venachescu

This looks amazing! Is there a number hooked up to demo this out? Would love to send this to my nieces and nephews!

> This includes the current US president, who signed a bunch of executive orders right after taking office that increased gas prices by restricting fossil fuel production.

I'm sorry, what?

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/19/business/us-production-oil-re...

> - We're in a recession (at least if you aren't upper middle class or above)

I'm sorry, what recession?

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-paychecks-a...

> In the year ending in November, real wages grew by about 0.8 percent for all workers and 1.1 percent for the 80% of workers who are production and non-supervisory workers. Further, wage inequality fell. The ratio of wages at the 90th percentile compared to the 10th percentile fell by nearly 6 percent over the year.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2023/12/19/...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-i...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/strong-wage-growth-gave-ameri...

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

Now where does this doubt come from?

This _person_ has worked and was rapidly promoted to leadership positions at two of the companies that have extremely outsized reputations for technical proficiency, during periods which both companies achieved dramatic successes...

but somehow, somehow, there are doubts about _her_?

The central nervous system has an extremely delicate chemical environment where routine disturbances like inflammation would induce swelling and destruction of delicate neural pathways. In fact one of the primary roles of the blood-brain barrier is to ensure that any type of “growth” or “organ repair” is extremely retarded - any changes to cells happen very slowly compared to the rest of the body. This is one of the reasons brain damage is so slow to repair, the whole nervous system has a very prescribed way that it grows as a fetus and childhood/youth and then it puts the brakes on everything and only allows very small changes from then on.

> Your jeans don't have 0 day exploits whereby someone halfway around the world can steal your banking credentials, private photos/emails, cryptocurrency, etc.

I dunno a lot of my jeans end up with a hole right in the middle of the crotch and it actually kinda feels similar

Being cleared by the FDA means that they have demonstrated evidence, which is linked in the original Apple page: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36305584/

Like others have said, it's likely prescription only because being FDA approved as a treatment for a specific disease allows it to be paid by VA or other health insurances.

FDA approval processes and guidelines are notoriously rigid and increasingly antiquated, and likely ended up requiring "the whole system - i.e. watch + app + phone" to be approved together, making the package pretty pricey - and in awesome circular logic now basically require insurance to pick up the tab.

There are some efforts to make "digiceuticals" more streamlined to approve but... the FDA is unfortunately very necessary but painfully in need of reform.

While it's mostly a phenomenological observation (and not a natural law), many types of movements in humans and animals are well described by a "minimum jerk trajectory" [1]. There's a ton of debate about whether or not the brain is actually computing or optimizing the 'jerk' of your arm at all - or if it just happens to be the consequence of minimizing the effects of noisy neurons and muscles.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6565116

Sure, you can see a lot of shallow similarities between these two groups but it would miss a pretty important structural difference.

Oligarchs don't have power outside the authoritarian apparatus of the state. Oligarchs exist entirely at the pleasure of the leader and have no true autonomy. If an Oligarch tries to 'branch out', they end up in jail or dead.

Not really when it’s used in the ways they use for imaging. What this procedure uses is ‘focused’ ultrasound that is comprised of a helmet-array of transducers (it has serious Magneto vibes) that is very specifically calibrated to create areas of focused resonance within the brain, using the MRI imaging as guidance. Any of the individual transducers don’t have anywhere near enough power or penetration to be really dangerous by themselves.

This same technique is also being researched as an alternative for radiation therapy, since it doesn’t cause nearly as much collateral damage.

No, we are absolutely predicting when we are looking at a photo; firstly, we really do not see the ‘whole thing’, our eyes make quick, stereotyped (cough predictive cough) movements to a few spots on the image and mentally imagine the rest. Secondly, that’s assuming we recognized something in the image, if it’s unclear, like a grainy photo or lots of shadows, we start to make informed guesses about what could be there.

All of our sensory systems work this way - we use an enormous amount of context to bubble up predictive categories and the collect marginal amounts of information until one prediction dominates over all others.

When one doesn’t, we get gestalt like illusions; like the cubes that are projected both forwards or backwards - or dresses that are blue and black and white and gold - or laurel and yanni in perfect harmony, etc.

I believe some work with smaller local credit unions who only have in-state business. Not sure if these credit unions are in the clear or just minimally exposed to federal prosecution though?

