Ryantific_theory

Yeah, I mean we've been working on brain implants of various stripes for a couple decades now, and they're not the first to attempt motor cortex implants for paralyzed patients as a method to begin human trials, but the current state of the art for brain implants is honestly pretty... primitive. There's no good way to avoid damaging neurons, so it's mainly a focus on not causing too much damage while fine mapping and targeting has to be done on an individual basis.

Implants are hugely useful, and arguably the current state of the art treatment for several conditions (epilepsy and parkinsons), but we're so far out from computer brain interfaces being useful for anything outside of dire medical needs that it's kinda surprising they're pushing ahead when they had so much trouble with their experimental subjects.

I worked in a brain imaging lab in college, and we had a couple of chimpanzees with brain implants that did daily research protocols. Bastards were better than me at the testing regimen, and other than some minor discomfort (water intake is restricted prior to the tests so that the gatorade reward was more attractive), they were large children that could tear your face off if they got angry. Once they got older, they would have surgery to remove the implants and retire to a primate ranch where they just got to live out the rest of their life. All of the grad students there had been working with the same chimps for years, so it's a little alarming Neuralink had so many issues.

It doesn't exactly engender confidence.

Oh my god.

I could have so many tabs.

The really annoying part of this is the author says:

“The crucial finding is that the number of violent video games you’re exposed to has an influence on your verbal aggression and hostility,”

Only to go on and say:

“It’s very important to stress that our findings are not causal,”

More than that, the study doesn't even measure their "exposure" to violent games, it requests their three favorite games and then checks their PEGI rating.

Whew. Okay, so reading the actual research article here, and, this article is kind of trash. First off, the study group was recruited from ads posted on Reddit and Discord, notably from r/samplesize, r/narcissism and r/truegaming and Cluster B Circus, r/NPD Official and NPD Recovery 2.0 respectively. One is a place for polls, one is a gaming subreddit, and the rest are all communities for people with narcissism. So they're skewing their sample population explicitly towards how people with narcissism that play violent games respond. Which, I think was the original intent of the study, and they bolted on the additional conclusions for a spicier publication, since the only way these numbers are meaningful is with a control group of people with NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) that do not play violent games, and even then, it only provides a correlation between people with NPD who play violent video games and increased verbal aggression (one of which was arguing if people disagree with you).

I'm beginning to feel regret for putting way too much effort into a comment, because this is a long ass article, but further in, the study states that respondents had "healthy" levels of narcissism, which goes unremarked despite their primary sample sourcing being targeted at narcissism instead of a population of gamers. I'm calling it a wrap here, but essentially this is a remarkably unreliable study to write that headline off of.

Can't complain about how the government doesn't work, if the government works.

I mean, at least President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho actually listened to people smarter than him in an attempt to fix the issues plaguing the country that he governed, even when it went against enormous corporate interests. So, arguably Idiocracy is actually a step up from where we're at.

Yeah, in academia getting approval for primate research projects is a huge process where you need to clarify every aspect of the protocol, housing, care, and experimental operations to submit before the project can start. I'm less sure if it's voluntary or required, but we had funding allocated for their retirement from the start. They're smart enough and strong enough that I'd be terrified to work with unhappy and unwell primates.

Not that all research projects are have happy endings, but I don't think corporate research has the same restrictions and oversight that academic research does, given that this even happened. I'm pretty accepting of the necessity of primate research models, but we should be doing everything we can to treat them as best we can. Withdrawing a subject from the experimental protocol should be preferred over letting an infection fester just because the implant is in the way. Just seems really poorly done on their part.

That lady's a lifesaver.

119,000 dollars worth of drugs in a single drone though? And I thought inflation was bad at the grocery store.

You mean, waiting for news when it gets isekai'd after someone pushes it in front of a train lol.

Reddit's normal traffic is 52 million users a day and 450 million a month. Lemmy has something like 150k active and 500k total users. Contributing to a thousandth of a percent of their activity to spread awareness of Lemmy isn't going to even be visible unless literally everyone went.

I also stopped using Reddit, but I don't begrudge people for poking their head back in. Though the Lemmy pixels got wiped out at some point.

The Gay Agenda strikes again!

While conceptually badass, I literally cannot imagine a worse idea than bringing an enormous non-domesticated predator into a loud, aggressive, and crowded space. Like, trained zookeepers get mauled after living and working with the same lions for years.

