Neuralink reportedly under investigation by Uncle Sam for 'animal welfare violations' Neuralink is reportedly being investigated by the US government for possibly mistreating animals in lab experiments as the company rushes to build an implantable brain chip. The startup, founded in 2016 by belligerent biz baron Elon Musk, is developing a medical device to help people afflicted with brain disorders to …
I hope you're also gonna also tackle the, hyperloop is now 'Teslas in a tunnel', because that's a flaming death trap waiting to happen, there's no way sprinklers will put out a lithium fire in those tunnels, or that people can flee such a fire, or that a failure in a Tesla can be safely driven manually to a stop by the user.
I see he's been investigated for claiming Teslas will deliver level 5 by end of 2021 when they're level 2/3 and the pure Tesla vision is so bad it doesn't even see close-up obstacles when reversing, ultrasonic sensors shouldn't have been removed until he could get Tesla vision working properly. Multiple safety recalls, lots of cut corners.
Frankly the whole Dogecoin pump and dump needs a full SEC investigation.
If you don't enforce laws against Musk, then he's never going to fix any of his half assed crap. He'll just do what he does now, announce some new gimmick, that he doesn't have working, will never deliver on, he'll take pre-orders, and will swap something half-assed at the end that he promises will work one day but never does. People who preordered Tesla 3s expected to get something with the full sensors and got palmed off with half assed crap.
You can also see him executing his 'pedo guy' attack mentality now. Musk's businesses face regulatory investigation, the executive branch are Democrats, therefore he's suddenly a full on MAGA nutjob datamining Twitter data for attack vectors. Attack attack attack, rather than fix fix fix.
You realize the permissions Twitter has? File access to the device media, location access, camera, microphone, contacts.. and all the private data his has access to. Musk in nutjob attack mode, trying to shape politics to let him continue to fail to deliver on his promises. That's not a good thing. You can't have one set of rules for most businesses and a free-for-all for Musk, and certainly can't let him abuse a massive attack vector, given his attack-personality trait.
Company wants to plant chips in our heads, then we find out that the work was rushed, the test animals died.
When does the report come out that the sole human test subject was given a nuclear battery to power his implant?
Killing test animals by rushing the procedures to get results faster? That isn't doing science, it isn't doing engineering, it is just doing capitalism - badly. Or deliberately creating the plot for the movie and novelisation.
"Killing test animals by rushing the procedures to get results faster? That isn't doing science, it isn't doing engineering, it is just doing capitalism."
It's not even capitalism, Vladimir Demikhov famously left hordes of dogs disabled and dead because he wanted to generate impressive results for his communist masters. Even that pales when compared to the King of Soviet junk science: Trofim Lysenko, who's fraudulent work led to millions dying in famine (not just in the USSR, in the PRC too), legitimate scientists being locked up and killed (Nikolai Vavilov would likely have been the East's Norman Bourlaug) because they disagreed with the party line and the entire field of genetics (a bourgeois concept, according to Lysenko, because it suggested that individuals could be born with advantages which couldn't be developed through hard work) entirely dead in the USSR.
It makes the whole Scopes trial look like a boring triviality.
> It's not even capitalism, Vladimir Demikhov famously left hordes of dogs disabled and dead because he wanted to generate impressive results for his communist masters.
Vladimir wanted to please his masters (and in that situation, doesn't matter if the masters are Communist, Capitalist or anything in between).
Neuralink wanted to please Musk and rush to market - "rush to market", pretty damn Capitalist motivation!
And doing it badly - because Capitalism also needs "good optics" and screwing over animals doesn't provide that.
The key difference I see between communist masters and capitalist masters is that, depending on the implementation of the former, you're very unlikely to be able to do anything in your chosen field if you don't please the former. Worse, if you really displease them, you're running the risk of being killed. Compare Bourlaug who upped and took his genius to different employers several times during his illustrious career to Vavilov who was forced to make humiliating concessions to Lysenko before ultimately being executed by the state when his denouncing reality proved insufficient.
I also don't think the concept of 'getting to market' differs in the practicalities between financial systems, other than the concept of a market. Look at Chelyabinsk, where the pressures to produce a product quickly led to an environmental disaster that makes Hanford seem squeaky clean. At Hanford, though spooky things could go on behind the fences, the public could eventually protest over contamination; the captive villagers (look up the Soviet internal passport system) around Chelyabinsk were forced to endure unthinkable levels of radiation before being disappeared when the symptoms became too severe to hide.
