swordsmith

You are missing the point, they are not decoding semantics. The signals being decoded correspond to imagined motor activations needed to produce the word. It's similar to asking you to mentally rehearse throwing a ball.

This was possible while I was in high school -- I was able to take Bio, Chem, Physics, and Calculus in the same year.

However, this is no longer possible now for my younger siblings enrolling at the same public high school. Apparently the school now put much more strict limit on pre-requisite and what classes students can take at which year. There is now much less flexibility.

This is not due to significantly increased student body size , but mainly for "equity" in education outcomes -- i.e. holding back the advanced students to accommodate the less advanced students. It makes very little sense, but that is California!

> Imports are already subject to tariffs precisely to protect farmers.

I think you got these backwards. Subsidies are provided because other countries imposes tariffs on US farm products.

> and the breeder had (nearly) her own highway exit

This is the key assumption on which your statements are based on. How do you know the state built it for her, rather than, she built her house next to the highway exit? I find it hard to believe that the state would build a highway exit specifically for a few normal individuals.

> I'll tell you - because there are no alternatives.

How about other more legit consulting firms like exponent (https://www.exponent.com/)?

The difference here is Yue Fei has had a solid track record of being loyal to the emperor. In contrast with Huawei being CCP controlled, having poor track record of intellectual theft, and that CCP having clear conflicts of interest with the countries Huawei is doing business with.

Hopefully this get upvoted to the top. Answers a lot of speculations and questions in the thread.

I am a research scientist at a FAANG. The interview process we went through is much less demanding in the CS part, as the domain knowledge is the focus (yet we still struggle to find good candidates that pass). But I've noticed that those who passed the coding interviews (easy to medium leetcode style) write much more efficient, maintainable, and concise code for the algorithms, experiments and analysis they implement. This results in much higher productivity, even if they have to do more catch up on domain-specific knowledge.

The blog post mentions he works on "machine learning" projects, which in my experience benefits significantly from having leetcode-style algorithmic knowledge (assuming you are not just calling blackbox.infer() all day).

Compared to the pricetag of Macbooks, $1000 is a great deal, no?

You are touching on the subject of attention, which is actually extremely important and has a whole field of research (see for example, the hillarious invisible monkey experiment: http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html)

There are a lot of things that we ignore or don't register consciously. It is possible to decode items in one's working memory in controlled situations (see for example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28155212/).

So I suppose one possible approach would be to hold things in your working memory and have the Neuralink actively decode those. But in that case, as you've pointed out, requires a lot of attention and most likely would rely more heavily on contextual AI to narrow the decoder search space.

The basic premise of my skepticism with the "we need higher bandwidth I/O" statement still stays though -- the bottleneck of human communication is how quickly coherent thoughts can be formed in a way someone else can understand it (output), and how quickly information can be understood (input). For the latter example, you can scan an entire page in less than second. With immense speed reading practice, you can get a "gist" of a page in around that time. But understanding the details in that time is not possible.

There is a big difference between decoding covert and even "imagined speech" and decoding "thoughts". In covert/imagined speech decoding, the user actually tries very hard to imagine the action of speaking and moving the corresponding vocal articulators, without actually doing it. This is similar to mental motor rehearsal done in sports training.

It works because there is direct correlation between the speech-motor cortex and how the vocal articulators (larynx, tongue, etc) move, and how that combine to produce speech.

Abstract "thoughts", on the other hand, are not so straight-forward. For one, there's no central location in the cortex where the concept of "car", for example, lives. The distributed representation of abstract thoughts within the brain makes it orders of magnitude more difficult than decoding speech for one specific individual. Then add orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude to generalize that to different people.

I'd argue it is the "Hello, World" in any BMI lab. Assuming existing implants and electronics, and non-naive monkey, advanced undergrads should get it in a semester.

Not far away: https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-03-31/braingate-wireless

Funny you should compare understanding biological neural networks to a microprocessor. Check out this paper (https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...), which systematically addresses how applying traditional neuroscience methods to analyzing a microprocessor would get you.

Noninvasive signal modality directly from the cortex are certainly possible (e.g. Ultrasound, fNIR). But they lack the spatial and temporal resolution of implanted electrodes. Intracortical brain signals are the most well understood and mature in terms of instrumentation as well. So in the short term, implanted electrodes offer the highest capacity for a BCI.

> Maybe it will be able to extract speech directly from the brain, which is orders of magnitude harder than controlling a joystick.

Check out https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1119-1

And yes it is definitely orders of magnitude harder than controlling a joystick

See (https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-03-31/braingate-wireless), wireless BCI, in humans nevertheless. It's not mass produced, but mostly because there isn't the need to.

This whole "our existing i/o bandwidth is too limited" story started by Musk and co is not very well thought out.

Most people cannot think faster than they type or speak, at least coherently. The rapid information transfer with a computer via "thoughts" ignores the fact that a concept of a "car", for example, exists as different neural activity patterns, distributed over different parts of the brain for different people and changes with time. So that would imply the BCI would need to catalog how different all possible concepts are cataloged within an individual, to achieve such "direct thought communication", which would require whole-brain scale recording, something definitely NOT achievable with ephys (as a thought experiment, you'd have to introduce wires whose total volume become significant compare to brain volume).

Further, the act of speaking and typing is also a way to articulate and organize your (abstract) thoughts. If one skips that stage, would the output be meaningful at all?

The limiting communication bandwidth idea is a very fancy marketing message easy for people to hype up on, in typical Elon fashion.

