Big jump when we go from decoding what you’re seeing to what you’re thinking.

This is a big jump ethically, but technically it feels like it's a hop away. If we can do this for visual images, we could use the same strategy on patterns of thought - especially if the person is a skilled at visualisation.

"Feels" and "is" are quite different in these domains. Self-driving feels like it's 5 years away for 10 years straight, and biology is infinitely more complex than automation. See this comment from this thread [0].

> These techniques operate on the V1, V4 and inferior temporal cortex areas of the brain. These areas will fire in response to retina stimulation regardless of what's happening in the rest of your brain. V1 in particular is connected directly to your retinas. While deeper areas may be sympathetically activated by hallucinations etc, they aren't really related to your conception of things. In general if you want to read someone's thoughts you would look elsewhere in the brain.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43910953

There are no ethics in China.

There are no ethics in America

In that case, you'll need the equivalent of ad-blockers for the brain, to prevent eavesdropping and intrusions by commercial and state actors.

Really like the philosophy here. Keeping config formats minimal and text-first (rather than trying to be 'clever' with types or logic) feels underrated these days. CONL looks like it hits a nice sweet spot between human-editable and machine-parseable without drifting into 'just use a programming language' territory.

solving real problems is the core of it, but for a lot of people the joy and meaning come from how they solve them too. the shift to AI tools might feel like outsourcing the interesting part, even if the outcome is still useful. side projects will stick around for sure, but i think it's fair to ask what the day-to-day feels like when more of it becomes reviewing and prompting rather than building.

they hunted us for food once, figured out we’d feed them instead, and never looked back. probably the only species that domesticated us.

Domestication is often thought of as a unilateral relationship. Like all relationships, it goes both ways.

We have domesticated cows and wheat. Now their population has reached tremendous size. So has our population. We both need the other species to survive. We need them, and they need us.

You could definitely take the perspective that we have been domesticated. For example, plants have domesticated us by feeding us.

Dogs have masters; cats have servants.

To be that guy, small felines never were big felines. Domestic kitties do not descend from people-eating ones.

Mini-cats have much in common with main-cats, both in terms of software and hardware, but the power requirements are rather lower.