Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)
I havenāt seen any mention of this in sneer space, so kind of a request for context/comments. I recently learned about Cortical Labs from a news story that came out about a month ago. Basically (and apologies if Iāve got this wrong), the story is that theyāve built a ābiological data centreā where the computing units use lab-grown human brain neurones. Theyāve been in business (actual business) since 2019. Some shallow searching on reddit and lesswrong shows a flitter of interest from those guys here and there.
Looks like they have āneuron culture and interface as a serviceā going on, for all the good its for.
Its a real thing. You grow some neurons and stick some electrodes into it, and you can measure the activity of neurons or groups of neurons through some electrodes and induce some to fire through other electrodes. Now, if you have some external process that you define that takes the output from the electrodes and does some computation on it and returns signals to the input electrodes, the way that neurons work and change their synaptic weights over time ensures that the network will learn to produce outputs that make the inputs more predictable. Hence teaching a few thousand neurons to play ādoomā - you have a program that takes the screen and turns it into a set of input strengths, take some outputs and turn them into controls, and it feeds back, and you eventually have something that learns to do predictable actions.
Their innovation appears to be having standardized software you can use to define the input and output electrodes with respect to whatever other software you are running connected to the stuff. Who is willing to pay for this is anyoneās guess.
Maybe all the AI hype has lowered my standards too much, but that actually sounds pretty neat. No idea if itās actually useful and the biological component gives me a kind of instinctive discomfort that I can neither justify nor ignore, but it does feel like thereās an actual interesting development there, at least compared to throwing bigger matrices at the natural language problem and waiting for God to pop out at the end.
Ah yes, a torment nexus.
from what i understand, itās also impossible to copy this thing and every single instance will turn out slightly different. also it will continue to learn on whatever data it is fed so you might end up with something useful, that will degrade, is on a timer and has no backups
hmm. Sounds like an average chapter of Franken Fran
Iāve been keeping extensive notes on these bozos but I donāt quite have a story yet. Not even the US VCs are going big into ābiocomputingā. Iām trying to work out what the fuck Cortical Labs think theyāre on about.
If I had the time and interest Iād look at their literature but unfortunately I lack both. Filing this under: probably a grift
my first guess is some sort of weird sci fi eugenics
I think its more just getting money from people who think something sounds cool despite being not actually useful. Long storied history of this sort of thing.
The new Maas biochips
If you wanna see something thatās actually potentially useful and interesting, just look up the term āMortal computation thesisā
Hey, why not both