The location of the electrodes aren't arbitrary. The region of implantation is likely the hand-motor cortex (which has thickness on the order of mm), the area associated with arm movements (check out somatotopy), so the signals acquired are actually targeted for the demo task. This relationship has been known in neuroscience for almost a century and has been validated in decades of brain-machine interface experiments.

They are also recording from up to 1000 channels, which is probably overkill for mind pong, tbh. But you'll need that many implanted electrodes to study long term electrode biocompatibility.

> - resumable tasks - I want to sit down and work, not sit down and figure out what to do

I've found this indeed helps me get back to productivity. But at the same time, if I know what exactly needs to be done, it would be hard for myself to stop until it's finished. And that's when multi-day coding binge happens, followed by a few days of fatigue and low productivity. Kind a of a catch-22 for me...I wonder if there's anyway to be moderate about it.

> Here are the most common traits: apathetic, very logical, quantitative and concise sentences, fast-speaking, use and identify their models in their speech, a dash of academic prose, direct eye contact, infallible confidence.

Oh man I hate this type of speech pattern. Everyone speaking a million miles per hour to try to show how quickly they think, but takes the same amount of total time to convey the same amount of information if they slowed down and used better constructed sentences.

Apparently there is a big shortage for ABF (Ajinomoto build-up film) substrate, which is big part of PCB manufacturing (see for example https://www.hardwaretimes.com/ps5-supply-to-be-affected-by-a..., https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20201214PD202.html).

Big suppliers of ABF substrate includes multiple companies from Taiwan Unimicron, Kinsus Interconnect, and Nan Ya PCB, which all trade in the Taiwan stock market.

I considered investing in those companies...but seems like only Nan Ya has been showing an upward trend. Perhaps we are still early?

> spew their hate of anyone who is not a white conservative?

This is extremely biased and ignorant. For one, there are plenty of non-white non-conservatives on the platform. Your statement here reveals much about your biases.

You are basically removing platform of communication is ok for people that hold opinions other than the mainstream politically-correct ones. This is exactly the sort of things authoritarian government such as China do.

You claim it's clear, yet the majority of protestors that showed up in DC DID NOT storm the capitol.

How is it it's clear to so many people on the left that Trump was inciting violence, when that wasn't the case for most of his supporters?

> The one sole reason the West was so eager to jump on the China train unlike any other broke harebrained communist country was because China went from the start to openly bribing Western elites.

This is very accurate. Recent example is the implied Biden family in CCP's pocket [1][2].

[1] Prof. Di Dongsheng's national televised speech that has since been taken down: https://youtu.be/aeegrkPx0xE [2] https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news/section/6/16084...

> You also might get interesting perspectives if you explore outside the software industry.

Second this. I'd think PM at Google work differently than PM in Lockheed.

The results are foreign companies moving out of China. Bringing much more world attention to the aggression of China in the South China sea, and uniting foreign powers (India, Japan, Philipines, Vietnam, Australia, etc) to contain the CCP's aggressive expansion. It's been made more clear how the Belt and Road initiative can create debt trap for less developed countries and as a sort of CCP imperialism.

Under all these external pressures, the economy of China has suffered. And this is more crucial than most realize, as CCP would remain in power, and the majority of its citizens tolerate the oppression and ignore minority's human rights abuse, as long as the economy is growing. Also as a result, CCP is experiencing more internal factional struggles. This is apparent in Xi's deployment of cultural revolution style tactics such as purges (under the name of anti-corruption, as vast majority of CCP officials are corrupt), requiring study of Xi thoughts (think Mao's little red book), and demand for absolute loyalty from the military to himself (generals have spoken out against him).

> China knows that no other country has the influence to form such a coalition. That means it doesn't even need to be coy about what it's doing

At least now that CCP is showing its true colors, the world is more aware of its threat.

> > […] By the mid-1920s, the overwhelming majority of Chinese intellectuals believed that an authoritarian solution was China’s only recourse. Some looked to the Soviet Union, and to Bolshevism. Others looked to Italy, and later Germany, and to fascism. Liberalism became almost irrelevant to the violent discourse on China’s future.

I did not read the article, but I'd point out that this is in opposition of what Sun Yat-Tsen and Chiang Kai-Shek believed in. KMT take over happened around the 1920's, they believed the road to rebuild China was through [1]

> three steps: military rule, political tutelage, and constitutional rule. The ultimate goal of the KMT revolution was democracy

And indeed, this is what Taiwan had gone through under the rule of KMT, evolving into the democracy today.

> which is why Xi inaugurated his office with the anticorruption campaign. Yes, there was some power consolidation involved, but most of the effort was genuine - CCDI has investigated close to 2,000,000 officials, even Xi doesn't have that many enemies.

Xi became president as a compromise candidate between the internal factions, so he didn't have much support or allies. CCP officials are corrupt by default, of course the effort would be genuine, even though the true intention was to consolidate his power inside the party.

Re. CCP lifting 500m out of poverty -- I'd argue that the Chinese people prospered and lifted themselves out DESPITE of what CCP has done. Looking at the potential alternative and what KMT has done to develop Taiwan, I'd think that's the case. But there is no way of testing that.

> Authoritarianism + capitalism are absolutely compatible.

I agree with this in the case of Singapore. But when CCP is actively exporting its brand of authoritarianism to other countries and influencing the freedoms of other countries' citizens as part of an ideology war [1] using unrestricted warfare [2], then that organization becomes a threat to the world. The best case HK can hope for is the collapse of CCP.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/chinese-comm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrestricted_Warfare