The enemy of the (perceived) enemy's economy. There is a war in Europe, and the EU and the USA are mostly involved economically. Causing economic damage to the financiers of the enemy is a standard Cold War pattern. Oil-embargo warfare is a double-edged sword: while it hits the EU hard, it also causes pain for Russia. This is most likely one in a series of low-hanging-fruit attacks intended to cause economic damage to Ukraine's financiers.
So I think thos would be something that needs to be started at a young age with lots of exposure training. My father in law is deaf and has a cochlear implant but often removes at points because it gets overwhelming for him to hear all the noise all the time. This seems like it would not afford him the luxury of that.
I don't blame your father-in-law: We live in an increasingly loud world, where people casually make sounds above the threshold of pain. I just started carrying earplugs in my pocket for this reason.
More recently: I've been in movie theaters where the dialog is played over the threshold of pain, and on a cruise where the microphone for a drawing clinic was set over the threshold of pain.
The special part isn't the earplugs (and they're good!), the special part is the little carry case so they can live in my pocket 24/7. I use them more often than expected: loading the dishwasher, vacuuming, movie theaters, mowing, discount stores (acoustic tiles cost more), using an electric leaf blower, digging with a shovel (hitting rocks), riding in a car with bass, etc etc
Naturally, you can use any small carry case and earplugs. I just needed that 'permission' lol
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You may be interested to hear: some experts suggest "age-related hearing loss" is essentially a myth, and it's actually caused by our loud industrial lifestyle.
Yes, it's coming out that driving around at high speeds with the windows down is a major contributor.
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I figured it out years ago when I came across an anecdote somewhere that explained that elderly people in remote, non-industrialized societies had no age-related hearing loss.
> driving around at high speeds with the windows down
That's been well known for decades. I wish I knew that when I was younger. I avoided rock concert and gunshot sounds with earplugs, but always drove with the window down. My left ear is much worse than my right.
I also don't listen to loud music anymore. Sigh.
I wear ear protection whenever I vacuum or use power tools.
I am not an expert but it might be the problem with microphone or sound processing and not actual noise. For example, my smartphone mic picks up lot of noise from wind even if the wind is not strong, while human's ears somehow reduce or suppress the wind noise.
Also, modern smart speakers use arrays of microphones and medical devices might be using some outdated tech.
I haven’t kept up to date with cochlear implants, but their capabilities used to be pretty crude. The bitdepth of sound being profoundly reduced to just 5 or 6 bits equivalent.
It wouldn’t take much to just sound like jumbled noise.
From what I have been told by my father in law it sounds very digitized on his implant. I think it takes some level of therapy for the brain to build the pathways for it to not sound like a jumble of noise anyways and actually interpret speech. It is incapable of really giving the richness of music or other forms of noises. Interestingly enough his implant can connect to bluetooth so if he wanted to he can listen to podcasts.
It would sound the same. The implants work by stimulating a few patches in the ear. Older implants stimulate fewer, newer ones stimulate more. In both cases they stimulate 1/1000th the signal a healthy ear does. It's like a fast Fourier transform that only selects the top N peaks.
Go listen to some simulated CI audio on YouTube. It's not great.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that it seems to be MRI conditional without too much drama. One of the requirements is that it’s turned off, which the user does from their controller.
Edit: getting specific details on its MRI safety is the same as it is for all medical companies. Set language and region (this somehow affect MRI safety?) and then hunt for implant. But not all implants are listed in all regions. Because ‘medical professionals’ want to hunt shitty websites and trawl model numbers.
Just list the documents ordered by implant type, then name. Please.
> This seems like it would not afford him the luxury of that.
An "off" switch seems like a really stupid thing to forget to include, doesn't it?
Even if we ignore our intuition and consider only what's in TFA, there's this testimony near the end of the article (emphasis added):
> This was echoed by Diana Grosser, a volunteer who received a TICI Unico in 2024 as part of the clinical trial. “The most meaningful change is freedom,” she said. “I can sometimes forget that I’m deaf, live more freely with my children, swim or ride my motorcycle without worrying about my processor pressing, slipping, or getting lost. I can even choose to hear at night, which gives me additional safety.”
This doesn't seem like a new strategy for irresponsible companies. It seems like when there is a bad public image issue there is always a blame shifting that takes place instead of a true assumption of responsibility. This is because the greed has blinded folks in some of these companies. I think the only thing that makes this unique is that the things they are blaming have, at least in popular thought, some modicum of agency. I think its important that folks hold these companies feet to the fire vs letting them blame shift and Scape Goat. There is a responsible way to do business but it requires virtue and not many in these companies have it.
