expect TDUs (which have FDA approval, already seem to work well and don't require invasive surgery...) to become part of the discussion.

Not sure how it was 2007, but tumblr feels like relief nowadays because it still has some glimpses of that old internet. You can customize a tumblr down to the HTML, including JavaScript.

Not using the social parts (likes) etc. though. I'm using it as a way to share photos and what I'm up to with family without forced login. Like a homepage basically. It is not trying to distract visitors with pointing to other blogs either.

His letter from today is on X.

It is about 2021 onwards, which should not surprise anyone who has paid attention.

Edit: Also here now, as another user posted: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/house/3134499/mark-z...

RIP. Her son just died early this year, from a drug overdose.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/05/31/marco-t...

Interesting slide deck from Kamitani (senior author) about this paper from this week:

https://speakerdeck.com/ykamit/the-thin-line-between-reconst...

Interesting, thanks for sharing. I do wonder to what extent the MRI magnet poses a safety risk? Also these things are quite expensive, I wonder how the producers view the costs involved. I wonder whether fNIRS could be a cheaper and safer alternative. (Obviously, such a system is a good development.)

I've had to renew my ESTA last year and theirs (the official) is probably the clearest government website I came across. Lots to read but every possible detail or outlier seems to be clearly handled. Was also processed quickly. Just saying, good luck to OP.

They are much better integrated with the system, their UI is great and they are plain and simple. It's not just Keynote that is good. I used Pages for a lot of private stuff like letters, and Numbers suffices for a lot of simple tables too.

I avoid the MS Office suite wherever I can. Recently went through some lengths to deactive Microsofts intrusive updating background service (nearly as bad in slowing down my system as Adobes).

I've been told a few times that I'm a good listener. All I ever did in this direction was reading Michael Endes "Momo" as a child.

There is a good chance that it will remain niche due to the paid and forced-login model. This is a good thing. I hope they will manage to position themselves well as an alternative search engine with clean, unmanipulated results; and be careful about unhealthy (greedy) growth.

Since the Mandelbrot iteration happens on the complex plane, is there any recommended reading / research about its relation to scientific fields where the complex plane is applied, like mechanical oscillatory systems, quantum mechanics and electromagnetism?

This view on the Mandelbrot iteration seems much more interesting than the original set:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhabrot

It is the probability distribution (i.e. the most frequent locations visited) over the trajectory of the points that escape the plane.

Since it's paywalled, here is the summary from the (recommended) BrainPost newsletter: https://www.brainpost.co/weekly-brainpost/2024/1/23/the-purp...

This bit was particularly interesting: "First, the authors found that more time in a waking state correlated with higher deviation from criticality (i.e., higher DCC scores) and more time in sleep correlated with lower DCC scores, consistent with their theory. Interestingly, the effect was greater when the rats spent more time moving during wake and the effect was absent when the rats were awake but in the dark. This suggested that not all wake experiences are the same and that more stimulation during a waking state can result in a greater deviation from criticality."

RIP. Thank you for sharing.

Here is Bob Bishops website (he is mentioned as the source of the Duck images in the article): https://web.archive.org/web/20181105111956/http://bob-bishop...

Does someone know where he is now?

Many destructive behaviours are rewarded in a system that is putting emphasis on the quantity and proposed impact of publications. Many scientific fields suffer from behaviours of individuals who are more interested in social status (or just economic security) than in seeking truth. Just like in overall society the humble truth seekers necessary for slowly chiseling out the firm ground of solid knowledge are in the minority. They are definitely disadvantaged in this system, and more likely to be driven out than those who lie, rush or cut corners.

At the modern complexity and importance of science, we do need to put much more emphasis on checking whether it is done right. The original vision of the Royal Society involved rigorous peer review, to the point of demanding scientists to demonstrate their experiments in front of their peers: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/17th-ce... The curator of these literal peer reviews held the first paid position in science.

Journals do have the profits to hire or otherwise pay peer reviewers full time. They would become experts in their field in the process, and thus more suited for the task than the ones in the current system, where even undergrads are asked to review for high-profile outlets like NeurIPS. Also, full-time rigorous peer reviewing would be an interesting career prospect for many current scientists. And here is your startup idea..