It panics, or decides it wants to be somewhere else, and dude holding a chain isn't gonna be in charge anymore.

Not to mention, do people really believe that people shouldn't be allowed to see sexual content until they're 18? I started looking up titties when I was eleven, and as I understood it, the generation before mine either inherited or stole porn mags and tapes from older brothers/dads or got somebody to buy some for them. Given how useless sex ed was on the actual sex aspect of things, how are teenagers supposed to figure out anything besides anatomical structures?

The fundamental premise just seems weird to me, why are we trying to hide away pornography like it's this shameful corruptive thing? I maybe knew a handful of weird kids that listened to the 18 year old restriction (all on extremely religious grounds), so the idea of actually trying to enforce it seems kinda crazy. I don't know, it just reeks of the idea that masturbation is a sin, but everyone's so uncomfortable with the notion of teenagers + anything sexual that nobody wants to touch it.

I just feel like the next couple generations are gonna be weird with the tug of war between book bannings, LGBTQ+ bannings, religion in schools/out of them, and all the other proxy wars being fought using schools as the battle ground. Not to mention all the shootings.

Yeah, what we were always missing after fleeing cable, was the ads that really made each show worth it.

Why can't we just have nice things?

I like the rule lawyering, but the fuzzy conception of vampire law is that they require an invitation to enter a home, but nobody would expect an abandoned home to stop them, indicating a holistic rather than a technical definition. The state can repossess the home, but if the entire police force is vampires they'll be unable to cross the threshold so long as those living there view it as a home.

For example, a worker drone that keeps a bed at their office and lives there part-time, it makes sense that a vampire could enter their office without invitation because it isn't a home despite living there. However, alter the situation to an even sadder worker drone that lives full-time in their office and considers it to be their home, can the vampire enter? I posit nay, the vampire will need an invitation to enter their sad office home.

This... this is so optimistically naive it's almost heartbreaking. Even if Putin could lose the elections, and his political opposition wasn't repeatedly being jailed, poisoned, or assassinated, the centralized power would still qualify as a fascist government.

Man, I remember back when it was women's studies getting bullied, then they added gender studies, now we've got African Americans, Germans (I assume because of Marx?), the study of the development of society, and the study of society. They're becoming so inclusive in their discrimination 🤗

For real, I knew a guy that kept an ounce as his daily supply. As in, he'd set aside an ounce each day for casual smoking with friends. This whole four month raid was over three days of heavy college smoking. The demonization of marijuana is such a ridiculous waste, and leads to weird stuff like selling K2, which is a shittier version of weed, with actual risks as you can overdose on K2.

I mean, he had a genuinely good reputation prior to the big money and PR back in 2012-ish. I followed him because I love space stuff, and he was this awkward nerd pushing for electric cars, solar power, and reusable rockets, which were so insane it was basically considered impossible. Most of his early twitter conversations were discussing rocket details with other space nerds, pulling videos of RUDs on request, and sharing some of the hidden numbers that we'd normally never have access to. He was genuinely involved in the early years at SpaceX.

Up until he called the guy who saved the cave children a pedo, he was basically held up as one of the individuals who would be responsible for changing the world for the better. An actual example of capitalism being used to push society forward. Then it was a steady downward spiral, but early Elon was basically just a nerd that liked rockets and green tech. Had he stuck in that lane, and not been greedy about squeezing every penny of profit out of Tesla workers, he'd probably still be considered the "real life Iron Man" instead of another classic example of how capitalists are consumed by greed.

So, don't get me wrong, I am deeply disappointed in what he's decided to do with himself, but he was a legitimately popular figure and led SpaceX to face off against the military-industrial space industry and break a monopoly that's been in place for half a century. The myth was exaggerated, but his initial popularity was earned before being wasted.

Not gonna lie, I was like "well at least they're having fun" until getting to where they were snorting their coke lol. That said, when I chuckled at orphan crushing machine memes, I didn't expect them to gradually materialize in the waking world.

It was hilariously bizarre when it was discovered that a population of mole people had been living inside reddit's image host for some period of time. Especially since they were were getting up in arms about how much reddit content was crowding up the site.

Wonder what life's like in there these days.