I think this is a way that airlines and the FFA could continue to grow in consideration. At some point the economics of flying with children starts to make less and less sense. I just flew with a toddler that was under 2 from the mainland US to Hawaii and back. The toddler is just under 2 so he was considered a lap child to fly free. However at 2 the child for most airlines graduates to a full price ticket. At that point it seems less and less likely for families to want to fly over driving. Then add more children you are spending something of a small fortune to fly anywhere. It seems like the airlines could capture more business if they could price into their model a discounted ticket for children older than 2 but under a certain age (ie. 13 or 10).
But why? They weigh slightly less, but take up a seat. Why should a child be subsidized. Planes are typically full or close to full. The airline doesn't really care what age the butt is in the seat, just that it's a revenue passenger.
Yeah, and as someone who just travelled with three young kids I don’t think my party cost the airline less than our number of seats, probably a lot more. We required more attention from staff, made a bigger mess, and didn’t bring less stuff per person just because the kids are small.
Kids are already subsidized with free gate checking of strollers (to be fair, so are other things like skis on Alaska).
You all have some fair points. I was thinking about it as more of a business opportunity for the airlines to attract more families to fly over driving. As I said before the economics start to become more prohibitive to fly vs driving the more passengers. Its not unreasonable to think this way. Airlines give out other incentives for loyalty or just generally having enough airline points. Why not like family packages to attract families that wouldn't otherwise go to get more business
Flying from US to Europe we ended up paying charges roughly equivalent to 1/4 the price of the adult ticket for a lap infant. Now he’s 2 we pay about 2/3rds the adult ticket price until he’s 12 and get a seat and a cabin baggage allowance so it ends up not very different to paying for one checked bag and lap infant.
I think this highlights one of the fundamental differences between humans and our current AI systems. They can still only try to solve problems in the given well defined parameters they are given (with some exceptions). The human is able in the effort to solve problems to intuit where there may be new interesting problems adjacent to the current problem.
I don't think we can confidently say, yet, that LLMs can't discover those connections. We just haven't explored them yet, because 99.99% of the prestige is locked up in proving hard results, which also happen to be easier to assess objectively (thanks to automated proof checkers), and so that's where all the effort has thus far been exerted.
LLMs can discover anything. It is just a matter of creating the right goal function and teaching it the right heuristics. Right now, humans are required because humans know what humans want, and LLMs are not good at predicting what humans want to the point where they can safely and autonomously run off on their own to solve problems we didn't know we had, or to define the problems we have that we're not good at defining ourselves.
Once that is cracked, you throw more compute at it and practically every industry will collapse on a long enough horizon - with digital industries going first. Anything that requires physical hardware will require time for the machines to bootstrap, but that'll get there too.
Although, there are a few human-centric industries that will survive, for example: prostitution. Maintaining it's edge as the world's oldest and most enduring profession.
Debatably in your scenario the last one will or is already falling with robots that will do that. I think there is a real philosophical question of whether AI will be eventually capable of everything we are. I think the question of what makes us unique as humans needs to be asked. I am inclined to think that there is always something that will separate us as human beings from digital robots. I just believe the language and reasoning used for the last 200 years is no longer sufficient. In 25-50 years I believe we will have a clearer picture. Your view essentially falls into a nihilistic framework if I am understanding it correctly.
Now the key question, can the hardware be made accessible to everyone. Its definitely an improvement to make self hosting software easier but the process of setting even a raspberry pi for an average consumer interested in self hosting is still a barrier. They probably will be able to figure it out via youtube and some reddit posts but there should be an easier process or way
(author here) I am really excited to make pre-configured Raspberry Pis that people can just plug in at home, and have it work out of the box. It'll take a bit more work to make it seamless but we're definitely aiming in that direction. It's a shame how expensive Pis have gotten recently though with the memory shortage.
That is cool to hear. I know lots of folks who would be genuinely interested in this who don't have the technological chops to set up a self hosted system. One angle i have heard is degoogling and having more privacy in their data. I am really genuinely interested in this venture. I had the same idea about a year ago but was not in a place in life to act on it. I think even with the PIs being expensive because of the people will still buy them. Especially if they are seamless or near seamless.
This is really sad to see. I didn't agree with him on much but his viewpoints and arguments definitely made me consider my assumptions about technology. It helped me reconsider whether it was always good for us as humans to make things easier and more convenient via technology. He helped me realize that sometimes to be human is to go through the process to see the fruit of your labor.
Honestly it would be helpful for someone to collect a list of these articles and concepts in a single location for engineers to get up to speed on these concepts. I think that is the only advantage of this AI generated website at the moment.
I hear the comments that state we should have sympathy for github. For the individual ops/sre I can have that sympathy because it must a heck of a time internally to manage things. I can't however have sympathy for company itself. They have not set themselves or the community for success. I think it is the responsibility of the company to anticipate the issues or at least react in a way that would build trust. The fact is there is a systemic issue in the company that causes the repeated unreliableness and they have not rooted it out.
This article seems to say that there is "no excuse" for these issues but look at all these things we changed and are changing. It doesn't really feel transparent and it feels like they aren't really taking true ownership on what has happened.
