frisco

Fun fact: lighthouses in a general area will all have different periods so sailors can easily tell them apart and know which one they are looking at

agreed but that is not what they are talking about banning -- "PE" is expansive and includes all those other things. If they narrowed this proposal to just what people are thinking of as "PE" here rolling up clinics and gaining local pricing power that would be different and I'd agree with you

"Private equity" also includes venture capital here. It means all private direct investment. The thing you are imagining is one small corner of what private equity actually is.

I'm sorry, compared to what? We're not talking about a routine doctor's office for healthy people. Advanced care is extremely technologically intensive and your local surgeon is not personally buying the $20M in infrastructure required for many modern advanced treatments. Venture capital has been essential for progress in medicine, and many advanced therapies are going to be increasingly delivered vertically integrated for the widest accessibility and best outcomes.

Medicine is extremely capex intensive and only become more so. Sucking private capital out of healthcare is going to make it vastly worse for everyone; higher prices and less innovation. I think we can criticize the often ruthlessness of PE while realizing that limiting medicine's ability to invest would be a huge self-own and only force further centralization into the biggest non-profit centers.

Medicine is already held back enough by the lack of ability to use debt to finance its sales, unlike almost every other industry; you can repossess a car but you can't repo an implant or administered drug, forcing everything to be paid for in cash upfront. Medicine needs as much access to capital as it can get.

Many new medical treatments/approaches involve heavy capex (robots, light and ion sources, imaging systems, etc) and removing private money that doesn't belong to individual physicians personally will suck a vast amount of capital out of healthcare, creating significant forces against innovation and deployment.

These laws are effectively retroactive wrt Uber, and are protectionist nonsense anyway. Good luck.

This is pure revenue extraction from American tech. The EU now makes more in fines from American companies than it does in taxes from its own tech industry. It is clearly impossible to fill these roles with humans without breaking the economic case for Uber, which is obviously the goal. Europe is so fucked man.

Sorry how else are they supposed to do it at Uber scale?

For large corporates and other entities of any size, the threat of the core of your infrastructure getting suddenly disabled because of something like this is going to be untenable. I predict the pressures for on-prem, offline access (whether by licensing weights or getting them in a restricted setting like TEE/CC) will be overwhelming and one the players will fill the need.

Personally knowing four people with GBM and not being an oncologist is exceptional and worrying. That feels like it should be raised to… someone. It is very possible something bad is happening and a commonality needs to be tracked down urgently.

Someone please make a player for these things for Vision Pro and/or Quest!

Some quick googling does seem to lend at least some basic credibility: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiktokhelp/s/Y4RCSS6jqk

Fun story I heard recently: apparently a bunch of pigs were placed on various small islands in the pacific in the 19th century so in case sailors were running out of food, they would have a known self-sustaining backup option.

Many of those pigs were isolated from the rest of humanity for over a hundred years and completely missed out on the globalization of tons of infectious diseases.

A while ago a group of them were picked up and brought to a special protected refuge in New Zealand, where they are being used for artificial organ research (https://nzeno.nz/) basically for the reasons you highlight.

You should find a camp to join that can help coordinate tickets. (Whether Directed Group Sale or just having the network for overflow tickets.) Unless you’re prepared to spend $$$ and suffer through figuring out a lot to truly DIY it, it’ll be a much better experience to be part of a camp that knows what it is doing anyway.

Right, if our best regular conductors (used in your ohmmeter) are ~10^-8 and superconductivity is (by convention) less than 10^-11, one can see right away the simple regular methods won’t work and some cleverness is needed.

These pictures are my favorite of this phenomenon: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/01/2...

After running into these issues a few others and I wrote a typescript agent framework that I think significantly improves on LangChain in many ways: https://github.com/sciencecorp/buildabot/

It’s still very early days for software composing AI models and we almost certainly don’t have all the right metaphors yet. And I think there is a lot to be said for strong typing and simple, robust code!

Unfortunately I can’t share specifics about Neuralink. But the general points I will make are:

- in this field, monkeys are high value animals and experimenters will often work with the same ones for many years; they are not, generally speaking, a high throughput model.

- to the extent a company does need to go through a large number of animals for a study, the way this works is you start by figuring out all of the problems you might be worried about, and choosing some rarity threshold to verify absence of (safety against), and then animal numbers are derived from the power calculation. For example, to rule out a potential complication to no more than 1% of patients with 95% confidence… you need a lot of animals, especially considering multiple study arms. This is the values tradeoff we as a society have chosen to make and empower our regulators to enforce. There is often a negotiation for the least controversial species to use that will satisfy the scientific goals.

All I’m saying is that I think it will be challenging to produce a commercial product that achieves product-market fit for an application other than basic neuroscience research. It’s a cool tool but the practical drawbacks are myriad, and when you say “the brain is the single existing example of general intelligence,” that’s true of the whole thing, with glial ion buffering, ephaptic coupling, global oscillations, and so much more. We should be honest here: the system being studied in DishBrain is very far removed from that, so it’s tough to use the existence proof like you are doing.

I hope I don’t come across as uncivil, but you guys alienated a lot of people both in how you talked about “sentience” and also seemed to heavily hype this as totally novel.

I would never root against cool progress in neural engineering, but I would be curious as to what you think your first big product will be based on this. Past attempts have usually ended up pivoting to stuff like artificial noses.

Edit: I tried to ignore it but the bad faith attack on neuralink, which, look, I have complicated feelings about too — you should know the animal use data in the press is extremely out of context (to the point of simply being wrong) and also neuralink has had zero chimpanzees in its entire history.

Interestingly, this is not a new result; people have been doing stuff like this since at least the 90s, most notably Steve Potter at GA Tech and Tom DeMarse in Florida.[1][2] (I built a shitty counterstrike aimbot using a cultured neural network in college based on their papers.)

There was a lot of coverage back in 2004 when DeMarse hooked it up to a flight simulator and claimed it was flying an F-22 [3] (lol, but I don't blame him too much...)

The basic idea is that if you culture neurons on an electrode array (not that hard) you can pick some electrodes to be "inputs" and some to be "outputs" and then when you stimulate both ends the cells wire together more or less according to Hebb's rule[4] and can learn fairly complex nonlinear mappings.

On the other hand, these cultures have essentially no advantage over digital computers and modern machine learning models. Once you get through the initial cool factor, you realize it's a pain to keep the culture perfectly sterile, fed, supplied with the right gases, among many other practical problems, for a model which is just much less powerful, introspectable, and debuggable than is possible on digital computers.

[1] https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/f/516/fi...

[2] https://potterlab.gatech.edu/labs/potter/animat/

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/02/brain.dish/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory

$10B isn’t even in the ballpark. We should be willing to pay $1T to fully onshore TSMC, if that were magically an option.

Is there anything actually released here? Just a paper? No weights, not even code?! No interactive product of any kind? The degree of Google’s inability to actually ship anything even now is totally mindblowing