4NDR10D's comments

Great concept and interesting demo, however the title is pretty misleading. This isn't what I would call "thought controlled" more than the old Thalmic Myo or any EMG [0] is thought controlled.

This is reading muscle signals with electrodes and translating those muscle activations into a variable voltage signal. One could argue that because you're not reading mechanical action it could be considered "thought control" but I'll leave that up to the individual to gauge for themselves.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/10/ctrl-labs-first-dev-kit-is...

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure [1] by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

I didn't necessarily agree with all of it but it helped me understand the changes I've seen across workplaces, colleges and beyond. It was also a nice way of thinking more "grey" in terms of the current political climate, and trying to understand the reasons behind people's actions regardless of their political stance.

[1] https://www.thecoddling.com/

Hardware Acceleration/Parallization is the next frontier. We've already seen the benefit of some pretty simple ASICs (TPU was built to be simple) as well as more general purpose accelerators. Hardware architects used to have a hard time, because often the best option was to simply wait for CPUs to get faster. Now that we've seen CPU power begin to stall it makes economic sense not only to invest in more parallel software but more appliciation specific accelerators.

CPUs/GPUs are beasts of hardware architecture, being complex mostly due to their flexibility. We can achieve higher performance with dedicated hardware (or FPGAs), and it looks like the economic reasons to do so are slowly becoming more certain.

Great job to the founders, awesome to see more cool companies out of the UW nano program.

Curious why all the negativity, perhaps people are unaware that cannabis actively DOES impair driving to dangerous levels. Also, as this startup is from Canada I'm almost certain the mindframe of the founders is to develop a device that makes legalization EASIER, not allowing police to use it catch and arrest people on the street who they think are high.

One issue we have been dealing with in Canada is how to regulate driving after consuming cannabis. A zero tolerance policy for smoking + driving within days is unreasonable and thus will be ineffective. This device and the research behind it looks like could help regulators and police catch people who are dangerously high while not arresting those who happened to smoke much earlier.

It seems you may be unfamiliar with STEM Ph.D programs. The way it works is professors "sponsor" a graduate student to do reserach for them. The student will either work on existing projects started within that professor's lab or start their own related projects. The goal of this research is to contribute novel material into scientific literature.

It's also usually NOT a rich parent. For example a big funder is NSF or NIH, these institutions grant money to labs with the expectation that they will perform research.

Don't think of it as being paid to go to class, think of it as a job where you work 40 hours a week (usually way more) doing reserach, then go to class, then on top of that help teach those classes through being a TA.

Thats the gist. The main problem is the lack of distinction between finincial aid or graduate fellowships and other forms of "unearned income". This lack of distinction leads to a graduate student's only source of income (a fellowship) being taxed as if it was a gift handed down by a rich parent.

This doesn't only effect undergrads, this is also horrible for graduate students. I'm going to be directly effected by this tax this year if the law doesn't change. It will tax my fellowship stipend (used for living expenses such as rent, food, and transportation) equivilant to an ESTATE.

It's basically like saying that grad students are not "earning" this income and thus they don't deserve to be taxed on it as if it was a wage.