Huh. Terminal curiosity, but randomly clicking through, I saw a lot of 2000's era racist/sexist humor, mostly banning NSFW, one entirely made up of github links and anime girls, a weirdly normal Reddit clone, and... one that was suspiciously banned from the internet lol.

So, at least one person got Hansen'd. Which, I can't imagine what they thought was gonna happen there.

I mean, if you view clowns as the opposite alignment of goths, in theory big tiddy clown gfs should be just as viable.

*screaming intensifies*

"Whoops, turned it up instead of down, one sec."

BANG

Lol, I'm glad you were too cool for school, but his twitter conversations were actual sources used by Ars in the early days, which regularly called on actual rocket scientists. More than that, they were correct, so I'm not entirely sure what you were seeing through. He definitely became an attention whore by the time he started posting memes, but just because somebody became a garbage human being doesn't mean everything they touched is trash.

SpaceX is a treasure, and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise.

Yeah, I'd be uncomfortable, but immortality is immortality.

Now, if the requirement was a daily barebacking by the ultra-rich engineering their cum to be the elixir of immortality, I'd be a little more conflicted.

That's absolutely wild, genuinely terrible, and intends something basically no different than what we already have. The biggest difference would be all of your conservative areas immediately collapsing without funding from liberal areas lol. I mean, your whole plan is basically just not having the United States anymore, and assuming that states will continue to play nicely with one another when they no longer have any higher authority to hold them to rules and regulations.

States already have different laws on abortion, gun ownership, taxes, and "personal freedoms". People can already move. This is just such a strange political take, I almost don't know what to say.

Yeah, always blows me away how willing people are to call for crimes against humanity for groups they don't like. I mean, I find nazis to be ridiculous and terrible, but throwing people into re-education camps and executing them if they don't convert to your worldview? That's like reading 1984 as an instruction manual lol.

Three sentences. Twelve words. Unlimited titties.

Honestly brings a lot to the table. They've got my vote.

I genuinely loved that movie. Watched it as a kid, got the DVD as I got older, downloaded the torrent when I was in college, watched it with friends for movie nights.

I had no idea it was supposed to be bad! I loved the weird fusion of camp, bizarre situations, and genuine action. Although I did have to chuckle at one of the reviews criticizing its CGI, written twelve years after the movie came out.

I think you mean a nice golden parachute to reward them for taking the heat, so they can swap in a new expensive face to implement slightly less unpopular fees.

Women hate this one weird trick!

People say AI start hallucinating bizarre sentences is a problem, but I'm beginning to wonder if it simply gazed too deeply into the internet abyss.

Lmao. Scrolling through a ton of climate, political, and Reddit drama, only to see a neat bug that everyone's excited about.

So cool.

Yeah, playing it as a kid was nightmare. I had no idea what I was getting into, so it was just sitting there alongside Need for Speed and Rollercoaster Tycoon. By the time I realized I needed a note page to keep track of obscure bits of information hidden across the map, I was already in too deep to just have a properly organized note sheet. Never wound up finishing, but I remember just scrawling numbers and words connected by branching lines like some kind of schizophrenic conspiracy theory.

Mole people! Yeah, at some point the disconnect between the two populations resulted in losing track of history. I just remember browsing the drama and chuckling at the sheer indignation towards Redditors treating Imgur as their personal image hosting site. Redditors got to feel superior after discovering that Imgur existed to serve them, and Imgurians(?) got to experience the horror of learning that the world was not what they thought it was.

There was a surprising amount of confusion on both sides.

Always nice to know someone appreciates me.

Yeah, I could see the financial value dropping, with businesses less willing to pay as much for harvested data, but I don't see a point in time where they don't attempt harvest every last piece of data on the off chance somebody wants it though. Advertisers paid insane amounts of money for targeted information, but even Google's seen a huge contraction in their advertising revenue.

Doesn't mean they aren't frantically trying to harvest data more aggressively (just recently tried to bake it into the internet itself), just that our data is getting cheaper.

Didn't realize the monkey paw was granting these powers lol.

It's a little grim, but there's a standard SCI (spinal cord injury) guillotine that drops a weight with an angled wedge to cause a near perfectly replicable SCI. The mouse is sedated, but it's not exactly a good time for the mouse.

But yeah, the alternative is testing on humans, which, I really don't think we need a reminder on why that's super illegal.