I haven't followed Neuralink too closely since it was announced, so I was not expecting to see what I just saw. I've seen a handful of breakthrough moments in my life - I think this will be remembered as one.
Why would this be remembered as a breakthrough? Playing games with a BCI is many years old at this point. Here is an article from 2020 talking about playing Sonic the Hedgehog, amongst other games [1]. Here he is fist bumping President Obama in 2016 with a brain controlled robot arm.
I don't think the device itself is a breakthrough, the issue beforehand was that tissue in the brain tries to heal from the implant, it can be lethal, I don't know what they're doing to have a PERMANENT implant, completely stop that area from "healing" so tht the implant doesn't become a legitimate hazard.
The main issues with previous BCIs were that the electrodes were larger, less flexible, and not as biocompatible. This caused scar tissue to form around the electrodes, degrading the quality of the signals and eventually making the device useless. Neuralink has apparently reduced scar tissue formation enough that the implant receives usable signals for years. Neuralink also uses far more electrodes, improving signal quality and adding redundancy. The number of electrodes necessitates the use of a robot to place them. The robot is programmed to avoid blood vessels, which also reduces bleeding and scarring.
It will be quite a while before we know if they've managed to mitigate the issues enough to last a lifetime (and support upgrades), but it's better than previous devices.
Can you point to a study showing that Neuralink has achieved any of those things you mentioned? What evidence is there that the implants have reduced scar tissue formation and what supports the assertion that they would be usable for years? What other previous devices are you comparing it to that allows you to positively assert that it is better than them?
You can not just reel off every bullet point on the marketing slides without support as if it is the truth.
the only development (and it wasnt invented by neuralink) is flexible and smaller electrodes seem to take longer for scarring to take over than larger and more rigid ones. Right now, it seems that their only path is to help people with severe disabilities get better quality of life for a few years, which many people might take.
No they wouldn’t stay lean. If you fed someone more calories than their body uses to maintain its current weight, they would get fat eventually. Regardless of whether they eat carbs, fat or protein.
Let's say you're being fed just the amount of calories your body needs to maintain. What influence on body fat has the distribution of carbs, protein and fat from food then?
My point was that regardless of what you eat, if you eat more than your body expends, some of the excess will be used to produce fat and you will gain weight. If you lead a sedentary lifestyle and eat 3000 calories of nothing but lean meat per day, you will gain weight.
You are right that different foods (macronutrients, more specifically) have different thermic effects and therefore require different amounts of energy to metabolise. Protein takes more energy to process than fat. This does not change my overall point.
Not much for getting lean but it's easier to overeat carbs and fats are calorie dense. That said you need to eat a mix of the three to be healthy because they all have important body functions.
You're so wrong. With only protein and fat, they would not be able to gain much weight. I've tried to gain weight on low carb/high fat, and it doesn't work. I was uncomfortably full after every meal. My tracking showed a significant calorie surplus, but my body wasn't absorbing it. Adding in more carbs made a huge difference. Hormones tell your body when to store fat.
Did you know that bodybuilders in the 1950's(before anabolic steroids) used the egg and steak diet before contests as cutting diet to get lean? They would eat, as the name suggests, large quantities of steak and eggs with butter and have a carb refeeding day every 4 days. They would get really lean on a very high-calorie diet, think 4000 to 6000 calories.
The inventor of diet famously lost a contest for being too lean.
The authors calculated that ∼18 g (79%) of the 23 g of ingested protein could be accounted for by deamination; thus those carbon skeletons were available for gluconeogenesis and release of new glucose into the circulation. The remainder, presumably, was used for new protein synthesis.
The total amount of glucose entering the circulation from all sources was calculated to be 50 g over the 8-h period. However, only 4 g (8%) could be attributed to the ingested protein.
I think you misread that experiment. It appears that some quantity of protein was converted to glucose, but that it wasn’t dependent in the quantity of protein consumed.
> Humans are bad at lipogenesis: we can only convert tiny fraction of the carbs into fat.
