acrefoot's comments

Related: breathing is semi-autonomous, and controlled in the brain:

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2017/08/408006/searching-brain-cel...

We can be aware of our breathing or not, yawn, and hold our breath. I imagine we can do similar with our sense of time: count seconds, have a sense of time, and lose our sense of time (on purpose or by accident).

I thought we had discovered pacemaker cells over 20 years ago. I'd be very surprised if that didn't already factor into hypotheses of how episodic memory is ordered. Either this article is disingenuous, or neuroscience suffers from deep fragmentation that is hindering progress.

https://www.hhmi.org/news/researchers-discover-molecular-pac...

It's exciting to see this reborn outside of Dropbox!

To be fair, Dropbox works pretty well as a backup (with the ability to restore deleted files via the web UI), as long as you catch it in the 30 day window.

When I worked there, I was surprised to learn that they also often act as mitigation for ransomware attacks (they could roll back your account in time if you contacted CS and explained your situation).

I learned recently this is sometimes visualized by something called the "Swiss Cheese Model": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

Regarding self driving cars: I was once told that a big reason for the safety of fly-by-wire systems (when planes first moved from directly attached controls) is that the engineers who built those systems had to take the first flights, so they made sure their systems were good. That is probably the case for self-driving cars too, but falling out of the sky feels more viscerally unsafe than driving on a highway, and the gradual nature of the changeover probably isn't helping either.

That strong dependence changed with Magic Pocket:

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-ama...

Natural monopolies are ones where the barrier to entry to provide a service is high. Like a nuclear power company. This fragmentation isn't really in the same category, since clearly many companies have the ability to create a music streaming service or game store with some form of content.

The Vimeo video says that spinal cord injury affects ~300,000 people in the US, and also says that's 2% of the population. Is that percentage referring to something else, or is that a typo?

This is going to appear nitpicky, but the average preference is some average gray, neither dark nor light. The mode is light. That relates back to the fighter jet thing: if you’re going to build a non-adjustable cockpit, build one that fits (within some tolerance) the most number of pilots, not the average on every dimension.

I think it's possible to burn out working on things you think are important but that are chronically underfunded or ignored. For example, I can imagine working on cleantech or green NGOs only to be consistently frustrated that people don't want to pay for better recycling and cleaner energy, or want to reduce their water usage.

I got a chance to work with a lightfield camera for a class project a few years before Lytro shipped its first cameras, so I was sad to see it struggle as a consumer product. Can you shed more light on what the article should have written?

Is there more benefit to publishing a company’s design system than maybe some recruiting benefit? Is it about giving back to the design community or something IP/trademark related?

The "Zero to One" wisdom is that lots of competition means low margins for the business. It's very difficult to afford much more than minimum wages for your sandwich shop employees. That's part of why you don't see a lot of venture-funded restaurants.

Nectome, South San Francisco.

1) Lab automation and rapid prototyping. I definitely don't expect you to have mastered all of this, but tell me what you do know: basic CAD, basic PCB layout, prototyping with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, basic optics and cameras. Some firmware programming is expected.

2) Electrical/mechanical engineer: motor selection, motor controllers, sensor integration, safety systems, some basic industrial design.

Remote may be possible. Interns are welcome to apply.

Email Michael: [email protected]

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Nectome is a research company dedicated to advancing the science of memory. We design and conduct experiments to discover how the brain physically creates memories. And, we develop biological preservation techniques to better preserve the physical traces of memory.

If the signal transmission worked at 400 microns, I would say that your feature size argument would be a good reason to consider other explanations, but they explicitly show that such a gap prevents the signal from being transmitted.

Instead, the transmissible gap is poorly characterized—-they cut then stick the slices back together. Depending on how clean the cut is, the gap could be quite small. Yet they argue that this unknown small distance (which presumably still contains a fluid interface) is enough to eliminate the usual explanations. That argument feels undersupported to me.

Looking at the paper [0], particularly Figure 4, it looks like they cut slices then stick them back together again. This allows the signal to propagate (4.B).

But when a gap of 400 microns is added (4.C), the signal doesn't propagate.

I'm sure that the actual cutting causes some damage, and perfect realignment is unlikely, but I'm not sure how this is conclusive of ephaptic coupling, or how it eliminates the possibility of electrical or chemical communication by synapse, gap junction, or axonal transmission.

[0] https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/JP276904

Honestly? Because we are new at press, and were pressed for how we might offer it in the near term.

There are a couple of scenarios that might be helpful to consider, as they are examples of mental discontinuity in use today. I cannot convince you of the semantics of "not you" vs "still you", because I think this question is too ambiguous to address satisfactorily.

- general anesthesia is definitely, to some extent a discontinuity of consciousness. You lose time.

- more extremely, Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest actually (temporarily) causes brain death by cooling the body to between 10˚C and 20˚C. All brain activity ceases for the duration of this deep hypothermia.

Are there risks to these practices? Definitely. Some may argue that someone who undergoes general anesthesia isn't the same person. But I would argue that it is, despite the discontinuity, and despite some risk of personality changes.

Given that an early death is only possibly prescribed in cases where a patient is terminally ill (as determined by two physicians), where a patient is of sound mind, and is often in pain, it can be a reasonable alternative to a lot of the (often expensive) interventions that don't do much more than prolong agony in the last weeks of life.

Backup is a misnomer here--it's a fixation of the biological tissues. So the format for preservation matches the structure of the original neural tissue down do the nanometer scale, which is a format nature has deemed appropriate to stabilize on the time scales we care about.

I agree that there's research to be done, which is why we're not offering a product at this time, and may not for years.

I would say that even more research needs to be done for any hope of a protocol that preserves synaptic details in postmortem cases hours after death (as many cryonics companies seem to be peddling). If you're saying "recently" to mean <20 minutes after death, that complicates the distribution enormously, but it's not outside the realm of what Nectome may develop later.