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Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

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Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#211

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"anyone who can think critically leans towards the Democratic party" isn't something anyone who's actually intelligent would ever say.

It's exactly what a partisan reddit midwit would say and they're overrepresented when it comes to Elon Musk hatred. There used to be less of that on HN, my theory is younger accounts that are more politically extreme/lefty are now here as the younger generation graduates school and posts more on HN. There's some historical irony too since communism came out of highly educated academic elites and is responsible for an…

Thanks for proving my point by demonstrating you can't comprehend reality. You assume that anything anti conservative must be in the Bernie Sanders camp of full left.

In reality, the modern democrats are pretty much the exact center. Any sensible traditional right leaning policy like free market capitalism, gun ownership, and immigration enforcement is already part of the liberal Democratic platform.

The reason that what I said holds true should be self evident. One of the cornerstone of modern conservativism is small government and reduced government spending. Yet Trump is pretty much doing the exact opposite of this. So to to even begin talking about why conservatism is valid, you have a LONG bridge to cross of somehow proving that Trump objectively the better choice, which at this point would require exceptionally extraordinary evidence.

Another way of testing intelligence is basically to ask the question - what concrete evidence would it take for you to change your mind to the opposite view on a certain subject? For the question of what is better for society, Democrats and their policies vs Republicans and their policies, no conservative can provide a clear answer on what would it take for them to change their mind.

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#212

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I always thought only tech people were interested in it.

But 2 years ago, I've talked to an old school, rather wealthy guy, and he was explaining to me that he always invested conservatively but he wants to buy Tesla stock, because Musk said they started producing Optimus robots and next year they will have thousands of those in the factory and all Tesla factory workers could be fired.

Yep, Musk knows exactly what he's doing overhyping his companies. The stock is the product.

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#213

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There's a lot of parallels here to the history of Nikola Tesla vs. Marconi. Tesla's inventions were superior, more reliable, more versatile in almost every way. But Marconi is the one remembered as the father of the radio, despite stealing Tesla's ideas and implementing them in less reliable fashion. He got to market fast, iterated on horrible versions, built broken products, but he shipped shipped shipped. And in th…

I wouldn't be surprise if Musk is bankrupt in a few years. He acts in many ways like someone trying to keep a fraud going and running out of options for how to spin it.

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#214

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Does any other consumer car brand have a self-driving mode as good as Tesla's?

"Tastiest steaming pile at the dog park" is a curious honor to wrap one's champion in but perhaps I'm not the target audience

That “steaming pile at the dog park” drives me driveway-to-parking-lot without intervention on 100% of my drives now. It’s one of the best steaming piles I’ve ever seen and I would pay many dollars for that steaming pile on future cars I purchase.

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue a lot of Musk haters are not getting a representative sample of his behavior, but rather only the most outrageous things he says and does, which tend to be the things that penetrate their bubble.

I don’t hate him. I think he’s a sad, small man who makes himself feel big by being a bully and faking technical experience and knowledge. I think his fans confuse being in the right place at the right time in possession significant capital as genius. I think he is an incredibly toxic public figure. I think farming outrage and feeding trolls is bad for everyone. I think Nazi salutes are bad. I think that lying is bad…

I read this Musk biography a few years ago: https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/...

I don't think he's short of technical skill. I think he is a genius, and I think he's sincere in his desire to make humanity multiplanetary.

I recommend reading the biography to get the facts that aren't penetrating your bubble.

I think Musk is going kind of insane due to ketamine abuse, bipolar disorder, and/or whatever caused his father to go insane around his current age.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PaL38q9a4e8Bzsh3S/elon-musk-...

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/03/ketamine-...

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#216

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Classic HN middlebrow dismissal, only upvoted because people dislike Musk. Word error rate of 25% is unusable. Also it needs extensive retraining every few days. They used four fixed electrode arrays, like pushing a miniature bed of nails into your brain, which is far more invasive and less advanced than Neuralink's one device with threads individually implanted by robot. Neuralink is not exclusively for speech, focu…

I have never seen stats showing that FSD is "rapidly improving". Quite the contrary, it seems hobbled by its backward hardware and plateaued in terms of progress.

The backward hardware in my 2020 car has plateaued at driving me driveway-to-parking-lot on 100% of my drives in recent history. It’s a pretty nice plateau, really.

(I admit I’m mocking your wording; in fact it has not plateaued. Just every update makes things slightly smoother in non-safety-critical ways.)

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s actually the other way around. Musk is getting a ton of attention even for stuff that’s inferior to what other teams are doing.

"Inferior?" Neuralink's tech is SOTA. Before Neuralink, there was no major investment into BCI tech as far as eye could see - because medicine is where innovation goes to die. We've gone from Utah arrays in 1990 to Utah arrays in 2020. All while computing and AI - the other key enablers of neural interfaces - advanced in leaps and bounds.

Neuralink maybe. Do you remember how much attention he got for his stupid submarine during the Thai cave rescue?

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#218

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Black spots often have a different feeling on produce.

That's a good point. I'm fairly certain that lady has said that to me before touching the food. I think some legally blind people are good with shapes and big contrasts. She may also be relying on smell and not expressing it.

If they have any sight at all, their ability to cope with that limited sight would also be greatly increased; that is, if their resolution is significantly lower, their relative contrast may be much higher, even if what the object is is much less clear, without context.

Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#219
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guy tweets all day and the press talks about every little thing he ever does, there are hundreds of videos of him on youtube, dozens of his employees and ex-employees telling stories about him on the net. How much more do you think you are going to learn if you actually talk to him?

I would argue a lot of Musk haters are not getting a representative sample of his behavior, but rather only the most outrageous things he says and does, which tend to be the things that penetrate their bubble.

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Re: Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

#220

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Well your father can't buy a Waymo. Even if he could it wouldn't go very far, wouldn't work everywhere and would cost at least 2x a model 3 or Y. So there are at least several leads Tesla has. It's a horrible comparison. Why do people keep making it? This isn't Lyft vs Uber. A better comparison to Tesla FSD would be blue cruise, super cruise, drive pilot, god's eye, and every other consumer level 2 ADAS.

> It's a horrible comparison. Why do people keep making it?

Because Tesla keeps claiming they'll have full autonomy "next year", year after year.

In 2016 Tesla claimed every Tesla car being produced had "the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver". That was a lie: https://web.archive.org/web/20161020091022/https://tesla.com...

By the end of 2020 there were supposed to be 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the road. That was also a lie: https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...

Tesla sets its own benchmark and consistently fails to achieve it.

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