Because historically food is scarce or difficult to obtain, in general organisms develop mechanisms to make good use of it: when excess food ("energy") is available, it is stored rather than wasted.
This is also true in particular for mammals, and for humans. It's quite obvious that humans are very effective at storing excess energy.
It is said that sumo fighters maintain their body mass (muscle + lots of fat) by eating rice (i.e. carbohydrates) and protein.
Lipogenesis (fat generation from carbohydrates) takes place mostly in the liver.
"Excess acetyl CoA generated from excess glucose or carbohydrate ingestion can be used for fatty acid synthesis or lipogenesis."
Nope. If humans eat both carbs and fat (most of us do), the excess calories of fat goes mainly into the storage (or plaques to your arteries), while the carbs are used in the sort term (converted into glucose).
> Lipogenesis is mostly derived from carbohydrates and is a relatively minor contributor to whole-body lipid stores, contributing 1–3% of the total fat balance in humans consuming a typical diet.
The human body doesn't need to store excess calories. It could store the excess calories or it can excrete energy through urine(glucose, ketones)
Or it can ramp up metabolism, there are many scenarios. Not all lead to adipose tissue growth. Why not muscle growth, which is somehow always overlooked in these discussions.
Funny enough adipose tissue and muscle growth are both through hormones. If testorone and hgh are high then muscles growth will prioritised over adipose tissue.
People with type 1 diabetes have figured out how to stay thin after eating copious amounts[0]. They won't inject themselves with insulin. Unhealthy, sure, but they won't store calories, as adipose tissue (fat cells) remain inactive, even though blood glucose is dangerously high.
Just looking at calories is simplification, and is just for general guidance.
Ketosis is probably our rudimentary "wintersleep mode". Rudimentary as we are basically tropical animals (look at our lack of fur).
We should not eat for ketosis. But we can eat (restricted to fat and protein) and still stay in ketosis, which is marketed as the keto diet and is not well tested in long term studies. You are a guinea pig when you do this long term.
For me I went keto because I had a problem with sugar addiction going back since childhood. I managed to maintain a healthy weight through exercise etc but as I aged I felt that my bodies ability to handle sugar was decreasing, and it had significant impact on my energy levels, physical appearance and digestion.
Keto not only simplified my diet but massively improved my digestion, and helped me form more awareness of risks of sugar.
Regarding no long term studies.. its hard to believe much these days I rely on body feedback. Years ago the American diet was supposed to be healthy, look how that science turned out.
I'm glad it works for you. I'm not keto hating, I just find people advising to do it long term to be on the quacky side (there simply is no such evidence).
> Years ago the American diet was supposed to be healthy
The result of lobbying. True nutrition experts knew all along.
300k over 30 years is ~21k in interest per year. Over 10 years its ~17.5k a year.
But yeah, that's a lot. I'm curious how one racks up $300k at a state school. I just checked a few state schools in New York and their out of state tuition is ~7k a year?
$300k is enough to have gotten a degree from the most expensive private school in the US (Harvey Mudd).
But to answer the OP: absolutely do not start a company. Get a job and pay your loans off.
noob to "semi pro" isn't the jump you are looking for. To get to a level even remotely close to 'semi pro' would require thousands of hours of playtime.
you just need to grasp the basics.
Phil Gordon's Little Green Book and The Theory of Poker (Sklansky) are common recommendations.
Right, but the important difference between an internal tool and {any other start up idea} is that the internal tool, in theory, has "traction" - i.e. it is being used by people. By definition, you can't pose the same perceived value on something that _isn't_ an internal tool.
A lot of people are listing good examples of pieces of software that were always bad. Some software just starts bad and becomes the incumbent and stays bad. But Google Analytics' regression in GA4 is just unfathomable.
It's actually impossible to overstate just how much of a regression GA4 was to its predecessor.
I'm not aware of a single piece of software that regressed the way this one did.
Google Analytics was an absolute delight and they just threw it away. I would _love_ to hear the internal politics that lead to this and the usage/satisfaction metrics that they are looking at - there has a to be a reason it happened.
