Confused me for a second, because I just saw this about growing teeth, which is aiming for reaching market in 2030, which is relatively soon. So hopefully you’ll be able to see that before people start shoveling dirt at you.

While that’s true, this isn’t a specific engineering problem. You need to grab a single cell from each relevant subcluster of neurons in the spinal cord, spatially record the exact positioning, send it off to have RNA seq. done, sample all of the subclusters of the target area, spatially record exact positioning, send it off to have RNA seq done, resample based off of RNA seq data, begin axon regrowth of a single subcluster, and then repeat after every growth cycle to ensure the targeting is holding.

You can improve RNA sequencing machines to reduce runtime, improve spatial tracking to make it easier to keep track of the anatomy, but without sci-fi advances in implant technology you can’t get around the sheer amount of procedural time requiring MD-PhDs and post docs to be involved in every visit.

One of the issues with medical technology is that we know far more about how the human body operates than we can control, so compared to biological structures our manipulation of biology at the cell specific level is relatively crude. I’m not saying tech won’t catch up, but it’s going to be ruinously involved for a very long time.

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.

The difference though is that this treatment would require hundreds of hours of ongoing work from medical professionals for each treatment. What they did was use single cell RNA sequencing to determine which subpopulations of cells are supposed to connect and where, before stimulating cell growth and guiding each RNA mapped subpopulation to where it’s roughly supposed to go. That’s one thing for anatomically complete sub-millimeter spinal cord injuries in mice, but a massive endeavor for human spinal cords.

If you’ve seen the bioengineered cancer treatments where researchers grow immune cells to target a single individual’s tumor, the amount of specialized work that goes into that pales to what current technology would require for this sort of spinal regeneration, and that’s for relatively simple small scale lesions. Multiple lesions or large scale cell death could result in attempting to selectively guide millions of microscopic axons in neat clusters for over a foot.

I wouldn’t be surprised if insurance companies refused to pay for cell regrowth, and instead went for implants that are comparatively much simpler to install and modify in brain-computer interfaces that skip over the damage. This is a great advancement and does open the door for recovering from spinal cord damage, but this is one of those treatments that people are going to get because they need to fill FDA trials and won’t charge, or because the patient is filthy rich.

Eggcelent. We eagerly await the completion of your grand project.

I could have sworn I saw an article talking about how there were noise artifacts that were fairly obvious, but now I can’t turn anything up. The watermark should help things, but outside of that it looks like there’s just a training dataset of pure generative AI images (GenImage) to train another AI to detect generated images. I guess we’ll see what happens with that.

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.

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.

Just keep glitching, you’ve got potential.

Feels a little like an Eldritch corporation that doesn’t totally understand humanity, but produces simple guides to existence in a an effort to ease the suffering of our poor squalid souls.

Thank you, PM_Your_Nudes_Please, for an wonderfully insightful comment on the nature of statistics in transportation accidents.

Yeah, right now the fight is between corporations and creators, but I feel like the future battle is going to be between corporate AIs and “pirated” ones, because Disney is going to keep a firm chokehold over what its generative AI can make, while the community ones will completely ignore copyright restrictions and just let people do whatever they want.

Not gonna need to worry about paywalls when you can get a pirated generative AI to create the superhero mashup you always wanted to watch as a child. That said, I could definitely see Disney and other piggybacking off of AI panic to extend copyright protection into spaces that were previously fair use.

Yeah, next thing you know they’ll be sliding offers to the most liked people’s profiles offering the chance to become compensated daters if they go out with VIP profiles, no pressure to do anything sexual though, because that’d be illegal.

Honestly, this 500$ a month thing is just sad, because it’ll definitely work (financially), and Tinder will do some shenanigans with the algorithm to make it seem a little worth it, and it’ll just definitely not be worth it to the people paying 500$ a month.

Aren’t AI generated images pretty obvious to detect from noise analysis? I know there’s no effective detection for AI generated text, and not that there won’t be projects to train AI to generate perfectly realistic images, but it’ll be a while before it does fingers right, let alone invisible pixel artifacts.

As a counterpoint, won’t the prevalence of AI generated CSAM collapse the organized abuse groups, since they rely on the funding from pedos? If genuine abuse material is swamped out by AI generated imagery, that would effectively collapse an entire dark web market. Not that it would end abuse, but it would at least undercut the financial motive, which is progress.

That’s pretty good for 2023.

That’s alright, I was just a little unsure about the mixed tone. As far as public funding goes, I’d much rather NASA funding go to SpaceX than Boeing, especially since unlike the cost plus development contracts that Boeing and Lockheed-Martin have gotten as the United Launch Alliance, SpaceX’s payments are almost mostly contracted purchases. That package you linked pays for specific flights to the ISS, as well as paying for a propulsive lunar lander as part of Artemis Project.

I mean, I hate Elon as much as the next guy, but none of this money is going to him. Compared to pouring money into the telecoms or aerospace companies owned by less vocal billionaires, and then watching them go back for seconds without doing anything, I’d much rather see something productive come of public funding.

As an aside, Starlink has never received public funding, so this really isn’t the project to complain about that. It was tentatively approved for 900 million to be awarded after delivering gigabit speeds to 99.7% of rural America, but the money would only have been awarded after completion, and the funding was pulled a month after Viasat (another satellite internet company) pressured the FCC, a decision that the FCC Commissioner publicly declaimed, which was kinda funny.

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.

Part of it is the very mechanics of gaming, they’re all built on a core of goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. When telling a story, the four basic forms of conflict are man against man, man against nature, man against self, and man against society. Violence is an easy vehicle for three of those conflicts, and especially lends itself to active gameplay loops. Mind you, I’m referring to violence as acting to cause injury, because there are a lot of games that are built around fighting with zero gore or death.

The other thing is that violence is just very popular. If you stop to really consider it, how much entertainment is free of violence? How many shows and movies are completely nonviolent? How many books don’t have a single fight? There are genres that typically avoid violence, but even then you’ll still find members of the genre that contain physical conflict. Plenty of romance and dramas that are steeped in fighting and death.

At any rate, not that my perspective’s any more valuable than anyone else’s but I really haven’t seen a demand for violence that’s lower that the supply.

If you glitch outside of the stadium, you can actually load in GTA and Cyberpunk 2077 depending on which direction you go.

Yeah, I feel like the improvements in gaming hardware have gone 50% to improving dynamic systems and graphics, and 50% to messy project bloat. Not to mention the constant crunch culture means they never have time to clean things up before launch, and after launch is for game breaking bugs and DLC.

Yeah, although I think part of the missing nuance is that people already did that, the difference being that now anyone can, in theory, create what’s inside their head, regardless of their actual artistic talent. Now that creation is accessible though, everyone’s having another moral panic over what should be acceptable for people to create.

If anything, moving the more disturbing stuff from the real world to the digital seems like an absolute win. But I suppose there will always be the argument, much like video games making people violent, that digital content will become real.