211–220 of 293 posts
Richard Slayman was a pioneer. He made an amazing decision, to see if it could be done. This was hard work done through eGenesis, and the steps to get to this point is quite interesting. >> First, the donors were often created on a commercial pig breed whose heart and kidney sizes are too large for human application. Although elimination of growth hormone receptor gene expression could reduce organ sizes, it comes wi…
Is he full of tubes?
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People keep forgetting that the surveillance of 1984 was just the surveillance of socialist countries in the 1940s.
The states were listening to people through their TVs in the 1940s?
Leon Theramin had invented a radio-activated passive microphone that was used to listen to people from their furniture [0].
The fact that this was only (as far as we know) used to listen in to embassies is more about the economics of scale rather than imagining new technology that didn't exist at the time.
At that scale at that time it was cheaper to have neighbors name and shame people who complained about the government. But there is little really in 1984 that's about the future of technology in the same way Star Trek or even Brave New Word is.
[0] He had also invented a television in the 1920s, which is mostly just trivia related to this question.
“Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal. It’s pretty wild being alive these days. Lots of big stuff the species is struggling to adapt to and figure out how to exist with. But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek, and the early makings of the holodeck. And we’re making pigmen senior citizens who would otherwise be dead. It’s quite something to stop and thin…
It really depends on the organ. Kidneys stand out as the most successful organs for transplantation, even in allotransplantation (between humans) so it makes sense that they are working well in xeno as well. Kidneys are not as vascularized as some other organs (heart or lung) which probably helps a lot. Heart and lung xenotransplantation are still a ways off and a lot of basic research is still needed to make them wo…
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/aug/25/surgeons-tra...
“Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal. It’s pretty wild being alive these days. Lots of big stuff the species is struggling to adapt to and figure out how to exist with. But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek, and the early makings of the holodeck. And we’re making pigmen senior citizens who would otherwise be dead. It’s quite something to stop and thin…
It really depends on the organ. Kidneys stand out as the most successful organs for transplantation, even in allotransplantation (between humans) so it makes sense that they are working well in xeno as well. Kidneys are not as vascularized as some other organs (heart or lung) which probably helps a lot. Heart and lung xenotransplantation are still a ways off and a lot of basic research is still needed to make them wo…
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It really depends on the organ. Kidneys stand out as the most successful organs for transplantation, even in allotransplantation (between humans) so it makes sense that they are working well in xeno as well. Kidneys are not as vascularized as some other organs (heart or lung) which probably helps a lot. Heart and lung xenotransplantation are still a ways off and a lot of basic research is still needed to make them wo…
A family member needed a kidney transplant in the early 60s. This was in the UK where the first successful transplant was in 1959, so just a few years earlier. Thanks to a kid on a motorcycle she got a kidney just in the nick of time. She was in her early 20s and was told she could expect a few years. Because of that she never had kids. Her donated kidney served her well and she lived a quite normal life. She passed…
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> They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to support such workflow. > What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. The writers were surpr…
> If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. Considering how bad Apple is at syncing, that’s just asking for trouble. You’d never know where anything is or what iPad has what or if it’s the current version. Not to mention the charging situation and all the e-waste. > The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers Under appreciated by whom? It’s one of their defining fea…
To use like we'd use paper.
> Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean
That is very much up to debate at this point. But for practical purposes in context described here, they do.
> and don’t know what the right answer is.
They're not supposed to. This is LLM use 101 - the model itself is behaving much like a person's inner monologue, or like a person who just speaks their thoughts out loud, without filtering. It's very much not a database lookup.
> I also disagree that was an underappreciated featured of the Star Trek computers, it’s one of their defining features.
What I meant is, people remember and refer to Star Trek's ship computer for its ability to control music, lights or shoot weapons, etc. with voice commands. People noticed the generality, the shamelessness of interaction, lack of structured command language - but rarely I saw anyone paying deeper attention to the latter, enough to realize the subtle magic that made it work on the show. It wasn't just some fuzzy matching allowing for synonyms and filler words, but more human-like understanding of the language.
(Related observation: if you pay attention to sliding doors on Star Trek vs. reality, you eventually realize that Starfleet doesn't just put a 24th century PIR into the door frame; for it to work like it does on the show, the computer has to track approaching people and predict, in real time, whether or not they want to walk through the door, vs, just passing by, or standing next to them, etc. That's another subtle detail that turns into general AI-level challenge.)
> The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even strange pieces of technology.
That's obviously tool calls :). I don't get where this assumption comes from, that a computer must be a single, uniform blob of compute? It's probably because people think people are like this, but in fact, even our brains have function-specific hardware components.
(I do imagine the scans involve a lot of machine learning and sensor fusion, though. That's actually how "life signs" can stop being a bullshit shorthand.)
> The most advanced LLMs frequently fail at even identifying themselves.
They'll stop when run with a "who am I?" tool.
> When the Start Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that, they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning. Yet you’re defending this monumental gap as being effectively the same thing. Gene Roddenberry must be spinning in his grave.
All I'm saying is, LLMs solved the "understand natural language" problem, which solves the language and intent recognition part of Star Trek voice interfaces (and obviously a host of other aspects of computer's tasks that require dealing with semantics). Obviously, they're a very new development and have tons of issues that need solving, but I'm claiming the qualitative breakthrough already happened.
Obviously, Star Trek's computer isn't just one big LLM. That would be a stupid design.
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Fun fact: the nerves between the brain and heart are never reattached. A heart already has all of the facilities to keep working all by itself. Even weirder is that an adult kidney transplanted into a child will actually shrink to fit.
Another fun fact: you can remove all of the brain of a cat on threadmill except the brainstem and he'll keep walking.
What we really need to work out is how we can incubate humans outside of the womb so we can create brain-dead humans for organ harvesting. Would be both more reliable and more humane than this. Plus you could harvest the heart, liver, etc at the same time. While this is great news, my understanding is that kidneys donors are in larger supply because often family members can give one of theres. This obviously isn't th…
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In star trek they only figured that out in 2024, so we are only a year late. And honestly, the way us politics are headed, a "bell riots" type event doesn't even seem that implausible. (Learning from it on the other hand does seem implausible) [For those not into star trek lore, the way star trek became a utopia was first the government put poor people in internment camps, eventually triggering violent riots in 2024,…
2024 Bell Riots were the tipping point[0], but there was still World War 3 a few decades later. A global nuclear exchange probably helped a lot in kicking human civilization off the dystopian but locally optimal path it found itself stuck on[1]. Meeting a technologically superior alien race a decade later also helped solidify a different perspective :). But yeah, I too was disappointed when 2024 came and gone without…
My favorite fan theory as to why they went to a future of flying cars that’s so different from our own is that it was the events of the first movie (going back there and changing history) that ultimately led us to that different path.