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.

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

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

Imagine the timeline, Elon never became an asshole, the ultimate pyrotechnic show, fireworks going off, this strange happy man has flamethrowers and a jetpack, behind him a dozen synchronized Falcon 9 rockets take off and engage in a choreographed aerial ballet.

People post videos of it online, because Twitter still exists as a functional platform.

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.

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.

You mean, waiting for news when it gets isekai’d after someone pushes it in front of a train lol.

*cries a lot in capitalism*

I’m a little confused, the first article glowingly supports my comment, while the second is somewhat neutral. Pointing out that Starlink satellites show up on long exposure astronomy images, while also pointing out that they’ve already launched a new gen testing surface dimming. Given that Starlink satellites only have an orbital lifespan of five years, there’s a 0% chance of old Starlinks cluttering up the night sky. If they stop trying to improve the light reflection issue, that would be the time to be angry.

Also, boondoggles are a “wasteful or impractical project or activity often involving graft”. The Space Launch System is a boondoggle, Starlink is dozens of times cheaper than laying cable, especially in rural areas. The alternative is to install radio towers for 5G coverage, which is something that developing nations have done to skip the expense of rolling out a unified power and data grid, but there are a lot of advantages to not having ground based hardware beyond the receiver.

After living in fairly rural areas for quite a while, LEO internet coverage is much nicer than watching billions get funneled the telecom giants to lay cable, only for them to just… not lay cable.

Yeah, I agree with all of their points except for SpaceX, which has been an unequivocal success that doesn’t deserve to be painted with the same brush Elon is. They revolutionized space flight, broke into the national security launch industry that was entirely captured by the United Launch alliance, and stand to obsolete the (93 billion dollar!) Space Launch System the moment the Starship is approved for commercial launches.

Dozens of Falcon 9’s exploded while testing them and especially while attempting to land and reuse boosters, so the Starship failure was all but expected. I hate Elon Musk too, but SpaceX is arguably the most successful aerospace company at the moment. Were NASA allowed full control of their money, I think it’d be better, but as it is the viability of many of their future projects hinges on SpaceX.

Christ on a cracker. For six grand I’ll raise their kid. The kid can keep a thousand a month for having shitty parents, and I can make sure there aren’t any dead animals laying in the yard.

Yeah, in academia getting approval for primate research projects is a huge process where you need to clarify every aspect of the protocol, housing, care, and experimental operations to submit before the project can start. I’m less sure if it’s voluntary or required, but we had funding allocated for their retirement from the start. They’re smart enough and strong enough that I’d be terrified to work with unhappy and unwell primates.

Not that all research projects are have happy endings, but I don’t think corporate research has the same restrictions and oversight that academic research does, given that this even happened. I’m pretty accepting of the necessity of primate research models, but we should be doing everything we can to treat them as best we can. Withdrawing a subject from the experimental protocol should be preferred over letting an infection fester just because the implant is in the way. Just seems really poorly done on their part.

Well, it has been a while since we’ve had a good Red Scare, and we even have a prominent McCarthy for this next round.

That said, it always throws me for a loop when the news just casually reports about the location of a spy station.

Yeah, I mean we’ve been working on brain implants of various stripes for a couple decades now, and they’re not the first to attempt motor cortex implants for paralyzed patients as a method to begin human trials, but the current state of the art for brain implants is honestly pretty… primitive. There’s no good way to avoid damaging neurons, so it’s mainly a focus on not causing too much damage while fine mapping and targeting has to be done on an individual basis.

Implants are hugely useful, and arguably the current state of the art treatment for several conditions (epilepsy and parkinsons), but we’re so far out from computer brain interfaces being useful for anything outside of dire medical needs that it’s kinda surprising they’re pushing ahead when they had so much trouble with their experimental subjects.

I worked in a brain imaging lab in college, and we had a couple of chimpanzees with brain implants that did daily research protocols. Bastards were better than me at the testing regimen, and other than some minor discomfort (water intake is restricted prior to the tests so that the gatorade reward was more attractive), they were large children that could tear your face off if they got angry. Once they got older, they would have surgery to remove the implants and retire to a primate ranch where they just got to live out the rest of their life. All of the grad students there had been working with the same chimps for years, so it’s a little alarming Neuralink had so many issues.

It doesn’t exactly engender confidence.

Yeah, and a lot hinges on the definition of cyberbullying. If they mean a sustained and targeted campaign of bullying, that’s one thing, but if it’s just being the target of toxic behavior on the internet that’s pretty easy to trip over on social media.

God gave us four fingers and a thumb, so we can properly hold mice by their fluffy little tum.

… Why does Saddam Hussein have an enormous erection?

Y2K: Passed ✅

2038: “Wanna see me do it again?”

Ha ha, well I have absolutely no faith that we will collectively solve that unless 32 bit systems stop working on their own before then. If Y2K happened again today, there’d be a handful of companies handed billions of dollars to fix everything, and it’d wind up half done with demands for more money.

It’s been a while, but I’m confused. I never said anything like that, but that is essentially the government’s point of view. Erotica requires one to be 18 to see, whether written, drawn, or photographed. Depictions of sex and nudity either ban everyone under 17 ( or 17 and under for NC-17 ratings), or expect parents to restrict those under 17 in the case of television as it can’t be moderated (for now).

At any rate, I just wanted to respond and clarify despite the better part of a month passing.

homepages of major porn sites is unique compared to the pre-internet days.

It’s really not. You just weren’t exposed to it and think it’s new. The only change is the quantity, not the depravity. Marquis de Sade, the origin of the word sadist produced a significant amount of incredibly depraved erotic works back in the 1700’s, and he was not unique.

To your second point, should their first exposure be to porn? Of course not, but developing, evolving and maturing is done by exploring, not by sitting in a cave and generating knowledge from scratch, even if you have an equally amateur friend. That’s how people get hurt because they have no idea what they’re doing. If they want to see what’s out there, let them. Trying to ban everyone from sexual content until 18 is a uniquely modern take.

Not to mention, we’re far too uncomfortable with the topic to have their first exposure be anything but porn, since sex ed is all drawings and awkward anatomy. And childbirth videos. Since I was a kid myself, all I’ve seen is moral panic that wants nothing more than to simply shut the blinds and pretend that there’s nothing there.