I'm pretty surprised by all the focus on spiking neural networks too; they are really still much more of an academic topic and I have never heard of any real practical applications (yet).

There are a number of methods of training these kinds of networks like Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) which is essentially a reinforcement learning algorithm that increases the weights between neurons that spike often together and modulates the increases by a reward signal. However, all these methods are really more focused on replicating and modeling the biological phenomena and not being performant.

In theory, spiking networks should be much more efficient, real neurons are able to take advantage of many non-linear effects to create incredibly complex analog to digital (spikes) computation in every cell using incredibly little energy - our brains only use about 20 watts of power.

But, the current approach to CPUs and even GPUs means simulating all this stuff is ridiculously inefficient and ultimately looks nothing like the real thing.

But all of their other robots that they bought are in the bay!

Except for SCHAFT, who, apparently were also bought by SoftBank today so go figure.

This is nerd fever dreaming conspiracy bullshit, if they were really building such scary capable war machines for the defense department they would have been bought long, long ago by a big defense contactor (and likely that would be the last we'd publically hear about it!).

Fact is that Boston Dynamics does one thing, really, really well engineered dynamic locomotion. From what I understand there's very little ML/AI to it, just really good modeling and engineering.

However, no one has quite figured out exactly where this technology will be most useful or practical in the near future. Even (maybe especially) when they were owned by Alphabet.

Mostly because it was a rushed and not totally thought out acquisition - Boston Dynamics never wanted to leave Boston and has always been about legged locomotion, Google wanted them to change and they didn't.

All the examples you've given are either still very academic or just marketing for 'clever algorithms'. The whole idea that one company or another is owning 'AI' is mainly analyst and marketing words - anything that moves over into practice and actual use just gets callled 'technology'.

You are literally making my dreams come true. Thank you!

I think you're missing the bigger point that he's trying to make - our sensory systems work in concert to provide a full picture of reality and they're very sensitive and extremely well tuned together through a lifetime of experiences.

Just providing an accurate projection of the visual field to the eye's doesn't solve the problem completely. Visual perception is not a passive mechanism, our eyes 'explore' the visual field through quick movements and readjustments and this process inherently locks together the proprioceptive signals from the ciliary and ocular muscles to the stream of information from the retina. By only providing screens, we can't simulate this process in a natural way and our body will detect it.

Similarly - our vestibular sense is strongly tied to our experiences of our body moving through the world. Just using a blanket stimulation of electrodes on the skin will not recreate these signals in anywhere near a convincing enough manner to fool the brain's perceptual processing.

All of our sensory perceptions are strongly linked together - if just one is perturbed in an unconvincing way (try wearing glasses that aren't prescribed to you for a while), our brain will do our "caveman brain" thing and make us sick.

I'd like to dismiss this as a little bit of jealous gossip, but the more I read the more it fits. Not to say the things she's done haven't been impressive but she seems like a person better at winning awards and having fanciful features written about her than creating really wide reaching impact. Many of these projects really strike me as a feel-good ideas that are much more beautiful to the wide-eyed technologist futurist types, than to the intended markets / consumers / world at large.

But yeah, I'd like nothing more than to be wrong on this. All of these ideas, if true to their promises would indeed be worth the "visionary" labels.

It's quite likely the latter, who in the world can / will pay more than Google?

Those are pretty amazing click/follow through rates, and I'm not surprised because they're 100% deserved. This is a great app clearly made with care and dedication, thanks for all your hard work!

This is a cute argument, but I think it falls into a trap of following its own thinking.

Video games are explicitly designed to test and fit within our bounds of conscious control and processing; particularly the retro games, but essentially all games in general have a very limited input control space (a couple keys or joysticks) and usually very rigorously defined action values. Moreover, these were designed by humans with very explicit successes, losses and easily distinguishable outcomes.

None of these descriptions fit the kind of control that an 'intelligent' system needs to handle. Biological systems do not have predefined goal values, very incomplete sensory information and most importantly control spaces that are absolutely enormous compared to anything considered in a video game. At any point in time the human body has ~40 degrees of freedom it is actively controlling - compared to ~5 in a serious video game.

I do not doubt that pattern recognition and machine learning techniques can be improved through these kind of competitions. But the problem is in conflating better pattern recognition with general intelligence; implying or assuming any sort of cost, value or goal function in the controlling algorithm hides much of our ignorance about our 'intelligent' behavior.