Technology

Caught prions*

There was a documentary about this awhile ago which was pretty terrifying. They basically go into how you can essentially "grow" computers to augment reality and human perception. Pretty crazy. "eXistenz" was the name I think. I believe Jude Law was the narrator or something, I don't remember.

I’ve got just the thing

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And who knows, maybe you will even enjoy thinking about chat bot responses in weird nightmarish ways for the rest of what might seem like an eternity.

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Don't need the homeless. You can pluck a hair, donate your blood, or even take a plug of your foreskin if you have one, to generate the neural stem cells from iPSC, the cell type they use in this process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell

Oh, a CPU that straight up expires? A product that comes with enshittification built in from the start? Corporations' mouths are watering as we speak.

also they only feel pain suffering for every second of their miserable existance. They welcome the cold embrace of the void.

So basically a first trimester abortion. Will these be available in Texas?

They don't really go into the size of the organoid, but it's extremely doubtful that it's large and complex enough to get anywhere close to consciousness.

There's also no guarantee that a lump of brain tissue could ever achieve consciousness, especially if the architecture is drastically different from an actual brain.

Believe it or not, I studied this in school. There's some niche applications for alternative computers like this. My favorite is the way you can use DNA to solve the traveling salesman problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing?wprov=sfla1)

There have been other "bioprocessors" before this one, some of which have used neurons for simple image detection, e.g https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1396377?casa_token=-gOCNaYaKZIAAAAA:Z0pSQkyDBjv6ITghDSt5YnbvrkA88fAfQV_ISknUF_5XURVI5N995YNaTVLUtacS7cTsOs7o. But this seems to be the first commercial application. Yes, it'll use less energy, but the applications will probably be equally as niche. Artificial neural networks can do most of the important parts (like "learn" and "rememeber") and are less finicky to work with.

Tom's, of course

"LOBOTOMITE!"

The Return of The Organoids

I also like to play around with it.

Organoids are largely homogenous lab-grown mini-organs.

They have to use STEM cells because other kinds of cells are bad at math.

And then every time you sneeze, you end up ordering another case of diapers from Amazon.

You misspelled 'should.'

tbh this research has been ongoing for a while. this guy has been working on this problem for years in his homelab. it’s also known that this could be a step toward better efficiency.

this definitely doesn’t spell the end of digital electronics. at the end of the day, we’re still going to want light switches, and it’s not practical to have a butter spreading robot that can experience an existential crisis. neural networks, both organic and artificial, perform more or less the same function: given some input, predict an output and attempt to learn from that outcome. the neat part is when you pile on a trillion of them, you get a being that can adapt to scenarios it’s not familiar with efficiently.

you’ll notice they’re not advertising any experimental results with regard to prediction benchmarks. that’s because 1) this actually isn’t large scale enough to compete with state of the art ANNs, 2) the relatively low resolution (16 bit) means inputs and outputs will be simple, and 3) this is more of a SaaS product than an introduction to organic computing as a concept.

it looks like a neat API if you want to start messing with these concepts without having to build a lab.