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.

I don’t think I’ve taken emotional damage like this since I discovered what rejection felt like.

Yeah, I remember when everyone was starting to get decent camera phones and then news articles started popping up about high schoolers being picked up by the FBI for producing child porn by sending nudes, and their girlfriend/boyfriend for seeing them. There was a bit of panic, that was then promptly ignored because “it’d never happen to us”.

Can’t imagine how different someones life would be if they were tagged as a sex offender before even turning 18.

Well, I mean we kinda are, capitalism and all that. There are thousands of authors of Patreon, Kofi, and the like that you can pay to write you the fanfiction you want. Further, if you don’t know the provenance of a fanfic, how do you tell which ones are the copyright violation? The only way to do so is if you have records of its birth, especially as generative AI improves.

I’m not blind to the plight of creators here, but isn’t the issue that a machine can, in theory, out compete the authors at their own style? If a random human can write Stephen King’s style better than Stephen King, it’s forgiven because that took time, effort, and talent, where a machine doing it alarms us. No author has ever been sued because they read a book and were influenced in their writing, unless they outright plagiarized without attributing. I just think that there needs to be a significant frame shift, since artificially limiting generative AI to protect the current business model instead of allowing it to reshape how people produce and consume media isn’t realistic. The issue is figuring out how creators are still compensated for their work.

People are already building small generative AI projects, so there’s no containing it, and it’s only going to grow.

Right, but they would have been the last, because who gets mad at Canada, really?

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.

Yeah, I always figured Canada would be the last to fall in nuclear holocaust because they’re, you know, Canada. Yet here we are.

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.