Is there any alternative for having a gallery of text&photo posts without forced login and exploitative social media distractions? (except for self-hosting)

When I looked for this 11 years ago, tumblr was the only platform ticking these boxes. I just wanted to share a link to photos of what we are up to with family and friends without asking them to register at another platform, and only tumblr allowed that and did not look as if it would close shop within two years.

Looked again recently and it still seems to be the only platform filling that overall „niche“. Also it has a clean and good user interface, and is customizable to the point of changing the HTML. I hope they can save or otherwise sustain it.

Other social media attempts to constantly distract and emotionalize me to keep me hooked. Looking at a good art or photography Tumblr feels like relief now honestly.

Not a good idea then. The librivox experience turned me away from professionally read audiobooks for far too long.

Amateur readers are hit & miss. A lot of professional readers are actors or have a lot of experience. There is a reason people do pay for professionally read books instead of electronic reading or librivox only.

Same problem here, also the A5 ones are actually quite heavy to carry around.

I find the A6 Leuchtturm ones to be in most practical use right now, they fit into pants pockets (or for me, dress pockets) and they also come in bright yet simple colors which is somewhat inspiring for me. I need relatively long time to fill them so while the price is high they are not a big regular cost factor.

I need something to scribble, macOS notes doesn’t always do it in terms of putting thoughts somewhere and any electronic UI tends to be too distracting.

I had a question that was difficult to search for about a framework recently. While Kagi didn’t fully get me to the solution in the end either (a human query did), the difference in results was interesting:

Google retrieved content spam and mailing list entries about previous versions of that framework that have been outdated for years. There was no code in the first page of results.

Kagi found commented scripts in a GitHub project interfacing with the framework, which basically did what I wanted to do.

While I understand that SEO is a problem that Kagi does not have yet, I don’t understand that Google doesn’t allow me to simply blacklist Pinterest, Quora and annoying content spam and StackOverflow mirrors. Also I never want my queries to be interpreted for me, by ignoring search words or using synonyms so that my exact query is always a few more clicks away. If you want to appeal to the lowest common human denominator then techies are probably not in that target group anymore. Are Googlers still using Google?

Kagi also seems to be ahead of their time in thinking about search. In a blog post they were talking about personalized AI very early and I only really understood what they meant after encountering ChatGPT.

Not just that, you can sign directly on the trackpad. And store that signature for later use.

I summarize:

+ You don‘t want to see or understand another viewpoint,

+ You did not even read the piece before flipping into hating it,

+ You hold a quite irrational emotional view on other people’s private health decisions (how come?),

+ You don’t dare to post under your real account,

+ You still believe „others“ to be antisocial.

I wish people like you would finally go back to Reddit, which seems to align more with your emotional frequencies and your intellect. You might find the aggressive narrow-minded echo chamber you seek there.

This community, in contrast, has always existed for intellectually curious people.

Coming up with the landmark experiment for this technology is no „small contribution“.

Described in this Nature piece, where the first few paragraphs are about Malone. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w

This is a rational, data-driven piece of writing, even by a software engineer, and in the past (I’ve been here for over ten years) it would have fit very well into this community.

It is a call for more communication and understanding of different opinions.

Since I’ve posted it this article got flagged and unflagged multiple times, the first flag appeared within minutes (i.e. the user pressing the button did not even have a chance to read the article).

I wonder what made people so aggressive and short-tempered about different points of view recently.

You‘ve completely missed his point of stratification.

What he meant is checking your personal risk of covid hospitalization and death based on age / preexisting conditions / BMI.

The former equals your risk of blocking an ICU bed.

If you still haven’t estimated your personal risk profile you can do so with this calculator from Oxford (afaik based on data from the more dangerous / less transmissible alpha variant, not on omicron which seemingly is taking over now): https://qcovid.org/

If you are elderly or obese, also check the risk of a 20yo or 39yo with normal weight and no preconditions. Given the mild covid cases they’ve got, it seems the author assessed his risk pretty well.

Mushroom foraging is a popular autumn activity in my local area. To prevent poisonings, cities have registered (usually volunteering) mushroom experts you can bring your harvest to; which they will check and determine for you.

According to the lawsuit, McClendon and Michael Jones had access to the code of Terravision: https://artcom.de/news/artcom-sues-google/