The danger in letting the state have total control over science is that, when it gets it wrong, the people who are right will be, at best, ignored and, at worst, executed for spreading the truth. The alternative allows quackery but, fortunately, those quacks aren't able to imprison you for disagreeing with them.
That said, some good did come out of Soviet totalitarianism: their utter sabotage of their native genetics programmes hampered their bioweapons programmes when they made the insane decision to whip up novel pathogens.
"When does the report come out that the sole human test subject was given a nuclear battery to power his implant?"
In fairness, that wasn't a sign of cutting corners in the research. At the time the book was written, plutonium power systems for pacemakers were being used in some patients because it decreased the need for surgeries to replace dying batteries. Neither batteries nor surgeries were as good in 1971 as they are today. The researchers in the book did a lot of things wrong, but the nuclear battery wasn't one of them.
Move fast and break things works in software (with appropriate dev, test and prod segregation etc etc etc)
Move fast and break things in animal testing?
Yeah, best not. But very on brand for Musk given his recent behaviour - I mean, two years ago, this would have been shocking. Now? Barely raises an eyebrow.
It's always fun to watch billionaires not only shit themselves in public, but to rub it in their own face while desperately shouting at the passers by that it's "totally chocolate guys, I didn't shit myself, I'm super serious, you're still my friends right??".
I look forward to the next bout of publicly exposed moral, ethical and managerial diarrhea from the man who only has status in the world because they couldn't take his Paypal shares away when they booted him out of the company.
Steven R
Hence, I would hazard a wild guess, the reason for the qualifier "with appropriate dev, test and prod segregation etc etc etc".
Like anything done badly, Agile done badly gives shit results. Like anything used inappropriately, Agile used inappropriately gives shit results. Etc, etc, etc...
With the corollary that any time you're doing Agile, and it's inevitably not working, some Agile cultist will tell you you're doing it wrong, or using the wrong flavour. One begs the question after 30 years of being subjected to Agile, is it actually possible to do right?
I assume this is for some very specific and narrowly defined specification for 'it works'. It certainly works for me when I get a contract to clean up a bunch of Agile technical debt and allows me to ask some fun questions like:
Have you ever heard of optimisation an Karnaugh maps?
Why is the no input validation anywhere.
Why are these debug options available to users.
Why are these hard coded credentials here.
These questions are invariably answered by the catch all "we didn't have time on the sprint'.
Less sprinting, less 'rituals' and a bit more quiet contemplation about best practices, now that will be $400 ...per hour.
Don't want to comment on animal experiments per se (if you really want to see"fun with animalss" search or some video of chicken processing...all perfectly legal and humane, we're told.)(It will really put you off your chicken sandwich...)
BUT -- We really have to get out of this "If Musk is involved then we've got to find anything negative and SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS" habit. Its not as if Musk it personally opening up the craniums of numerous animals and glueing stuff inside (shudder....).
There's another story on this site about "Starshield" that's got a similar negative spin. Its just that having seen the possibilities of a properly hardened Starlink from experience in Ukraine SpaceX is aggressively marketing it to Uncle Sam. Like every other friggin' company in the US --- there's a reason why companies have offices (and even their HQ -- most recently Boeing) in the area, its that great smell of Pork, they can't resist it. As taxpayer etc etc I don't like it but I don't see what's special about companies that Musk is involved in. After all its not really his fault that SpaceX is the cheapest and most reliable way of getting satellites into orbit, is it?
> Its not as if Musk it personally...
From the article:
>> "In general, we are simply not moving fast enough. It is driving me nuts!" he said in a follow-up email.
Musk is the one encouraging them to do a rush job - and it is him who is making ludicrous public statements about his goals for the project.
And nuke his location from orbit, its the only way to be sure.
Everything he touches turns to a pile of steaming turds. And the depressing thing is that important research that could be done by someone competent and sane, is trashed for decades because of electric Jesus. He's bounced from retard implementation to retard implementation of reasonable ideas for decades - the guy is a Sith version of Bloody Stupid Johnson.
If they find enough to shut it down, then it'll shut down a lot of similar research because the venture capital sphincters will slam shut tighter than a ducks butt.
Please someone for the love of science give him a Heather Taffett Haircut..
Bloody Stupid Johnson (Bergholt Stuttley Johnson) or the late UK PM but one?
Don't suppose it matters.
I was thinking more John Lumic (Pete's World.)
Reported here on a local a news site that he (Musk) would eventually have the implant so he could directly interface this his tech. Good luck with that upgrade.
At this rate I think learning to knap stone might be an investment in the future.
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