I have no idea what you are talking about because Lemmy, now all of a sudden, is refusing to show me context.

Oh god, new horrors just dropped

Trivia: I just learned two weeks ago that "firm"ware is in between "hard"ware and "soft"ware. It has nothing to do with a firm (a company).

Of course many comments in this threas are exaggerated; there won’t be played any ads into your brain.

But there are some implications for the usage of Neuralink that are worth thinking about it - especially when it comes to privacy:

Given that it “just” runs with firmware, so that the implant can function in a way most stable and reliably, and also given that there will be no subscription model involved into all of that, will the user (patient) be able to control the functionality of the implant (e.g. controlling the intensity of the eletric signal sent out from the implant to counteract the intensity of a tremor)?

And how will that happen? One thing I could think of is to control the implant with a smartphone app. How good will that smartphone app be? Will it be programmed sloppily like these apps we know from Internet-Of-Things-Apps and have a ton of bugs? Are those (medicinal!) apps secure in terms of privacy? What is with the product support? Will the implant be discontinued after a few years (and also the app)? What if your smartphone fails (no power or hardware failure, or after an update it doesn’t work)?

A friend of mine has an app to monitor her blood sugar. She is not qute satified with the app. Luckily the provider of those diabetes sensors provided a separate device, so that the app is just an addition for measuring when you are travelling, for example. But in their last iteration they tried to omit the separate device, probably in order to save costs. My friend had to explicitly ask for it.

With that in mind I’m not keen on having control on such medicinal devices with a smartphone only. If the smartphone fails, there would be no backup. Will such similar things be the case regarding Neuralink?

mfw I try to install arch linux to my brain and fucking die after it bricks itself

Watch red hat make it to where your brain is more inclined to want to wear an actual red hat lol

I mean, are you going to trust proprietary hardware anywhere near your brain anyway?

I just downloaded my calculus patch.

Not your brain but rather a tiny little chip inside your brain, still would be a rather difficult task (that’s an understatement) to unbrick or replace it though. Unless they put a debug Port accessible from the outside you would need surgery if you needed to JTAG to unbrick it (probably would need it anyway since if they go this route they probably won’t let you access the pins you need to from the outside).

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in the episode black museum

!one of the stories is about a doctor that had a brain implant that was paired to a hat type thing that was put on patients and he could feel everything they felt for a faster diagnosis, then he started abusing it, first for sex, then he realized pain felt even better, then one day he put the device on someone as they died and reached the ultimate orgasm and got addicted to that and became a serial killer!<

Another idea is that somebody found an exploit in the software and figured out how to use it for much more then interfacing with vending machines. So in essence the Borg is one giant botnet accept instead of ddosing or doing database leaching they assimilate people and make them part of the botnet.

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Elongated Muskrat has very little to do with the inner works of the company now. Even in the heights of his involvement, by his own account, his input was tangential at best, like “we make expensive car now, use this money to make cheaper car” and “we call it x because x is the best name ever”

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I still don’t get how it’s at all safe or practical to have what amounts to a smart watch embedded into your brain.

The surgery they want to do literally involves removing a piece of your skull. Falling and hitting your head without a piece of your skull removed is bad enough, this is going to seriously compromise the strength of people skulls. Which is especially bad when you consider it’s meant to solve problems like paralysis. I have a feeling that people who are just learning to walk again may be at a high risk of falling. Now they’re at a high risk of falling and cracking their skull open like an egg.

It’s also charged with a wireless charger, which would need to placed on the device every night when you sleep. How many people remain completely still the entire night and don’t move their heads at all?

This is a cool and valuable first step for brain augmentations that can probably help thousands of patients, but the implementation has so many glaring problems that it makes me wonder how well the actual product even functions.