Gabe Newell, the Man Behind Steam, Is Working on a Brain-Computer Interface
Gabe Newell, the Man Behind Steam, Is Working on a Brain-Computer Interface
Gabe "Gaben" Newell, the man behind Steam, has for years been quietly building a BCI company — and it just came out of stealth.
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This is rather old news, predating Neuralink entirely even. There used to be an unlisted YouTube video by Gray(Grey?) Newell that showed off what they were working on back a few years ago, too.
Yeah. I've been out of the loop apparently, because today was the first that I heard of it.
Haha glad that I brought it up on your radar! I like this one cause it seems much more medically oriented, vs. Neurolink existing "just because it can".
Which normally, I don't really have an issue with. I think it's great to do things just because we can (within reason ofc!), but I am definitely more skeptical of the fraud-Hyperloop flamethrower space-car man.
Yeah. Gaben has a strong track record of bringing technology to the market that works, from a company that wasn't already around and doing things better overall before he got involved with it.
Not the strongest because Steam Machines with Alienware had problems and way too early during development of Proton that games couldn’t handle well. The controller was stolen IP and is still currently fighting the lawsuit. VR games are not great as people expected and rarely do new VR games arrived. Leaving the VR headset in storage for mostly the owners life. Lastly, the Steam Deck original has problems and announced updates or free ifix fixes just to not have drifting problems. Still the Steam Deck after the original has some issues with compatibility and deleting their data every update.
The company has poor track records for hardware. Valve is like the Sony of gaming, they lie about stuff and make you sign up to download the game in their closed ecosystem.
I hadn't heard of most of this, and it's sort of an avalanche, so I picked out one particular part to check out in a lot of detail and see if it held up.
The controller was stolen IP
Looks to me like they had buttons on the back of the controller in some way which infringed on one of 105 patents that SCUF holds on specific parts of controller design, and they sued Valve a year after Valve had stopped using the design anyway.
I'm not qualified to say whether SCUF actually invented something no one else would have thought of, and then Valve deliberately copied them on it, but I'm skeptical. I lean a little more towards the side of "SCUF patented something somewhat obvious, and then wanted Valve to pay them rent in order to set their buttons up in a sensible fashion."
But at the very least, saying that it's demonstrated that it was "stolen" is, to me, not accurate.
and is still currently fighting the lawsuit
This part is objectively not true, unless there's some glacially slow appeals process I'm not aware of. It looks like the whole thing finished in 2021. Am I wrong?
I've had conversations with this person before, in my opinion many of the things they fault Valve for are... extreme nitpicking.
Also, IMO Corsair's patents are BS and are drastically inhibiting accessibility controller availability. Their stranglehold on something as simple as buttons on the backside of a controller shouldn't be lauded.
Yeah. I was around in the games industry way back when the big publishers had a total stranglehold on the whole arena, and Steam was this magic thing that enabled non-AAA games to actually break in in a big way and achieve sales above the double digits, and on top of that I generally like Valve's games. I was sort of wondering if this is a "live long enough to see yourself become the villain" type of thing, where my good feelings towards Valve aren't warranted anymore in the present day.
But, judging by what I saw when I grabbed one of this person's assertions at random and held it up to the light to examine in it detail for objective truth, I don't think it's based on a reasoned and objective basis. What it is based on, I have no idea.
spoiler
sdfsaf
Neuralink has a technology that specifically addresses two of the main issues with BCI: data density, and implant effective duration.
There are more issues, but it addresses those two in particular, which is something quite interesting to see, and can be turned into patents that can be sold to other BCI initiatives.
The rest of Musk is... well, he's kind of an "unstable genius", with enough money to blow on random moonshots, marketing stunts, and random publicity. Honestly, if I had his money, I'd probably do the same: build a few core businesses, then go on tangents to see what sticks to the wall. It can all still be seen under the general theme of "colonizing Mars" though, which is a guiding starshot as good as any, with Hyperloop and Boring company having kind of exhausted what can be done on Earth, Tesla being a borderline failure, SpaceX, StarLink, or indoor farming working pretty well, and X being an experiment at social manipulation.
Taking his ethics and actions out of the equation for a second -- I would have no issues with his businesses weren't scamming states out of legitimate transportation and fucking with people just because he could.
While dangerous, I'm not really against the idea of selling flamethrowers, kind of. It is kind of the American right, which may be dumb, but fuck if I have anything to say about it. And while it produces a lot of space junk, I'm not against Starlink or SpaceX. especially the former since it does do a lot of good. Coverage in the middle of the U.S. is not good, and anything more is good.
Ultimately what it comes down to is the fact that the more money tends to side on less regulation, and reintroducing ethics and actions into the mix he is abusing that. The flamethrower ploy could have been snark against the United States for not having regulation on that (if it were something that were actually important, that may have mattered...), and similarly the Hyperloop scheme could have been some form of commentary on how easy it is for a billionaire to manipulate voters with obvious pipe-dreams, then gone ahead with the high speed train plan.
Instead, he gets butthurt and lashes out. I know we're on the same page, if anything I'm disappointed specifically because he is in a position to be doing a lot of good, has convinced some people that he is.
Neurolink existing "just because it can".
"Aperture Science, we do what we must because we can"
You guys seeing this shit?
Joke aside, iirc Neurolink already been used on disabled people, allowing them to use a computer easily. Whether it will have any use case on healthy people it's still not clear so far.
Neurolink has been used on 1 disabled person, and it was "working" for about 2 weeks before it was announced there are "problems" with the connection to the brain.
Oh, and it has killed a bunch of monkeys.
I dislike the thought of ol musky rushing neurolink or even being remotely involved with something put into someone's brain, the also claimed they doubled the bandwidth of the connections via software optimizations so the disconnected wires doesn't have a large impact. Also from the comments of other Lemmy users from that article, my understanding was that it is a common problem for some of the wires used to probe the brain for input to pop out after surgeries where they implant a processing chip into a person's brain.