PH01

What is it about cryptography that creates a tendency toward hagiographies?

During the Snowden Leaks the same thing happened with Jacob Appelbaum and Julian Assange. There was no critical analysis on what they were actually doing or a lot of the advice they were giving people.

It's almost like the field somehow requires a defacto head who conveniently fits the media stereotype.

Did you read the first line of the article?

"The richest one percent of the world’s population are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3.1 billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity during a critical 25-year period of unprecedented emissions growth."

Assuming this is correct the number of children poor people have is essentially irrelevant. The premise of your argument is that increasing the population divides a finite resource amongst all members. Now take into account the articles premise that carbon pollution scales exponentially with wealth.

If you now apply the offspring argument the emissions multiplier for offspring in the developed world dwarfs all else. This isn't an original argument, it was made very popular by a 2017 paper by Wynes and Nicholas:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541

If you read the paper it's clear that offspring in the developed world contribute, not the 3.1 billion poorest people on the planet.

What Neuralink present appears to be almost the same as this semi-invasive from 2013:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

I am not up to speed on the non-invasive work, its called motion trajectory prediction (MTP) BCI. It is quite different from the method you decribed, which is a traditional motor imagey (MI) BCI.

Not to burst your bubble but I don't think they're not predicting X,Y,Z limb positions in that demo. The traces on the left don't line up with the video, what would they actually represent?

It looks a lot more like the result of adding physical movement markers to a pig with an implant, and then mining the recorded neural data for signatures which correlate with the marker data. I'd be willing to wager that's exactly what is shown in that video.

Not to take anything away from the Neuralink team, but predicting joint movements and angles is about the edge case of what can be achieved with semi-invasive and non-invasive bci.

Recording from the nerves predicting joint movements in a steady gait is definitely already achievable.

I struggled to find the meat in this article and a quick google of the terms involved only really brings back the same article, which is almost 3 years old now.

On top of that the story is a cookie cutter rewrite of every upcoming ML/math technique which are always poised to provide some amazing insight into the human mind.

A more honest title would be "algebraic topologists think algebraic topology is great, academics who have employed algebraic topologists want it to be great but don't really understand it".

Edit: for anyone looking for the actual meat this appears to be it:

Objective Morphological Classification of Neocortical Pyramidal Cells (2019)

https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/29/4/1719/5304727